In the mainline seminaries, why is it okay to deny Christ’s deity but wrong to call God “Father”?
Christians around the world will soon gather to celebrate Easter, exclaiming to one another the ancient greeting, “He is risen!”
But some will hear uncertain sounds on Easter Sunday. Instead of being assured that the tomb is empty, they will be urged to affirm the “idea of resurrection” or to believe that good will overcome evil.
That’s not bad advice, but it falls short of the truth that sent those first disciples running breathlessly from the tomb. Easter celebrates an event, not a set of values. But to listen to voices from within mainline Protestant churches, one would think Easter is no more significant than Valentine’s Day. It is this “theological virus” that has derailed most mainline Protestant seminaries and threatens to spread.
United Methodist professor Thomas Oden spent years in that wilderness of modernity in search of relevance, but he made his way home to the richness of classic orthodoxy (CT, Sept. 24, 1990, p. 28). While not entirely critical of his denomination’s theological education, Oden does make this stinging indictment: “We are cursed with the cancerous growth of a toxic doctrinal pluralism that lacks attentiveness to the unity of the classical tradition.”
An overstatement? Probably not. One sees this “toxic doctrinal pluralism” in theologian John Hick’s claim that it is no longer necessary “to insist … upon the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity, and it may be possible to recognize the separate validity of the other great world religions.” Christianity, he would say, is no more viable than, say, Hinduism or Islam. The common thread running through most of the new pluralistic theologies, ...
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