Too Late for Soundings

For almost a decade now Christian scholars interested in theology have been taking soundings of the religious scene. The giant ship Oikoumene has run into doctrinally shallow waters; for so long have her ecumenical steersmen put mission ahead of truth, momentum ahead of direction, that the World Church, so-called, finds herself adrift from the high sea of universal truth and swept off course by the shifting winds of modernity. Few ecclesiastical interpreters would venture to say just where the institutional church is now traveling, in relation to either the supernatural realm of biblical faith or the history of our times.

In 1962, when a group of Anglican theologians published the small volume Soundings (Cambridge University Press), the book’s editor, Dr. A. R. Vidler of King’s College, Cambridge, remarked by way of introduction that “it is a time for making soundings, not charts or maps.… We can best serve the cause of truth and of the Church by candidly confessing where our perplexities lie, and not by making claims which, so far as we can see, theologians are not at present in a position to justify.”

The sixth decade of this century has almost run out, but many ecumenical theologians—not only in England, but also in the United States, throughout Europe, and even in Asia—are still taking the pulse of the contemporary world. Soundings in its annual reprints still carries the widely held verdict: “Our task is to try to see what the questions are that we ought to be facing in the nineteen-sixties.… The authors of this volume cannot persuade themselves that the time is ripe for major works of theological construction or reconstruction.” Today the decks are crowded with theological navigators who admit that the Church may be not only in dire trouble but actually in danger of being beached and stranded.

This plight recalls another occasion of soundings, when Paul, hoping to plead his case before Caesar, was on board a Mediterranean vessel caught by headwinds. “For a good many days,” Luke reports, “we made little headway, and we were hard put to it to reach Cnidus” (Acts 27:7, NEB). Soon the ship began “hugging the coast” and “struggled on” to a place where—even though “by now much time had been lost”—the Great Apostle warned that it would be “disastrous” to continue, for it would mean “grave loss, loss not only of ship and cargo but also of life.”

Now I must say that I am not addicted to allegorical interpretation of Scripture; the last thing I would want any reader to infer is that God arranged a first-century shipwreck off the island of Malta to warn the Twentieth-century church against theological vacillation. Warnings against deserting the apostolic faith are plain enough in the New Testament that no one needs the help of allegories to make the point.

But I am interested in the Acts narrative because, when things worsened (a “ ‘Northeaster’ … tore down from the landward side” and “caught the ship” in its fury), the sailors were driven to taking soundings. They lightened the vessel by jettisoning her gear in “very heavy weather.” “For days on end there was no sign of either sun or stars, a great storm was raging, and our last hopes of coming through alive began to fade.” On the fourteenth night they were “still drifting” when, in the middle of the night, the sailors suspected they were dangerously near land. We read, “They sounded and found twenty fathoms. Sounding again after a short interval they found fifteen fathoms.” With that turn of things, even the pagans on board would suddenly get interested in the Ground of All Being.

There is, of course, abundant reason today for making soundings. The twentieth-century world is drifting, and only God knows where. Where are the nations headed? Where will science take us? What is happening to marriage and the home? Where are literature and television going from here? What is the future of Communism? Will the United States be a second-rate power by 1990? And, closer home for the Christian theologian, has the institutional church finally had it? Will the crisis in theology be overcome, or will Christianity fall victim to modern secularization?

Religious literature today reverberates with soundings. Thomas Altizer professes to have held an autopsy on God and pronounces him dead. James Pike claims to have talked with an invisible spirit world and reassures us that something out there is alive. John Robinson declares that what’s “up there” is no longer “in” here. And Paul Tillich insisted that what’s “down under” is it, not he. Karl Barth reported a clap of thunder in the Swiss alps that echoed personally right from heaven. Rudolf Bultmann said it sounded more like a rumble in man’s heart. Harvey Cox thinks he sees God standing on a picket line in the secular city. Small wonder that Cambridge professor Donald MacKinnon in his new book Borderlands of Theology, alludes to “the purveyors of dubious apologetic wares for the edification of Church congresses and ecumenical gatherings.”

Theologians who are taking soundings find the great ship Oikoumene still in danger of being cast ashore on a rugged coast, or of being trapped between crosscurrents. Some think the vessel has already run aground, its bow stuck fast and its stern being pounded to pieces by the breakers. Not a few passengers are jumping overboard, forsaking the non-terrestrial life for safe footing in the secular city. Others are clinging to wreckage of the ship and going it alone, certain that corporate Christianity—both Christendom and the institutional church—has had its day, that ecumenical Christianity in the conciliar sense has spent its force; if Christianity has an immediate future, they feel, it will be as the church in the home. Others think that the present ecclesiastical nightmare has a brighter day-after-tomorrow, even if this means that tomorrow the Christian task force may be temporarily grounded and imprisoned in Rome. For still others, Rome offers no safer haven than a cold windswept island whose warming firewood hides a serpent.

Is there nowhere in all this some confident soul to discern that the Living God is yet near, to declare that authentic hope can and will ride out every storm? Where is a voice to say, what few ecumenical steersmen want to hear, that this ship may in fact go down? And to say what everybody needs to hear: that nevertheless we can—if we meet the conditions—all get to shore safely?

To deny that Christ’s Church is invincible is to disown Jesus as Lord. But when it is theoretically and spiritually off course, the Church as a cultural phenomenon has no built-in guarantee of survival. Neither the chaos in culture nor the crisis in the Church is ecumenically manageable. Ask the once flourishing Christian community in North Africa that had even Augustine in its ranks.

If in our time faith is precarious, in our day also return to the true and unchanging Object of faith is indispensable. It may already be much too late for soundings.

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