As a follow-up to my last post, I want to reflect a bit on how exciting reading Dorrien's history has been for me. I have written previously of my own frustration with current academic theology. It really began when I purchased Jurgen Moltmann's God for a Secular Society: The Public Role of Theology, and the first essay was on . . . the federal theologians on seventeenth and eighteenth century Switzerland. Snore.
That was compounded by Douglas John Hall's three volume Theology in a North American Context, which I found to be wanting in a number of ways. Now I know the chief want was an almost total ignorance of American theological liberalism.
In the meantime, I have been wooed by the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy, as well as the pluralism of Isaiah Berlin. Yet, philosophy is, to me, incomplete, even at its best. Finding this deep well from which to draw - a well, moreover, of our own, American, construction - has been a blessing. I certainly don't agree with everything I read; I do, however, find solace in the fact that my own struggle, and the struggle of mainline churches today, are echoed in previous historic battles with both secular liberals and progressives on the one hand, and fundamentalists on the other. There really is nothing new under the sun . . .
One of the most important things I have found is a desire to keep theological reflection secondary to the life of actual Christians as they are actually lived out. For too long, a theology influenced by European Calvinism insisted that the theological task was a necessary first step in the Christian life. We had to get it right before we could move on. For me, that meant not going anywhere. Now, I know that we move, and reflect on that movement. Since where we are changes as we move, what we reflect changes as well. There is no sin in changing one's mind.
Hall was correct in one respect - the influence upon mainline academic theology by foreign influence (German academic theology on the one hand; indigenous theologies from Third World Christians on the other) have blotted out much contextual reflection on what it means to be a Christian in North America. One of the complaints leveled against the pragmatist position, then and now, in both philosophy and theology, is that it reflects a certain bourgeois comfort and complacency, an optimism that trusts in renewal through reform. I agree with this critique, but I also would suggest that it accurately reflects prevailing American values. There is nothing wrong with being middle class, and there is nothing wrong with having a theology that reflects the best bourgeois values. The alternatives - the kind of crisis theology offered by Reinhold Niebuhr, especially in his earlier, socialist phase - is an important corrective to some of the more drippy sentimentalism of pre-neo-orthodox American theology. Yet, Niebuhr, I believe went too far in the other direction, and ignored one aspect of American liberal theology - at its best, it was a protest against many aspects of our society (poverty, racism, the corrosive effects of capitalism upon various social institutions) that Niebuhr himself shared. The problem which he highlighted, a lack of understanding of what he called the tragic element of life, may be true, but I think he and his European counterparts over-emphasized that element a bit much. As the aforementioned Edward Scribner Ames wrote, there is indeed a tragic element of life, but part of the Gospel message is that tragedy does not win in the end. The "crisis" of the crisis theologians was a rage against their god that failed - the optimistic liberalism of Harnack, Ritschl, and Euro-American progress in its secular and religious forms as a result of the First World War. They were spurned lovers.
We can't get behind the neo-orthodox movement, but rather than flail around looking for a way out of the impasse, we can look to our roots to find all sorts of resources to move forward. That is part of the gift of Dorrien's work - intellectual and existential tools to find out what it means to be a Christian in America without having to learn either German or Spanish first.
