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Introduction On Monday mornings, ten or twelve of us meet to reflect on our faith in light of the pastoral challenges we face here and now. We are women and men, lay people and ordained ministers, some with and some without university training. Recently we have worked on the pastoral tasks that derive from the …
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You are concerned with the question of guilt and about this I have much to say. First of all: I have never suggested that the German people as a whole are responsible for and guilty of the Nazi crimes, but again and again I have said that we have no right to throw all the …
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Today’s American religious community is beset with tension. On the left, religious liberals fear that the various spiritual orthodoxies Will lead to extremism. Every act of spiritual zealotry — such as the bombing of abortion clinics — awakens in them the specter of religious fanatics controlling America. They believe that the slightest hint of an …
Continue reading “Between Anarchy and Fanaticism: Religious Freedom’s Challenge”
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Book Review: Separation of Church and State. By Philip Hamburger. Harvard University Press, 492 pp. Most Americans assume that the separation of church and state is a fundamental principle deeply rooted in American constitutionalism; that the First Amendment was intended to ensure that government does not involve itself with religion (and vice versa); and that …
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According to articles in the New Yorker and Business Week, churches are leading an urban renaissance. The media have celebrated the churches’ role in prompting economic development in distressed areas as well as the social services that churches offer to low-income residents. Presidential candidates are supporting measures to increase charitable giving so that churches and …
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Most of the 30 new staff members gathered at the United States Air Force Academy for orientation are in their 20s and 30s. Some are air force personnel and some are academy graduates. Some are veterans of the Gulf War, while others served in Iraq. A speaker is talking to them about leadership and character. …
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In October 1975 Peter Marin, writing in Harper’s, created quite a stir when he described the human potential movement as “the new narcissism.” I fear that the church today leaves itself open to similar criticism. Disciples of the social gospel still write challenging articles in liberal magazines; national church staffs sponsor conferences on the liberation …
Continue reading “Cats in a Wood Stove: Reflections on Building a New Social Gospel”
Book Chapter
What we seek is a situation in which we so combine scientific and technical skill with moral and spiritual discipline that the products of human genius shall be used for the welfare of the human race rather than their harm and destruction.
Book Chapter
There can be no enduring or generally satisfying civilization apart from ethical foundations. A mere power culture will eventually cease to be a culture at all.
Book Chapter
The only experience we know that is revolutionary enough both to support the downcast nation and to chasten the victorious nation is the sense of existing under the eternal Providence of the Living God. It is religion and religion alone that does this for men. For this reason we can never have a real civilization without it.
Book Chapter
What is needed is something that can set our souls on fire, and what can do this is that hypocritical, bickering organization that we call the church.
Book Chapter
We believe that we can survive a civilization gone rotten and that the essential faith of Western man can be restored to this end. The moral decay of imperial Rome was overcome by the gospel for that day, and the moral decay of Western civilization will be likewise overcome by the gospel for our day. If modern man can be made to see and understand the predicament he is in, that very recognition may be amazingly salutary.
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The revolution that has taken place in the last decade in our capacity to speed up technological change has confronted the Christian churches with an ethical dilemma of no small proportions. Throughout the last two thousand years, Christianity and Judaism have provided the religious ethic which gave meaning and purpose to the attempts to ease …
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Christians have in recent years thought much about political issues and rather less about politics. Abortion, the arms race, homelessness and human rights have exercised theologians’ tongues and pens, but little has been said about a fundamental theological assessment of the political order itself. Yet politics is as pervasive and determinative of human life as …
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Progressive political movements in the church are often portrayed — by their adherents and their critics — as opposed to “traditional” faith, as if the two were mutually exclusive. That this is a false choice is plain to anyone who knows such figures as Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, Fanny Lou Hamer, Oscar Romero, André Trocme, …
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There were about fifty of us church "dignitaries" from about twenty countries, including representatives from Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., flying into San Salvador on Palm Sunday weekend to honor our friend and mentor, Archbishop Oscar A. Romero, assassinated the previous Monday while saying Mass. Despite the nature of the occasion, there was something …
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Book Review: Of Little Faith: The Politics of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiatives. By Amy E. Black, Douglas L. Koopman, & David K Ryden. Georgetown University Press, 368 pp., $49.95; paperback, $26.95. A Revolution of Compassion: Faith-Based Groups as Full Partners in Fighting America’s Social Problems. By Dave Donaldson and Stanley Carlson-Thies. Baker, 208 pp., …
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Book Review: The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, by David L. Holmes. Oxford University Press, 240 pp. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, by Gregory A. Boyd. Zondervan, 208 pp. American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, by Jon Meacham. …
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Book Review: Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States, by Robert Booth Fowler. Eerdmans, 240 pp., $12.95 paperback. No one — well, almost no one — in America belongs to a church or synagogue in order to get political signals and find denominationwide company for expressing them. Many who believe in God …
Book Chapter
A “new” crisis is facing the Christian Church. The Church is in peril not only from an “external” worldliness, but a worldliness that has established itself within the church. Each of the contributing theologians brings his own view of how the Christian community can define and take its position against this crisis.
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The “Kingdom” of God and “gospel” are usually thought of as terms unique to Christianity. And who else but Jesus was called not only “the son of God” but also “Lord” and “Savior”? In fact, say biblical experts, these terms and concepts were already familiar to residents of the Roman Empire who knew them as …
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Not once but twice a year Americans have special occasion to think about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — on his birthday in January and on the anniversary of his assassination on April 4. Having two annual days of remembrance permits citizens to go beyond studying one or two elements in King’s legacy. …
Continue reading “Martin Luther King: The Preacher as Virtuoso”
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Book Review: Varieties of Religion today: William James Revisited By Charles Taylor: Harvard University Press, 144 pp. Among widely influential philosophers today I can think of only two who are self-professed practicing Christians: Charles Taylor and Alasdair Maclntyre, both Roman Catholics. Like Maclntyre, Taylor is unusually knowledgeable about the social sciences (he has taught in …
Book Chapter
The new crisis of the church results from the gradual secularization of life, the conviction that “man can lead the good life without believing in God”. Humanistic, scientific, “modernistic” methods do not lead to a solution of this crisis. Only a new religious sense, rooted in a new certainty of God, can confront it.
Book Chapter
In every part of the world the Protestant movement finds itself beleaguered by the forces of militant nationalism — a nationalism which represents for the most part an utter denial of the Christian faith. The precariousness of the position of the Protestant churches consists in the fact that the nature of nationalism is such that it can isolate sections of the Protestant community and destroy these sections in detail. Though the destruction of the universal elements in the Protestant faith has progressed further in certain sections of the German church than anywhere else this same process is actively present in American life. An environment favorable to this process has been created by some of our foremost educators, philosophers and theologians. It has been created by men who are quite unconscious of the indirect consequences of their intellectual assumptions, and who as individuals would energetically oppose the extension of the authority of national culture over the whole range of life. Yet such an extension is actually taking place as a result of the religious attitudes which these men have adopted, and as this extension takes place it carries with it a mortal threat to the integrity of the Christian faith. This situation obviously requires the immediate attention of those who have at heart the future of the American Protestant churches.
Book Chapter
Capitalism, nationalism, and an “anthropocentric” faith have made the church captive to their systems of worldliness. This has led to a revolt against the church by some, and a revolt within the church by others. The revolt within the church can only be effective with a return of loyalty to God and to Jesus Christ. If the church contents itself with any lesser task it is doomed as the instrument of God — even though it survive as a human institution.
Book Chapter
Most of our talk about post-war reconstruction misses the point in that the treaties, political organizations, and economic arrangements, are only surface phenomena. It is heartening that a philosophy is emerging to which many are led who are more concerned with the problems at the center than they are with those at the periphery.
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Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion in Our Shared Life By Martin E. Marty with Jonathan Moore. (Jossey-Bass) Sometimes I hear voices inside my head. I worry about that a bit. Not so much that I am afraid I’m going crazy — I’m not ready to change my …
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“But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear” [Matt. 13:16]. Establishment of a counseling center focusing on work with sexually abused children and adults was not our original goal. But, beginning as a small community outreach program for families in need two years ago, our project quickly evolved into …
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You have said that it’s difficult to be Christian in our age. But hasn’t it always been difficult to be a Christian? Why specifically is being a Christian difficult in our time? Culture as a whole has become secular in a way that it has never been before. One may plausibly argue that the 18th …
Continue reading “Seeking Christian Interiority: An Interview with Louis Dupré”
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Globally, cultural pluralism is a truly critical issue. Under its impact the nation state is giving way. At the same time we in the United States have committed ourselves to building a nation state on the basis of cultural pluralism. Is this possible? We Christians have committed ourselves to making it work within the church. …
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The Christian Church throughout its history took on different forms and adopted different strategies as it interacted with changing cultures and technologies. IMPLICATION: If the Church is faithful, it will not be the same in the future as it is today. I t will not use the same forms of organization, teach the same …
Continue reading “The Christian Church’s Struggle to be Faithful”
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When I was in Germany in the early 1930’s I became acquainted with a New Testament scholar who was at the same time a Nazi. As a student fresh from the halls of Union Seminary, I was completely baffled by the mentality of this man. His knowledge of the New Testament was not only technically …
Continue reading “The Christian Gospel and the American Way of Life”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) The authors see Christianity threatened not only by the rival religions of capitalism and nationalism, but in America it is becoming a purely national religion, unintelligible to Christians of other lands, as their Protestantism is becoming unintelligible to us. This may be the beginning of a process, which in Germany resulted in a new national religion. The chapters speak about ways of dealing with this threat to the Christian religion.
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The role of the church as the prophetic critic of society is neglected today; instead, the chief emphasis is on the healing ministry of the church, on Christianity as the antidote for anxiety, on the gospel’s promise of peace of mind. There is a prophetic No which still needs to be said, but there is …
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The fanatical mullahs have been let loose in the land, this land. They travel all across America in the flesh; even more alarmingly, they fill the air with the electronic projections of their presence. They are not a monolithic group, to be sure, and some seem more threatening than others. What they have in common …
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Such a dynamic interaction of doctrine and life is one of the chief contributions Christianity has made to civilization wherever free churches have been faithful and active. Indeed, the free-church tradition has, over the centuries, created the social space in which it is possible to be faithful while retaining intellectual integrity and socially engaged without …
Continue reading “The Free-Church Tradition and Social Ministry”
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Why does religion in America not produce or encourage lethal conflict, as it does in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the subcontinent of Asia, and many other places? How is it possible for groups of Jews, Catholics and Protestants to form alliances for the sake of the common good or to protect their own interests, …
Continue reading “The Frightful, Beneficial Mess of American Religion”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) To say that no one solution is a panacea is not to deny that some approaches to a problem come nearer to the center of the difficulty than others do. To say that we shall not make a perfect society in the next century or the next millennium is no excuse for failure to do our best to create an order relatively better than the one in which we now live. It is the gospel that can save our decaying society and the gospel alone.
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The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether "under God" should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If …
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Book Review: William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience By Warren Goldstein. Yale University Press. 400 pp. A good biography, expertly researched and finely crafted, conveys not just the trajectory of someone’s life but also a feeling for the era in which the person lived. This superb telling of the "still far from finished" life …
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I wrote The Secular City after having lived for a year in Berlin, where I taught in a church sponsored adult education program with branches on both sides of the barbed wire. The wall was constructed a few months before I arrived, so I had to commute back and forth through Checkpoint Charlie, whose familiar …
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Michael Dukakis, well educated in other ways, was not prepared to deal with religious ardor. Asked which book most influenced him, Michael Dukakis instantly mentioned Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind. He read it shortly after its appearance in 1950, when he was in high school. For a man whose preferred reading would, in later …
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Our modern world is headed straight for some gigantic disappointments. Never were such splendid plans afoot in human history before; never were there so many men and women of high hope and far-seeing expectancy at work on schemes for human betterment so vast in scope and so promising in outlook. Statesmen dare to plan for …
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In 1981, at the age of 17, my friend Liam Q. did what many adventurous Kansas farm boys do: he joined the U.S. Navy to see the world. His test scores marked him for further training in a technical specialty, but Liam wanted to steer an aircraft carrier, so the navy made him a helmsman. …
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There is a powerful political dimension to the present reality of our cities. The demise of so many of them has not been the result of an accident or of some inexorable force of history, but has come about because of consciously made political decisions. Cities first grew up around ports or industries, or at …
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What roles should Christian churches now play in the dialogue about democratic participation, discursive civility, and moral responsibility now emerging in diverse political cultures across the globe? American students of religion in society, including growing numbers of “good society” researchers, are discovering that they have international colleagues who bring fresh historical experiences and philosophical assumptions …
Continue reading “Theology and Civil Society: A Proposal for Ecumenical Inquiry”
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Running a soup kitchen and a food pantry has turned out to be a pretty tough job — for surprising reasons. Donations of food and money are sufficient. There is a core group of volunteers, each of whom gives ten to 20 hours every week to keep things running. They are backed up by 150 …
Continue reading “Welfare, Charity and Ministry: Postures in the Helping Relationship”
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Within the past half-century, men in the Western world have plunged from the highest expectations that they have ever held concerning their future in this world to the darkest fears that they have ever known concerning that future. This change has taken place in the minds and hearts of many of us. In this country …
