Meeting the Theological Challenges of the New Century
If we ask what the task of theology is within the life of the church and in service to the world,
several answers are possible and legitimate. Theology can be thought of alternatively as
catechesis, criticism, or doxology, depending on whether we see its goal as the handing on of
tradition, the assessment of thought and practice, or the praise of God. For a school of theology
like Candler, theological education can correspondingly be thought of as equipping students to
faithfully transmit the teaching of the church, or as distancing students from an unthinking
acceptance of traditional ways, or as preparing them for a richer experience of worship. All these
modes are actively present in our pedagogy.
But another way of construing theology is as a form of prophecy. By prophecy I do not mean the
ability to predict the future. I speak of prophecy in biblical terms, as discerning in the complex
circumstances of everyday life a Word from God, and speaking that Word to a world that most
desperately needs to hear it.
Theology understood as prophecy is a risky proposition. Risky because prophecy seeks to
discover the ways of the living God, and as Hebrews reminds us, it is a terrible thing to fall into
the hands of the living God. Risky because God’s work in the world, here and now, is disclosed
only partially, indirectly, and often, darkly.
It is risky above all, though, because the theologian as prophet does not stand above or apart
from the context of ordinary life but stands solidly within life as shared by all. The theologian is
therefore required to discern and declare God’s Word both with boldness and with humility—
boldness because the Word must be spoken: without a vision the people perish; humility because
the theologian holds no position greater than that of servant, wields no power other than that of
the Word itself.
For a school of theology like Candler, construing theology as prophecy means committing
faculty and students alike to the dangerous and exhilarating challenge of moving beyond the
exegeting of ancient texts to the exegeting of the complex and ever-changing texts of worldly
life. We seek to learn how to hear and to speak the Word that is God’s own amid the constant
noise and distraction of human babble. We must together embrace the risk of engaging God’s
world directly and without safety goggles.
Theology as Prophecy
This conference on the occasion of Candler’s centennial represents just such an effort to do
theology in a prophetic mode. We have gathered together to speak simply and candidly, to listen
carefully and respectfully, and to discuss responsibly some of the great theological challenges
that face us as we move into the school’s second century. We do not pretend to be prophets in the
predictive sense: We have no special ability to foretell the future. We take on only the daunting
task of discerning what God might be up to in the world now, and to what response God might
be calling us as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.
To expect those who founded Candler a hundred years ago to be prophetic in any sense of the
term would have been fatuous, much like expecting the pilgrims in 1620 to step off the
Mayflower and immediately declare America’s foreign policy. In 1914, Atlanta was quite
literally making the turn from horse and carriage to automobile; how could anyone then living
predict the technological revolutions that would transform every aspect of life: the air
conditioning that would change the old to the new South, the antibiotics that would conquer
infections and extend life, the cybernetics that would change communication, the planes that
would span the globe and the rockets that would leap to space?
Who in 1914 Atlanta could have predicted that the great European empires would dissolve, that
colonialism would disappear, that new world powers would emerge from the Far East, that
Africa would be the arena for great adventures in suppression and liberation, that the
combination of mineral resources and religious upheaval would give Islamic lands an importance
greater than at any time in history? How could anyone imagine that the Great War begun in 1914
would initiate a century of warfare in which advanced technology would be employed for the
slaughter of untold millions? Who could have dreamed that humans would be capable of
ideologically inspired genocide on the scale of the Shoah in Nazi Germany or the Gulag
Archipelago of Stalin or the killing fields of Pol Pot? :::
In 1914, the great theological centers of Europe showed themselves unaware of the cataclysmic
events that the 20th century would bring and ill-equipped to respond to them when they
occurred. Theological responses to war, genocide, and social oppression tended to be weak and
late. No surprise, then, that the founders of Candler, with a tiny faculty, few students, and truly
meager resources, would have kept their eyes fixed mainly on the catechetical and doxological
dimensions of theology as they sought to form ministers for the Methodist Episcopal Church,
South.
Mainly, but not entirely. In the great battle between fundamentalism and modernism that has
dominated American theology from the time of Candler’s founding, this school aligned itself
quickly and consistently with modernism. The reputation of being “liberal”—that is, of
encouraging and supporting free inquiry into Scripture and tradition—has been Candler’s
throughout its history, with not always positive consequences for the perception of the school in
a predominantly conservative region and church. In similar fashion, although Candler as an
institution was agonizingly slow to advance the cause of racial equality, its first professor of New
Testament, Andrew Sledd, wrote passionately against racist practices, and Candler’s alumni were
among the most prominent figures in raising regional consciousness on the issue.
Theological Issues Facing Us Today
We seek in this conference to stand within that Candler tradition of free inquiry and passion for
social justice. We attempt to do theology in a prophetic mode by considering four issues, which
in our judgment demand our best attention now, and will, in all likelihood, continue to demand
the attention of theologians through the coming century: theological imagination and
secularization; the image of God in contemporary society; creation and the care of the earth; and
the kingdom of God and global pluralism.
The four topics have several characteristics in common that recommend them to our attention.
They are all grounded in Scripture and the Creed, and involve convictions close to the core of
Christian identity. They have all been the subject of examination in the earlier theological
tradition. They all involve developments in history and culture, making them especially attractive
to this school’s habit of practicing theology contextually. And they all are under serious threat in
the contemporary world.
Theological Imagination and Secularization
The first issue is that of the Word of God. No need to defend the centrality of this topic within
Christian faith. Scripture declares that God creates the world through speech and communicates
with creatures through speech. The medium of God’s revelation to humans is the word,
expressed first through creation itself, then through God’s self-disclosure in law, prophecy, and
wisdom. God’s Word, we confess, is most fully revealed through the incarnation of God’s Son
Jesus Christ, in his embodied presence among humans, in his scandalous death, and in his
glorious exaltation as Lord. Through the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, we also affirm, God’s
Word continues to be spoken in and through the experiences of men and women. The gift and
task of the church, therefore, is to be the place in the world where the Word of God is truly
embodied and powerfully expressed, so that the power and presence of God that is only
implicitly present within human experience might be brought to full articulation within the
community gathered by the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus.
The theological tradition has naturally devoted sustained attention to the revelatory word,
debating the ways by which God’s Word in Scripture is best interpreted, inquiring into the
adequacy of human speech to express divine mysteries, distinguishing between the orders of
natural and supernatural revelation, identifying the ways that God’s Word calls humans to the
obedience of faith. Until relatively recently, however, preachers could assume that if the word
was proclaimed clearly and passionately, it would find a hearing in human hearts. A few stones
may need to be cleared; the birds and the weeds need to be controlled, but there is always good
soil for the seed to take root and grow.
There were always problems posed to effective preaching by cultural diversity, to be sure; thus,
the persistent concern to translate the Scriptures into language intelligible to people in diverse
settings—if people could only hear of God’s wonders in words of their own, they would
recognize God’s Word and respond to it in faith. But the optimism of Christian preaching was
always based on the premise that humans, no matter how alienated their existence or how
depraved their behavior, still had a longing for the truth that enabled them both to hear and obey
God’s call.
According to this premise, humans have a natural tropism toward God: People have a longing for
something more than the everyday world offers them. Christian preaching historically found
success among those who were in one way or another already religious. The Gospel provided a
distinctive and convincing version of a truth that their hearts already sought without knowing.
But was that religious instinct solely a matter of the heart’s natural longing, or was it also a
consequence of cultural formation?
We know that there have always been thoroughly secular people, who defined themselves
explicitly by what they saw and touched, and who lived their lives in disregard of the divine. But
such folk were historically a tiny minority, and their secular stance was actively discouraged by
societies that supported and rewarded religious adherence. Take for example the Greco-Roman
culture within which Christianity found its first and most lasting success. The structure of that
society supported a piety embracing both politics and religion in a single vision, and the form of
education reinforced this vision, so that Greeks and Romans thought naturally in terms of a “city
of gods and men.”
Today, that historical premise for proclamation is no longer obvious. The challenge facing
theology today with respect to God’s Word is not disordered religiosity but the apparent absence
of religious sensibility in the contemporary First World, an absence carved out of human
consciousness by the Enlightenment, by the astounding successes of science and technology, and
by powerful ideological forces making the argument that the beginning of human liberation is the
banishment of religious piety. Secularity—defining reality solely in terms of matter, seeing the
world not as mystery but as a set of interlocking problems and answers—is now no longer the
quirk of idiosyncratic individuals or of odd groups. It is the defining element of First World
culture, supported and reinforced by politics, commerce, and education.
The theological challenge facing us today is therefore more radical than for the founders of
Candler, who could assume in their students and in their congregants both a language and a
perception of the world shaped by religious convictions and commitments, who knew that when
they spoke of sacrifice for others, of seeking God’s will, or of values transcending self-interest,
such ideas were already familiar to those culturally shaped by late Christendom. No such
assumption can be made today. Today, theology must come to grips with a radical and pervasive
secularity that makes speaking of God at all increasingly strange, even quaint, and must come to
grips with the fact that the effects of secularism affect in profoundly corrupting ways even those
who profess religious belief. The challenge of how we might speak God’s Word today is real,
serious, and not for the weak of heart.
The Image of God in Contemporary Society
The second issue is the image of God in contemporary society. The conviction that humans are
created in the image of God is one that derives entirely from Scripture rather than the observation
of human behavior. It is a perfect example of the way Scripture does not so much describe the
world as imagine a world, and invite us, by imagining the world in the same way, to make it real.
We should never have come to such a perception on our own, but we are schooled by Scripture
to regard ourselves and every other human as bearing the impress of the divine. As Saint Paul
insists, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the
man from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49).
Christian theological anthropology is thus inherently complex and tension-filled. On one side,
Scripture proposes a truth about ourselves that we could never imagine on our own; on the other
side, Scripture also instructs us to pay the closest attention to our actual mortal bodies, for
through them we find God’s Spirit disclosed in the world. Not only changes in human
consciousness, then, but also changes in human bodies are significant for thinking about the
image of God. Today, the digital revolution is changing our culture with unparalleled speed, and
promises to alter even the structures of human consciousness. Medical technology has increased
longevity and enabled an astonishing range of physical alterations: organ transplants, prostheses,
plastic surgery, transgendering, cloning—all these transmogrifications press on us serious
reflection on what human identity might mean in the face of such malleability. What might it
mean to be created in the image of God when we or our neighbors are cyborgs?
Speaking of the neighbor, our convictions concerning God’s impress on humans demands that
we think in moral as well as ontological terms. Scripture’s language, in fact, tends to focus on the
imperative to treat humans differently because they are stamped with God’s image. The third
statement of it in Genesis 9:6 declares, “Whoever sheds the blood of a human by a human shall
that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humankind,” and the last in James
3:9 decries the evil use of the tongue: “with it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse
those who are made in the likeness of God.” Paul similarly links bearing the image of Christ and
the way we treat others: “When you sin against the brothers, and wound their weak conscience,
you sin against Christ” (1 Cor. 8:12). The dignity, even the sacrality, of human life, and the basis
for all claims to religious and other rights, is located in the special character of the human person
as created in God’s image. How we treat our neighbor is the measure of our response to God.
The historical record from Cain and Abel to the killing fields of Rwanda, however, does not
suggest that this doctrine has had much of a positive influence on human relations; the tale of
human savagery and violence is both long and dismal. People have been conquering each other
in war, raping and pillaging, taking others into captivity, and degrading other people apparently
as long as they have been aware of each other. But it can legitimately be asked whether over the
hundred years since Candler was founded, the pitch and pace of human savagery has not made
both a quantitative and qualitative leap. It may be, in fact, that this past century has seen an
unprecedented convergence of human cruelty, technological capacity, and ideological
justification, leading to forms of genocide, enslavement, discrimination, and degradation that
former ages could scarcely have imagined, and which makes any effort to think creatively about
the human person a perilous proposition. Recovering some sense of this most fragile and
precious of theological convictions is difficult, not least because of the overwhelming amount of
experience that seems to contradict it. As Gerard Manley Hopkins lamented concerning God’s
grandeur, “generations have trod, have trod, have trod; and all is seared with trade; bleared,
smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil is bare now, nor can
foot feel, being shod.” It is difficult, but it is also necessary directly in proportion to its difficulty.
Creation and Care of the Earth
That frightening quotation from Hopkins serves as a transition to our third topic, creation and the
care of the earth. The crisis of the present moment can be seen as shaped by the collision of two
realities. The first is the recognition that Christians have participated in practices deriving from a
distorted vision of the human place in God’s creation. The second is the sudden and shocking
realization that such practices threaten to damage or even destroy the work of God in creation.
Candler’s founders had no sense of the issue: Though coined in 1873, the term “ecology” was
not used in reference to human interactions with the environment until the 1960s. Now, it forms
a major dimension of our awareness of the world.
The distorted Christian vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos has taken two main forms. The
first derives from the powerful dualistic view of the world that we associate in its mild form with
Christian Platonism and in its severe form with Gnosticism: Matter is at best a shell for the spirit
and at worst a prison; the point of human existence is to liberate the soul from the body. In this
construction, the notion of “caring for the earth” is a form of entanglement with that deceptive
materiality from which the soul ought to flee. A more contemporary form of such dualism is the
fervent expectation of the rescue of the elect from the earth where they have been trapped, with
their being swept up to heaven, leaving the planet to conflagration and destruction.
If the Gnostic version saw only the soul worth saving and regarded all other creatures with at
best benign neglect, a second theological position—one based squarely on a certain
understanding of humans being created in the image of God—adopted a far more aggressive
stance toward creatures regarded as lower links on the great chain of being. The scriptural
warrant for such a sense of superiority is clear enough. Having created male and female in God’s
image, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and
subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every
living thing that moves upon the earth’” (Gen 1:28). This majestic imperative has historically
overshadowed the humbler but now suddenly more persuasive scene where “The Lord God took
the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it,” and placed strict boundaries
to the human exploitation of the garden’s fruits (Gen 2:15-17).
Ecological blindness is not entirely the fault of the Bible or Christian theology. Christians lived
for centuries with these views in remarkable harmony with other creatures. Indeed, material
exploitation and despoliation are far more the result of attitudes and practices that have
developed in direct opposition to classical Christian tenets. It is the spirit of the Enlightenment,
after all, that seeks to demystify everything, reduce mystery to problem, magic to statistics.
Cartesian dualism did more than Christian mysticism to cultivate the perception of the body as a
machine and the world as the mind’s laboratory. Above all, it has been the spirit of capitalism—
in tension with the Christian ideal of sharing possessions—that has fostered competitive
acquisition as the measure of human success, and has reduced all things material and spiritual to
marketplace commodities.
More than anything else, the effects of technological revolution—and the human population
explosion such technology supports—have fundamentally altered the relation between humans
and the rest of creation. The impact of our insatiable growth and consumption on the
survivability of the human species as well as every other species is something we are still
struggling to comprehend. The impact could not have been understood a hundred years ago,
when the consequences of the human drive for power, possessions, and pleasure—abetted by
mind-boggling technological prowess and multiplied by swarming populations—could not yet
even be imagined. Nature still seemed to be infinitely vast, infinitely rich and varied in life and
resource, even infinitely frightening when compared to human strength and cunning. We could
not leap into space, look down on our beloved planet, and see it as a stunningly beautiful yet
suddenly fragile blue marble. But now we have so seen it, and that makes all the difference.
Putting aside the question of blame, there are three reasons why Christians now bear a distinctive
responsibility for responding to the ecological crisis. First, there are more Christians in the world
than adherents of any other religion; what Christians think and do matters. Second, of all the
world’s religions, Christianity has been uniquely corrupted by the spirit of modernity, that
combination of Enlightenment reason, technology, individualism, commodification, and
consumerism; conversion is called for. Third, Christianity is the dominant religion in the parts of
the world most responsible for the despoliation of the earth’s resources; because of their
privileged position, the conversion of Christians is the most important and can have the greatest
impact.
Conversion is not a matter of each of us doing our bit by recycling. The change required is
massive. It requires a change of mind as well as of the heart. And this is precisely the theological
challenge: to think of God’s creation and of the relation of humans to other creatures in ways that
restore the sense of wonder and reverence at God’s work, that leads to a sense of appreciation for
the equality and necessary reciprocity among all beings, that yields dispositions and practices
that are more profoundly in accord with God’s vision for the world. It is a challenge we might
not have chosen, but it is one we must engage, for the stakes could not be higher.
The Kingdom of God and Global Pluralism
The final issue again demands the reassessment of traditional teaching in light of contemporary
circumstances. In this case it is the conviction, rooted in the preaching of Jesus himself, that God
is king of the universe and, as Jesus expressed in his prayer, that God desires his will to be done
on earth as it is in heaven. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, a corollary of Jesus’ exaltation
to God’s right hand is that Christ rules over all cosmic powers until he gives over final
sovereignty to God, so that God will be “all things in all things.” The Nicene Creed declares as
the hope of the Christian people the expectation of a kingdom that shall never end.
But convictions concerning the kingdom of God have never been easy to correlate with
conditions on the ground. Christians from the beginning experienced a tension between the
already and the not yet of God’s dominion, with believers locating themselves either
optimistically in terms of God’s presence now, or, more pessimistically, in terms of God’s
triumph in the future. There was also the question of the relationship of God’s rule to human
kingdoms. With Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire, the
church began a misalliance with human political power that lasted until very recently, and that
made it seem fitting to wed evangelism to colonialism. Only with the hammer blows to religion’s
establishment struck by political revolution in the United States, France, and Russia has the
church found itself largely unsupported by civil government and able at last to embrace the
diaspora awareness that was natural to it in the first four centuries of its existence.: :
Despite such uncertainties, Christian theologians have always been confident about declaring
who was to be included and who excluded from God’s rule, or to put it more precisely, who
would experience that rule positively as salvation and who as damnation. Outside the church, the
slogan said, there was no salvation. A great deal of Christian self-definition over the centuries—
involving an astonishing amount of intellectual passion and energy—has consequently been
devoted to deciding issues of inclusion and exclusion, always to the advantage, to be sure, of
those doing the deciding. From the start, authentic belief was defined in terms of an absolute
either/or, and located in contrast to rival seekers after God: among the Gentiles, there could be
only darkness, no light; among the Jews, there could be only blindness, not sight. The practice of
Gentile religion was demonic; the practice of Judaism was stubborn disobedience.
Defining by exclusion continues in the long tradition of heresiology: Getting anything wrong
means getting everything wrong and falling outside the realm of God’s rule. In a time of
relatively robust ecumenism among families of Christians today, it is helpful to remember that at
the time of Candler’s founding, scurrilous attacks between Catholics and Protestants were
standard fare, missions to Africa were regarded in terms of an urgent rescue of pagan babies
from the clutch of demons, and theological Jew-baiting was common in Christian sermons.
All of this theological map-making was carried out with supreme indifference to what might
actually be happening—still less what God might be up to—among Jews and the countless
Gentiles who had never heard of Jesus or perhaps had never heard of him apart from the sinister
implications of Western imperialism.
Christian theologians were like pre-Copernican astronomers who could draw exquisite charts of
the stars and planets visible to those resting comfortably on the planet they complacently
assumed was the center of the universe. The past hundred years have rudely jerked us from that
state of complacency to a lonelier and more isolated place in a Copernican universe. The tragedy
of the Holocaust has revealed the rot that lay at the center of Christian supersessionism. The
collapse of colonialism has revealed how corrupt the alliance between Christian mission and
Western political ambition truly was. Islam has awakened from its centuries-long slumber to
become the fastest growing religion on the planet, making claims concerning God’s rule and its
connection to the state that are eerily reminiscent of Christianity’s Constantinian dalliance. The
Gentile religions of the present—above all those of India and China—are in our schools and
playgrounds. The secularization of the so-called First World has revealed the powerful
ideological forces that not only diminish the role of Christianity in society but challenge the
default premise favoring religion. In short, Christians and Christian theology must today come to
grips with a pluralism that is both global and radical.
On this topic, we truly are at the starting point. With regard to the question of the church and the
world, we need to start over. The task is massive and demanding. We are not sure how to reread
Scripture and the tradition with sufficiently fresh eyes. But at stake is the authenticity and
integrity of Christian preaching within a world that truly is under God’s rule rather than ours.
Conclusion
These, then, are the theological issues that we seek to address in this conference. Let me
conclude by anticipating three objections to the agenda we have set.
First, our selection of topics omits issues of arguably even greater urgency and visibility. Why
not speak prophetically to the issue of ecumenism and church unity, the historical Jesus, the
prosperity Gospel, or the persistent conflict among Christians between fundamentalist and
modernist? While not denying the importance of taking a stance on each of these issues, they are
not of such fundamental importance, for the world as well as for the church, as the themes we
have chosen.
Second, it may be objected that the topics are insufficiently theological, in the sense that they do
not derive directly from the church’s confession or lead directly to prayer and piety. They tilt
rather to cultural analysis and ethics, are perhaps too much critical and not enough doxological.
Our answer to this is simply that this is the way we do theology here at Candler. Over the several
decades that we have tried to learn and to teach how to think theologically within social and
pastoral contexts, we have now become unable to think of theology as a subject that ever lacks
cultural dimensions and ethical entailments. And we are convinced that this is just the sort of
theology our world most needs.
