The theological scene in our day is pretty confusing. If one ever gets the theology sorted out, he still has the problem of how to make all this available to the great masses of Christians who are not theologians and to the even greater masses who are not even Christians. How to put the hay where the sheep can reach it takes considerable skill. And there is also the nice question of whether the hay should be prechewed and pre-digested. As a sometime, somehow theologian, I never quite get away from these problems.
Grounded in Strong, Hodge, Warfield, and Berkhof, loosened up a little by Forsyth, Denney, and Whale, not to speak of various commentators on Luther and Calvin, with a smidgen of Augustine, Wesley, and Temple, I later had the assignment of panting after Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Tillich, with liberal doses of Robinson, Hamilton, Altizer, and Cox. Meanwhile I have read some pietistic literature, religious poetry, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, and pondered on Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Dostoevsky. I could have read Grace Livingston Hill Lutz but didn’t. But I did read Lloyd C. Douglas. Meanwhile I have watched and listened to Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rex Humbard. On long trips the car radio keeps me posted on the Second Coming, speaking in tongues, and how to get bedside crosses that light up at night. I have also read Aquinas and Maritain and a few things by Küng and Bea. I try to remember that God is not the God of confusion. Teaching classes in theology becomes the fine art of deciding what to put in and what to leave out with the awful fear that the theological slant you give your students will probably stick for the rest of their days.
Ordinary terminology gives us our first confusion. Men hold a position that they may describe as orthodox, conservative, reformed (or reforming), evangelical, biblical, liberal, or radical. It is assumed that Warfield is a biblical theologian, but it is also maintained strenously in some quarters that Tillich is a biblical theologian. And there seems to be no doubt that once Bultmann has decided what the Bible is he considers himself a biblical theologian also.
Apart from the terminology used there are also strange patterns. If you try a steady diet of Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rex Humbard, you know you are listening to orthodox, conservative, and evangelical theology; but the theological patterns and presuppositions are very difficult to discover. And although the three of them are together in some things, they seem to be apart in others. A steady diet of these three men leads one to wonder what an unbeliever is supposed to believe and just how he is to get started. I happen to like Billy Graham’s format, and I certanly like the people who participate in the program; but I don’t know quite what to make of all the music and all the staging of other evangelical programs. To see a very handsome college couple sitting on a bench in a beautiful garden leaning toward each other as they sing into each other’s eyes an old gospel song gives me about the same reaction I had in a church one day where the minister baptized infants by dipping a rose into water in a baby shoe, baptizing the infant, and then giving the rose and the baby shoe to the mother. I know I am Scotch and Presbyterian, and therefore stodgy, but I think I reacted about the same as John the Baptist, Simon Peter, or John Calvin might have.
There are other strange patterns and constellations in the so-called evangelical field. I know one outstanding theologian who is orthodox, reformed, chain-smoking, and a-millennial. I know another who is “doctrinally sound,” loudly pre-millennial, and a glutton. In another I tried to run down his overall view of things, which included Sabbath observance, tithing, and “a little wine for the stomach’s sake.” And I think I get a whiff now and then of the love of money and the desire for ecclesiastical power among the most pious. Meanwhile the so-called evangelicals vis-à-vis the liberals show great meanness of spirit. Liberals generally condemn the evangelicals as being not quite bright, and the evangelicals think of the liberals as being not quite Christian.
What shall we more say with regard to our Catholic friends? In Time (May 23, 1969) we read, “Several Dutch thinkers … have tried to refine the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, which was made dogma at the Council of Trent; others have proposed radical new ideas on original sin. Even the conventional concepts of God, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ and the reality of his Resurrection are considered open for theological reconsideration.” Father Maguire of Catholic University wants to move away “from totally verbal, formal expression to a symbolic expression of belief.” (But he has to be totally verbal to say so.) Francis X. Murphy of Rome’s Accademia Alfonsiana explains that what is going on in the Catholic Church “is not deviation in the basic dogma but in theological explanations given for these dogmas” (a neat trick if you can get away with it).
One might try to sort people out on such subjects as propositional theology, verbal inerrancy, and social action. Why is it that some churches will join the World Council but not the National Council? How do you get people in various camps to read one another’s books? Evangelicals to a man condemn Tillich, but I have yet to meet one of these judges who has read Tillich or understood him if he has read him. From one end of the spectrum to the other we look with suspicion and make quick judgments.
This is all Current Religious Thought in a day when Christianity on the world scene is definitely a minority and, in my judgment, not too far away from being a persecuted minority. The builders of the Tower of Babel expected to reach heaven, and the whole operation fell apart because they couldn’t even understand one another. On the Day of Pentecost the disciples began to speak “in other tongues” and the listeners said, “we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God”—all because in a very confusing day they quit their busyness and waited for the Spirit. Because, I suppose, we are so anxious to do God’s work, we don’t listen to each other, let alone listen to him.
