Some years ago, German Reformed theologian Jurgen Moltmann published a series of essays on the role of faith in public life entitled God for a Secular Society. Moltmann is no lightweight. His A Theology of Hope inaugurated an entire new way of doing theology by living the faith; Moltmann was inspired by utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch to re-envision theology and the Church as a source of hope, a place where, to quote Jesus from the Gospels, a new thing is being done. He is given credit with starting a movement called political theology in Europe; those who followed in other parts of the world were more directly beholden to Marx on the one hand and actual ministerial practice on the other, and created the liberation theologies that upset the current pope so much he actually excommunicated one of its practitioners, Leonoardo Boff. Moltmann has written numerous weighty tomes on the doctrine of creation, the Trinity, the Church, and eschatology.
I realized the old theological paradigm in the United States - await with baited breath the latest German book because the Germans invented serious scholarship - was dead when I read the first essay in which Moltmann, in arguing for the continued relevance of the Church and its discourse in a secular society uses the Federal Theologians of the 18th century as his discussion point. The Federal Theologians were a group of Swiss Reformed theologians attempting to work out an alternative to the more hierarchical understanding of the Trinity and Providence that was prevalent in more authoritarian parts of Europe. Writing from more democratic Switzerland, the country that invented federalism, they attempted the first real democratic rendering of Christian theology. It is a fascinating historical period, and many of the theologians in question made important advancements in how we can describe the ineffable in a way that is not necessarily compatible with monarchy.
This in no way means they are at all relevant for our lives today. While I find reading theology and philosophy relaxing, invigorating, and even occasionally aggravating, I have ceased to believe that we need to rehash the same debates Karl Barth had with the Liberals, whether Bonhoeffer or Harnack were more representative of the best of German Lutheran theology, or the possible relevance of Hegelian ontology versus Kantian epistemology in constructing theological arguments. These are not just sterile; they ignore the fact that theology is supposed to come out of the lebenswelt - that wonderful Heideggerian term that refers to our particularity, our here and now.
Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall seemed to agree, and published a 3-volume work on "Christian Faith in North America" that tried to do just what I felt needed to be done. He wrote one of the great theological works of the early 1970's. Of course, he wrote it in the mid-1990's, thus rendering him as irrelevant as Moltmann.
With the exception of N. T. Wright, there are no serious theologians that jump up and say, "Hey!". We are starved for serious thought. We need a new way of taking Christian ideas and making them speak to our age.
We do not need the evolving position of Pope Benedict XVI (former Roman Catholic theologian Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) put forth most clearly in a Philippine newspaper by Fr. Roy Cimagala (and reprinted here at Faith in Public Life.org), which posits something called "secularism" as one pole of unacceptable social thought, and "clericalism" as another pole. My problems with this evoloving position are many (not the least its Aristotelian "mean between two extremes" approach to ethical thought that creates a fake neutral position between two equally fake ethical extremes), but I find the understandings of "secularism" to be insulting, and of "clericalism" to be disingenuous at best.
The Pope has spoken often against "secularism", and Fr. Cimagala is express in his understanding that secularism, being unGodly by definition, is therefore amoral at least, if not immoral (since God is the standard for morality, and if God is absent from secularism, therefore . . .; is it any wonder I detest the simplistic use of logic? You create false universals, posit an equally fake particular, and that leads you to a fake conclusion). Of course, secular social thought is far from immoral; John Stuart Mill, Richard Rorty, W. E. B. DuBois, Bertrand Russell, and Isaiah Berlin (to name some both of my favorites and the more important non-religious moral philosophers) are all concerned with ethical conduct and a just social order. None of them were particularly friendly toward religion, with Russell even writing abook called Why I am not a Christian. To argue, as Cimagala does, that "secularism" is subjectivism writ large, is simple ignorance.
On the other hand, to claim that "clericalism" - the idea that God should take sides in political disputes - is inherently wrong is at best disingenuous. First, there is an irreducible political core to the Christian faith. Second, as James Cone, Gustavo Guteirrez, Josiah Young and other liberation theologians have argued, God does indeed take sides. He sides with life - real human life, not necessarily feti - over and against all those forces that would bring death and dehumanization. The previouos Pope made many of the same arguments, which has always made me wonder why he and Ratzinger were so hostile to their South American and Central American Catholic brethren who were arguing much the same thing, just using different words. I suppose there is an element of truth, and one I have argued and still maintain, that those with whom we dispute are still children of God, in need of love and foregiveness. That truth should in no way prevent us from saying what needs to be said, and doing what needs to be done. Jesus loved Jerusalem, he wept over Jerusalem. He also pronounced a sentence upon it for its refusal to act as God wanted it to act, and paid a staggering price for that verdict.
The "secularism versus clericalism" paradigm that is evolving in Roman Catholic circles is no more real or relevant than Jurgen Moltmann's discussion of 18th century Swiss theologians or Douglas John Hall's embrace of Paul Tillich for the 1990's. We still must wait for serious theology to adress where we are, and more important, what we are to do.
