Review of Current Religious Thought: August 30, 1963

It has come to me on good authority that my IQ is, or was, 152. I report this to you not with any pride nor with undue modesty, but only to be able to say that I get about as much out of my theology reading as the next fellow; and what I get I do not necessarily understand; and I grow depressed sometimes by the endless assignment, and the confusions and alarums.

The mass of material in modern theology is utterly appalling. For fifteen years I taught theology in a seminary, and even now I try, as they say, to “keep up.” For three weeks steady this summer I have been swatting away again at Tillich, and I am not only incapable of keeping up, I am incapable of catching up. “Everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there,” and I am getting highly suspicious of some experts I know, and especially of recent seminary graduates, who speak authoritatively and glibly about Tillich, Bultmann, Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and the like. I do not believe (a) that they read these men in quantity and (b) that they have studied them enough to make valid judgments. There simply isn’t and hasn’t been enough time.

I think we have reached a very striking plateau in theology. John and Don Baillie have passed on, as has Richard Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer was destroyed years ago by Hitler. Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, H. H. Farmer, Whale, Flew, Raven, Dodd, Micklem, Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr are nearly all well into their seventies, and a couple of them are in their eighties. Back of these men who have dominated theological thinking I look in vain for those who are filling up the gaps. Here and there I hear of a great new “find” in theology, but I see nothing comparable to what we have known in the last thirty years. It is easy to misjudge one’s contemporaries, and it is easy to believe that the former days were better than these. The fact remains that nothing of the order of Barth’s commentary on Romans, or Bultmann’s notes on demythologizing, or Brunner’s battle on natural theology, or Niebuhr’s excellent insights built around the idea of the sinful man in a sinful society—nothing vaguely resembling the challenges of this sort of theology is within purview.

In my opinion we are in for a long period of adjusting and shaking down and criticizing. (Just think of all the Ph.D. degree theses which are yet to be written on Barth’s dogmatics!) And what can we more say about John Oman, P. T. Forsyth, Mackintosh, Streeter, Wheeler Robinson, Warfield, and all the men we were reading with such profit and delight before the experts of our own age. This says nothing of the exegetes, the textual critics, the church historians, the liturgists, the musicians, the architects, the dramatists, the scientists, the novelists, the philosophers, the sociologists—“one simply must keep up, you know.”

All this sets me to pondering over the many theological experts in our midst. “Knowledge is proud she knows so much; wisdom is humble she knows so little.” Meanwhile our bright ones come forth from our sophisticated seminaries ready to give us every word but the wonderful words of life. I don’t think they know enough about theology, not to speak of life, to sound off with the profoundness which they try to exhibit. What they are giving us is too often out of their big fat notebooks taken over in big lumps from a professor who is trying desperately to “keep up,” and in many cases isn’t quite making it.

Modern theology is not only faced with the mass of material which makes reading and understanding the primary sources alone an almost endless task; it is not only wrestling with masses of secondary source material more or less valid in comment and criticism; it is not only faced with an endless stream of pseudo-experts who, I think, could not possibly have mastered the material; in addition to all this, it is also faced with serious critics and these not necessarily in the conservative camp, so that the easy enthusiasm for Barth and Bultmann (a pose which is easier than mastery) gets badly shaken by trenchant criticism.

I like what Van Dusen says in “Liberal Theological Reassessment” (Union Seminary Quarterly Review, May, 1963). He doesn’t name names, but you have a feeling about his target:

“Let us recall that the Reality which has served the Christian Movement as a determinative norm has not been the scholars’ biography of Jesus, or the theologians’ construct of Christ. It has been the figure portrayed in the Gospels. In every age, and not least our own, the plain man, picking up this plain tale in his pitiable ignorance of critical principles and theological presuppositions, has found himself gripped by a living man of history who not only stands out upon the records with remarkable clarity but reaches forth from the records to conscript the devotion of his soul.”

At the same time the “assured” scientific presuppositions are being wondered about.

Nels Ferre, in “Christian Theology in Higher Education” (Andover Newton Quarterly, March, 1963), says:

“Nineteenth century ideology tried to explain creation as evolution from below. This was true of Darwin in biology, of Marx in history, and of Freud in psychology. Mid-twentieth century we begin to see … that as a description of method, how creation took place, evolution had much merit, but as explanation it is sheer faith, an incredible mystique. And yet hard-headed thinkers fell prey to such a gullible faith in the name of science. As an ideology, educators themselves are now beginning to see the stark and startling nature of this faith, but in the meantime education trained away from the church countless millions, who swallowed this mystique truth” (italics mine).

What honestly is the residue of all modern theology—and what honestly do we really know about it?

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