The Fortunes of Theology

Fifth in a Series

A crisis in theological credibility darkens the Western world; multitudes are baffled over what, if anything, they should believe about God.

This theological credibility gap differs from the widely denounced political credibility gap. Government officials are often charged with withholding information or manipulating the news; religious academics, however, are not often accused of malevolent secrecy or deliberate dishonesty. Few theologians are given either to anonymity or deceit.

The complaint against neo-Protestant theologians, rather, is that they simply don’t “tell it like it is.” Their religious reports are inconsistent and contradictory, if not incoherent. And if theologians and clergy who claim to be divinely updated experts cannot agree among themselves, surely the public cannot much be blamed for having high doubts about the Deity and about those who claim to fraternize with him.

If modern theologians kept their supposed revelational insights to themselves, that would be another matter. Then the continual revision and replacement of their views would create little problem for the public. But as it is, theology is increasingly tagged as an enterprise of creative speculation; its queen-for-a-day tenets have less endurance than many frankly tentative scientific hypotheses.

Neo-Protestant theologians hesitate to admit that they are simply playing peek-a-boo with divinity. Two generations of modern religious theory nevertheless bear out the blunt verdict that their rumors about God have no more solid basis in objective disclosure than Clifford Irving’s supposed conversations with the inaccessible and invisible Howard Hughes.

What makes the confusing theological reports—that the Deity is “in here” or “out there” or “up there” or “in depth” or “dead and gone”—a scandal is the fact that the Living God is truly accessible in his revelation. These neo-Protestant claims are intended to state the truth about God. But they so clearly contradict one another that if their proponents are not promulgating a literary hoax, they are at least profoundly mistaken. No claim is no more obviously fraudulent than that contemporary religionists convey the unadulterated truth about God. Their views cancel one another out.

Realizing this, a great many frustrated divinity students have taken a raincheck on theological commitments. For them to pursue a mod-theology for permanently valuable spiritual profit is about as rewarding, they feel, as for a squirrel to dig for nuts in Astroturf.

What neo-Protestant theologians as a class are saying about God is not only insufficient but inaccurate. At best, they proffer a mixture of truth, half-truth, and untruth—and no recent modern theologian has presented a solid criterion for distinguishing one from the other. The inevitable result is public distrust, even when these theologians happen to tell the truth about God. Their lack of theological concurrence has given rise to an adage: “When in doubt, speak as a theologian.”

This widespread uneasiness over the pontifications of contemporary theologians has been nurtured not only by their ambiguity and abstruseness but also by their promotion of a pluralistic dialogue that often denies historic evangelical Christianity a voice. Champions of a quasi-official ecumenical position screen and manage the news about God. Ecumenical biblicism wears thin the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel (“that they may be one”) but leaves comparatively untouched Jahweh’s message through Jeremiah: “You keep saying, This place is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!’ This catchword of yours is a lie.… Do not run after other gods to your own ruin.… You run after other gods whom you have not known; then you come and stand before me in this house, which hears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’; safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations” (Jer. 7:4 ff., NEB).

Among multitudes of Christians devoted to fulfilling the Great Commission, few complaints run deeper than that, in their unrivaled mass-media opportunities, ecumenists tend to obscure the singular truth of revealed religion and the good news of the Gospel. This dilution of historic Christian beliefs, whether in deference to modern theological alternatives or to socio-political activism, has nurtured widespread skepticism among the laity about the theological outlook of the institutional church. Ecumenical enthusiasm has been almost irreparably damaged among many laymen.

It is not that these laymen think the learned clergy are lacking in candor, or are given to fabrication and deception and to winning followers by pretense. Yet the ambivalence of many churchmen toward New Testament commitments has convinced numerous churchgoers that a cadre of contemporary religious leaders have acquired unwarranted influence, whereby they control religious information and, perhaps unintentionally, mislead the masses. Many lay leaders suspect that ecumenical bureaucrats have lost the sense of final truth.

The baffled multitudes have a right to know the truth about God. That truth is not nearly so inaccessible to the man in the street as theologians would have us believe. Nor is it dependent upon the ingenuity of modern-minded religious entrepreneurs. Any remarkably modern gospel is sure to be a false gospel. In earlier centuries, a powerful Catholic Church suppressed the Bible and shackled the people to the ecclesiastical hierarchy for their religious concepts. Neo-Protestant theologians suspend the Bible’s special meaning for modern man on their own cryptic “Key to the Scriptures.” In some places today Catholic leaders more energetically dispense the Scriptures (with the Apocrypha for excess measure) than do neo-Protestant radicals who are less sure of JHWH than JEPD.

Much of the new religious literature is greeted with such skepticism and suspicion that the religious book market is notably on the decline. The widespread loss of confidence and trust reflects a costly sacrifice of religious credibility. Now that God has been sensationally proclaimed to be dead, church members abreast of this information are not morbidly curious about the religious undertakers’ progress reports on the supposedly disintegrating corpse.

Indeed, the theologians of modernity are no longer widely viewed as the best source of information about God. While many radical clergymen have inherited what theology they have, or have had, from these theological mentors, there is a growing feeling among the masses that, if special information about God is available, neo-Protestant theologians are not the dispensers of it.

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