A LOOK AT THE LIST of subjects to be discussed at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden, next July may cause the thoughtful believer to wonder about the future of confessional Christianity. The assembly will concern itself with “a shrinking world,” with “a secular age,” with matters of social and economic development, with international affairs—in short, with “a new style of living.”
These subjects are to be scrutinized in the light of the role and mission of the Church. What is surprisingly absent in the agenda is any clear proposal for the consideration of matters historically regarded as “theological”—the being and nature of God, the incarnation of our Lord and his saving mission in the days of his flesh, the doctrine of grace, and so on. Are these doctrinal questions no longer meaningful? Is the body that professes to speak for Christendom now seeking to evade them?
Much will no doubt depend upon the selection of the spokesmen who are to “speak to the Church.” If the doctrinal presentations are made by those who feel impelled to proclaim, for example, that God must die for the sake of man’s promotion, or that the “salvation” of Christian theology demands a comprehensive “dehellenizatiort of dogma, specifically that of the Christian doctrine of God,” then the results may be expected to be dismal.
The real point in question is the starting point in theology. If the prevailing mood proves to be that man cannot (some would say will not) find God “on the way down” (i.e., through His selfdisclosure) and can only hope to discover Him “on the way up,” then the fears of many will probably be realized.
Some persons now feel that historical theology is made up of “copybook answers” and thus is radically irrelevant in an age of nominalistic and empirical science. To these, the prospect of a new beginning—with man and his problems—is tempting. The thesis seems to be that if we are to recover a meaning for theology, we must begin with man’s world, man’s problems, man’s hopes. It is, then, a vital question whether Uppsala will seek to elaborate a global form of culture-religion that derives its “theology” from secular and humanistic sources and interprets its “hope” in merely temporal and one-layered terms.
Major elements in our society are presenting the Church with the challenge of a religion without God and a Christianity without Christ. Will the Church respond to this challenge in secular terms—in terms of a New Worldliness—or confront its age with the vigorous assertion of the Lordship of Christ, with its own challenge of an Incarnate God and a risen Saviour?
Of those who would make a totally “new” beginning in theology, one is tempted to ask: Is it a foregone conclusion that as the human predicament is spelled out, valid theological assertions will emerge? To put the question in another form: Can we suppose that this decade is so pregnant with essential meaning that men can, through cultural analysis, propose answers to human problems so basic that in their very formulation God will necessarily disclose himself and his grace?
Must we accede to the assertion (made, for example, by Leslie Dewart in The Future of Belief) that Modern Man has developed in such a fashion that a completely new theological formulation is mandatory? Or, to state the question in Harvey Cox’s terms, has man in his “urban state” become so completely dependent upon forces and resources within himself that the categories of historic Christian thought, acceptable during the “tribal” and “town” stages, are no longer applicable to him?
If the past is anything of an indicator, the new theology will be some type of universalism in which it is assumed that all men are in reality children of God, and need only to be told so. And there will probably be no mention of any divine negative action toward human sin, such as is implied by the doctrine of the final judgment.
How far may the reformulation of historic Christian faith be expected to go? One is not cheered by the assertion in All Things New (the preparatory booklet for the Uppsala assembly) that “the forgiveness of sins was not merely a spiritual event, but had its consequences in people’s physical lives.” On the surface, this seems a plausible assertion. But can the theological basis for the forgiveness of sins be determined from its empirical consequences? Moreover, precisely what events bear witness to the breaking-in of the “New” that has allegedly occurred?
Few will deny that “the world is being drawn into one consciously common history, united by fear of universal catastrophe”; but can we deduce from this that in the unity of “shared secular hopes” God is being realized in the consciousness of man? Secular hopes and secular despair certainly do exist and merit recognition and respect. But is their articulation a reliable means to the articulation also of a new theological vision?
The WCC agenda seems to imply that the quest for a new literacy in theology must begin with the analysis of secular issues, and that when this analysis has proceeded far enough, God will “break in” and disclose himself. All this, we are led to hope, will issue from the elaboration of the predicament of secular man, despite his flight from a theology resting upon revelation.
Does much or all of this newly oriented “quest for theology” rest upon the hidden assumption that historic Christian theism reflects a relatively naive and infantile state of man’s mental evolution? Is Christian theology the product of underdeveloped cultures (Hebrew and Hellenistic) and thus irrelevant today? It would be helpful to have, prior to Uppsala, some forthright answers to these and allied questions.
This is being written in Munich, where in the sessions of the Goethe-Institut men of linguistic and philological orientation are also concerned with matters that relate to man’s ultimate destiny. One finds among them a certain preplexity about the almost frenetic attempts of theologians to trumpet Nietzsche’s robust proclamation of God’s demise. Few of them feel that God’s disappearance would guarantee a new epiphany of theology, or that “God” must emerge from the exercise of the current secular consciousness.
The Church may be in genuine peril of being remade in the image of the world, and the “one-world kingdom of man” may sidetrack men from historic Christianity’s insistence upon a crucial and personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Certainly, if the WCC assembly expects that an adequate theology must emerge as man focuses his attention upon his problems, many will be tempted to adopt a Socratic skepticism about the outcome.
HAROLD B. KUHN
