LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

as problem. Culture, for better or worse, is part of the created order: for better, when God allows Adam to name the creatures; for worse, when God scatters the builders of Babel and confuses their tongues. The people of Israel are to be a separate culture among cultures, and they are tempted to forsake their covenant relationship with God for unrighteous accommodations with their neighbors. This ambivalence is heightened in the New Testament, where attitudes toward Hellenistic culture vary from accommodation (e.g., “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” [Matt. 22:21]) to apocalyptic negation (e.g., “I saw a new heaven and a new earth” [Rev. 21:1]).

      Augustine began his theory of scriptural interpretation, which was also a theory of culture, by distinguishing things and signs. Things are good, insofar as they are understood and loved as part of divine creation. Signs are also good, insofar as through them we learn and teach what is understood and loved. Like things, signs can be misused or loved for their own sake (rather than God’s). Culture is the milieu for the Christian’s difficult pilgrimage toward God. The question is whether this environment is mostly hostile or friendly, deceitful or truthful. In such terms did H. Richard Niebuhr lay out a typology of moral relationships between Christ and culture. The problem is that culture is both something for which Christians must take responsibility and something from which they should remain distinct. Niebuhr’s five types, along with some of their exemplars, are: Christ against culture: First John, Tertullian, the Mennonites, Tolstoy; Christ of (at one with) culture: Gnosticism, Abelard, Albrecht Ritschl; Christ above (fulfilling and transcending) culture: Thomas Aquinas; Christ and culture in paradoxical tension: Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard; Christ the transformer of culture: Gospel of John, Augustine, Calvin. The typology is not neutral. Christ as transformer is the paradigm that Niebuhr most cherished, and it is implicitly his norm for assessing the other types.

      Were the second type named “Christ disclosed in culture,” it might have included Paul Tillich (who may also fit the third, fourth, and fifth types). Tillich’s “theology of culture” has roots in German idealism and romanticism and concerns the spiritual “depth” of culture. Tillich offers several axioms: (1) Religion is the substance of culture, culture the form of religion; (2) spiritual substance is disclosed by means of cultural forms whose “style” expresses depth or “ultimate concern”; and (3) the truly ultimate is God, the “ground” and “abyss” of being, or being-itself. Since being-itself is infinite and prior to the divide between subjective experience and objective expression, God for Tillich is indeed “other than” yet disclosed with culture, though ambiguously. The theologian of culture must show where depth is creative in culture and must criticize cultural forms (such as nationalism) where depth is manifestly destructive, demonic, or idolatrous. In his analyses of art and architecture, Tillich greatly appreciated expressionistic styles, in which depth appears to shatter (and hence criticize) form from within.

      The lasting import of Tillich’s thought is its critical, prophetic imperative, which has counterparts in many modern theologies. Particular cultural expressions (in the arts, philosophy, social sciences, etc.) can identify the idolatries and pretensions of both culture itself and religious traditions; likewise, religious traditions provide symbolic conceptions (e.g., doctrines) that are intrinsically self-critical and can call culture into judgment. The appeals by Christians to symbols of grace, justice, and reconciling love in the midst of social and political change are cases in point. This critical, transformative imperative survives changes in culture and theology now apparent at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

      Theology can no longer take for granted a cultural milieu that is predominantly Western, secular, individualistic, and defined by scientific and romantic paradigms. These traits remain evident in the West, but they are inadequate to the pluralism of current life and thought. Cultural pluralism means that we live within and among diverse cultures and religious traditions within our common local and global spaces. Such pluralism enriches our awareness of creation while boding tragic conflict and confusing babble. Amid many voices and perspectives, the impression of sheer relativism challenges theology to articulate distinctive, clear, and persuasive claims about God and reality. The pluralist must risk the challenges of real dialogue without forgetting his or her own finite limits and commitment to truthfulness. As pluralists seek to learn from the many voices within Christianity itself and from other traditions, religions, and sociopolitical realities, they will benefit from a variety of methods and fields of knowledge—convinced that no single angle of vision will comprehend the ever-changing intersections among God, ourselves, and others.

       LARRY D. BOUCHARD

      Bibliography

      Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology.

      Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

      H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture.

      Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture.

      David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism.

      Cross-Reference: Aesthetics, Civil Religion, Economics, Experience–Religious, Hermeneutics, Language–Religious, Pluralism, Secularity, Symbol.

      DEATH OF GOD THEOLOGY

      The death of God or radical theology is really two things: a media event and a serious theological movement. The media event began unfolding in October 1965 when the New York Times and Time magazine reported on the work of three Protestant theologians: Thomas Altizer, Paul Van Buren, and William Hamilton. Although the media event lasted briefly, the radical or death of God theology was a serious scholarly inquiry that began in the Protestant tradition and eventually influenced both Jewish (cf. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz) and Catholic (cf. Leslie Dewart, Eugene Fontinell, and the early Michael Novak) traditions.

      In many ways the formation of the theological perspectives of Altizer and Hamilton could scarcely have been more different. Altizer was trained in the history of religions under Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago; Hamilton was a product of Union Theological Seminary’s postwar neoorthodoxy, to the left of Karl Barth and to the right of Paul Tillich. In the work of Altizer, Hamilton, and Paul Van Buren, author of the important The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, there was a serious and continuing attempt to explore the possibility of the Christian faith and life without the reality or doctrine of God. The essays of the movement’s earliest stage can still be profitably studied in Altizer and Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966). Altizer’s influential Gospel of Christian Atheism and chapter 2 of Hamilton’s New Essence of Christianity (“Belief in the Time of the Death of God” [1961]) are other early sources.

      Indeed, one reason that death of God theology has refused to go away, as other subjects of media events have tended to do, is that it has attached to itself a whole cultural state of affairs. Death of God is not just a parable by Nietzsche, not just an easily ignored newspaper story in mid-twentieth-century America, but a continuing cultural tradition. The death of God, for example, is at the center of the interpretations of modern drama by Martin Esslin and Eric Bentley. J. Hillis Miller similarly has offered a reading of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century poetry in the light of the disappearance and death of God in The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality. Politics and the death of God were the shared passion of both Albert Camus in The Rebel and Michael Harrington in his remarkable essay The Politics at God’s Funeral.

      In the mid-1960s, death of God theologians perceived that God was newly withdrawing from the American and European soul; this withdrawal needed historical and systematic study and begged for detective work, which is still needed. Today in each of the three great monotheistic faiths of the West—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—God is reappearing in a variety of dangerous and evil forms. What is there, death of God theology asks, about belief in one God that makes persons and cultures evil? If it is the case that belief in but one God leads to the destruction and dehumanization of those not so believing, is it not the case that Christian justice and love require the elimination of that God as a source

Скачать книгу