Is Theology Dying?

Like Pavlov’s dog, I predictably salivate when certain stimuli come along. Having been much involved in the death-of-God controversy of the sixties and having written a book called The Suicide of Christian Theology, I am the sheer victim of conditioned reflex when an article appears with the title “God Is Not Dead, But Theology Is Dying”: my mouth begins immediately to water. Therefore I cannot resist analyzing the thesis embodied in the article of that title that appeared in the December issue of Intellect—particularly since its author is Charles W. Kegley, co-editor with Robert Bretall of the six-volume Library of Living Theology series, which has given significant scholarly treatment to the thought of Tillich, Niebuhr, Bruner, Wieman, Bultmann, and Nygren.

For Kegley, “theology, at least in the Western world, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts,” and all are in deep trouble. There is biblical theology, which has classically endeavored to set forth a systematic understanding of the teachings of the Bible; dogmatic theology, interpreting the doctrines of a particular church; and “natural or empirical” theology, illustrated by liberal D. C. Mackintosh’s Theology As an Empirical Science, which tries to arrive at religious truth without dependence on scriptural revelation.

The first half of the twentieth century, according to Kegley, “appears to have produced the most remarkable collection of brilliant theologians and the most exhaustive systems of theology in the history of Western thought” (he cites the theologians included in his Library of Living Theology series, plus Barth, Berdyaev, and Buddhist Suzuki), but “there not only are no equally creative theologians at work today, there are none on the horizon.” Now the biblical theologians are myopically dealing with specialized issues, rather than attempting to understand the sweep of Scripture; the dogmatician, likewise, has given up the great task of comprehending the whole of the faith by way of a “new theological blick or stance”; and “as for natural-empirical theology, religious liberalism, like political liberalism, just does not excite and sell enough to warrant the writing.”

To illustrate this collapse, Kegley zeros in on the “theology of hope” and the more recent “theology of play.” The former illustrates the tendency of the contemporary theologian to “dwarf” his subject matter—to take one (perhaps entirely valid) aspect of the whole and make it everything. “Hope is not any more—and probably is less—likely a candidate than love, faith, or other central concerns of theology” for prime position, and in any case the theologian should be offering a synoptic and comprehensive view, not a partial and limited perspective. As for “play theologies,” they so distort the broad sweep of biblical religion that they become a “burlesque”—a “crude joke.” Like today’s artist who gives us urinals as works of art, the play theologian (in the double sense) offers “the reserection of the flesh” (Sam Keen, in The Theology of Play, by Moltmann et al.).

Why this appalling situation? Kegley cites the American development of the independent theological seminary (“angel factory”) separated from the university, and the Supreme Court’s Schempp decision in 1963, allowing only “literary” and “historical” study of religion—only talk about religion—in secular educational institutions. This decision served to drive the wedge even deeper between so-called objective study of religion and the dedicated work of the theølogian, and to move the theologian even farther from the mainstream of intellectual life. And so the understandable tendency today is for the theologian to run away into Transcendence (example: the most recent theologizing of former death-of-god-er Paul Van Buren). Yet “to expound a theology which is incoherent, empirically meaningless, and irrelevant is to misconstrue the task of theology, and to seal its doom a priori.” What we need is a “theology of God, not of some secular fantasies and games of men”—but at the same time a theology which can “so construe its god-talk as to bypass … all the criticisms which attach to de-mythologized, literal discussions of God.”

Aspects of Kegley’s argument can readily be discounted as special pleading: his inclinations toward the “subjective religious empiricism” of early twentieth-century theological modernism cause him to redefine philosophical theology and apologetics as “natural or empirical” theology à la Mackintosh and Wieman; and his fascination with his own Library of Living Theology makes him forget Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and others and assert incredibly that theology has now plummeted from the greatest height it ever attained—in the first half of the twentieth century! But apart from Kegley’s frustration in not finding a suitable candidate for the seventh volume of his series, he should be listened to carefully.

Theology today is superficial and faddish. The important question is, Why?, and the answer lies much deeper than the separation of theology from religion or the theological seminary from the university (indeed, modern theology’s abrogation of its proper task occurred first in the German university faculties of theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The central source of the problem—as Kegley himself indirectly suggests in his call for a true “theology of God” and yet a theology that “bypasses” secular criticisms of literal revelation—is that theology is no longer sure of its data. The biblical theologian is unsure to what extent the words and acts of Jesus are the product of primitive belief communities rather than a reflection of Jesus himself; the systematic theologian, unable to build on such shaky foundations, cannot produce a consistent or comprehensive picture of revelational truth—for no one is sure what is revelation and what is not; and the modern philosophical theologian, having given up special revelation as the source of his operations, has fallen into thinly disguised humanisms devoid of theological substance or appeal (the old modernism, the new “secular theology”).

Theology is in the position that medicine would be in if it lost confidence in the germ theory or the use of pharmaceuticals, or law if it found the idea of precedent (stare decisis) no longer compelling. Either Scripture speaks univocally of God, or the death of theology is a dead certainty. When will the modern theologian learn that a reliable Bible is his only survival kit?

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