bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Labor Arbitration and Theology
Authors: Porter Arthur R.
Published: February 2011

“Arbitration is a better system of decision making than strikes. However, references to vague concepts of public interest, fairness, and justice are not likely to prove the point. All organized solutions to human conflict will involve discrepancies, unfairness, and greed, in other words, sin. Recognition of the irony of the human situation would prevent some of the disillusionment that has paralleled the development of new institutions to solve human problems.”
Can the Church Renew Itself from Within?
Authors: Smith Harmon L.
Published: February 2011

“The basic presupposition of the principle of internal renewal is that churchmen, united about the center of their faith in Jesus Christ, become more fully and effectively conscious of their participation in a worshiping community which is at the same time responsively entrusted with the task of reconciling the whole of life in the world to the God and Father of their Lord Jesus Christ. This affirmation carries with it explicit denial of any ultimately constructive contribution to the church's renewal from non-Christian groups.”
Educating the Layman Theologically
Authors: Engel David E.
Published: February 2011

“Some way needs to be devised for better theological education among the unordained laity. Dialogue between those engaged in the theological education of the clergy and those concerned with the theological education of the rest of the laity needs to be effected. Theological education is at a turning point. Unless greater relationship between the presently divergent forces in theological education is made, the ministry of all the laity will be seriously impaired.”
Historical Events and Ethical Decisions
Authors: Lochman J. Milic
Published: February 2011

“During the second half of the twentieth century it has become absolutely clear that ‘everything is connected with everything else.’ An explosion on the other side of the globe which would not have concerned us at all fifty years ago now has direct repercussions on our own lives. This is particularly clear in relation to the question of peace and war: on this planet we are all in the same boat. Whereas for thousands of years the primary problem facing mankind has been how to control nature, today our primary problem is history, or more specifically, how to control the future history of mankind.”
Colloquium on Hermeneutics
Authors: Funk Robert W.
Published: February 2011

“It is as if, all of a sudden, the things our theological tradition took for granted can no longer be taken for granted. Reality as the post-war generation experiences it does not permit the easy affirmation of some traditional starting point, in relation to which the theological enterprise can be newly ordered; rather, it senses the necessity to take nothing as the presupposition (least of all God or faith) of its theological endeavor. In this connection it should be observed that there is a new and radically open dialogue with secular philosophy, literature, and the arts. Camus is taken to be a more pertinent dialogical partner than Calvin, Wittgenstein than Luther, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Whitehead than Thomas, Barth, and Tillich.”
Freedom and the Catholic Church
Authors: Swidler Leonard
Published: February 2011

“It is in the nineteenth century—the century of freedom and liberalism—that we witness an extraordinary growth of arch-conservative authoritarianism, of Catholic ghettoism. … If the first session of Vatican Council II can be said to mark the wedding anew of the Catholic Church and freedom, the Catholic University affair of the spring, 1963, was its consummation. … The issue of freedom in the Catholic Church is one that suddenly and providentially has a glowing future.”
Two Sanguine Samplers: Too Much Efficiency?
Authors: Lapsley James N.
Published: February 2011

“Both Chauncey and Gallup are administrators in addition to being social scientists, and as such they find waste abhorrent. As heirs of a society dominated by economic theory and concern (shared also by communist societies), we share their abhorrence and applaud their aim of cutting waste in brain usage and politics. But perhaps we have come to the place in our history when we must seriously entertain the notion that waste may be constructive under some circumstances.”
How Can We Think of God?
Authors: Macquarrie John
Published: February 2011

“… The difference between the religious man or the believer in God and the humanist remains a perfectly clear and fundamental one. The former interprets his experience as showing that his aspirations for value have their support in Being itself, or, to put it otherwise, that Being has the character of grace. The latter conceives that man must pursue his ends entirely trusting in his own resources. This latter case is the true atheism, and the difference between the two cases is a real difference with important practical consequences.”
How New is the New Hermeneutic?
Authors: Braaten Carl E.
Published: February 2011

“The claim that there is a new hermeneutic is bound up with the judgment that Fuchs and Ebeling have, with the aid of Heidegger, rediscovered the hermeneutical import of language— perhaps for the first time since Jesus and Luther. In my opinion it is possible to call this insight ‘new’ to the extent that one forgets that, despite frequent aberrations in homiletical practice, the church has always regarded proclamation in the mode of witness as a kind of ‘primal speech’ which serves as the hermeneutics of the Word of God.”
Brahms' German Requiem
Authors: Minear Paul S.
Published: February 2011

“We may perhaps best sense the temper of Brahms' faith by the whole body of his religious music. Schumann had said of listening to his music: ‘We stand in the wonderful view of the spiritual world.’ The best clue to his personal faith is provided by the texts which he adopted for the music. Most notable is the text of the Requiem itself.”
Theology and Today's Informed Child
Authors: Pierson Maurene Fell
Published: February 2011

“Anti-intellectualism is historically traceable in American life, and the effectiveness of Christian education is not unrelated to it. Christians ought seriously to consider whether the church school, if it does not actively develop the intellect of today's informed child, can lead him to a knowledge of Jesus Christ.”
Exercise in Dead Seamanship
Authors: Nielsen Harry A.
Published: February 2011

“The Gospel hypothesis treats of the relation between God and man instead of the relation between sun and planets like the Copernican. The statements in the Gospels are accordingly to be regarded as open, and we are to think it the most natural thing in the world if every so often contrary statements appear and bring about an ‘alternation of perspective.’”
Theology and Belief
Authors: Holmer Paul L.
Published: February 2011

“Religion invites an almost continual effort at reflection. Of course, there are numerous things to know and to think about at length, some of them legitimately theological. But is there not a great deal of theology which is idle reflection and principally because there is so little in being faithful? When there is nothing to be, very little to do, very little to believe that are the ways of a Christian, then the burden has to fall on ‘understanding’ and its correlative, ‘meaning.””
God Without Theism
Authors: Ferré Nels F. S.
Published: February 2011

“… If by espousing theism one means merely that one is neither a deist, a pantheist, nor a denier of God in some humanist or naturalist sense, then obviously a Christian is a theist; the Christian faith stands or falls with its worship of the living God who is more and other than the ordinary world and who is yet present in it and working through it. But the term theism has become so identified with substance philosophy, that it is best now to insist that the Christian faith is not theistic.”
Word and History
Authors: Altizer Thomas J. J.
Published: February 2011

“… Faith must come to know the death of God as an historical event witnessing to the advent of a new form of the word. As so conceived only the Christian can truly know the death of God because only the Christian is open to the forward movement of history and the word. Only a new Adam who is liberated from the old creation of the past can celebrate the presence of the word in a new world that negates all previous forms of faith.”
The New Optimism—From Prufrock to Ringo
Authors: Hamilton William
Published: February 2011

“Is it possible to note, some forty years after The Hollow Men, that the world has ended neither with a bang nor a whimper?. … But on the night of Eliot's death, President Johnson invited his fellow-countrymen not only to enter the world of the twentieth century but to accept the possibility of revolutionary changes in that world. … This shift we are charting from pessimism to optimism can also be described as a move from alienation to politics, from blues to freedom song.”
Nuclear War and Vatican Council II
Authors: Ramsey Paul
Published: February 2011

“The Christian man, and every man, lives between the times of the fallen creation and the redemption of the whole creation. His problem in trying to tell what he should do falls within the dialectic between the here and now of fallen existence and the there and then of a restored human reality. At his peril he ignores either of these dimensions, by failing to take responsibility for the preservation of real political order in the world, or by failing to take responsibility for introducing radical changes into the existing world political system. … Yet all action that has in view the actual transformation of the world political system must be located in this world and not some other. A man must take care that his zeal and idealism is not a matter of high-minded rebellion against the governor and preserver of the existing world. This means that a political order is worth something only if it is real, and not merely ideal.”
Theology and Philosophy in Dialogue
Authors: Crownfield David R.
Published: February 2011

“The current theological scene … represents an attempt to reopen commerce between theology and philosophy without having dealt effectively with the standing theological objections to that commerce, and without having set out an independent alternative foundation for the theological task. … A central issue for the current discussion, then, should be to determine the nature and limits of interaction between philosophers and theologians in the context of a Christological conception of theology.”
Wittgenstein's Lion and Christology
Authors: Carse James P.
Published: February 2011

“The truly modern question with regard to Christ … is this: if there is nothing in the person of Christ that will yield evidence of his divinity for an understanding at second hand, and if we are nonetheless prevented from looking elsewhere than Christ in our attempt to understand God at first hand, is there a peculiar Lebensform visible in the life of Christ according to which we might know how to go on with the infinite mystery of the divine?”
Toward a Theology of Hope
Authors: Braaten Carl E.
Published: February 2011

“The debates that have gone on between Schweitzer, Cullmann, Bultmann, Dodd, Jeremias, etc., have … only [yielded] answers to the historical question: What did Jesus or the early church happen to hope? They have not taken up the question of what it means for man to hope at all, whether to be human is to have hope, and therefore in what way eschatologies from the past may be addressed to man today, offering him the ground, guidelines, and goal of his inevitable hoping.”
The Canadian Church in the Global Village
Authors: McLeod N. Bruce
Published: February 2011

“The happening that is Expo '67 implies for churchmen, most significantly perhaps, that to speak God's name coherently in 1967 we have to affirm not just that the world is our home and humanity our body but that the present is for us God's place of glory. The place to glimpse his reality is not the past, as though we were to back into whatever lies ahead looking over our shoulders into the time when once he was alive and spoke. Neither is it the future when at last he will be plain. … Taking our presence for granted, we commonly find God's presence hard to see, sometimes perhaps assuming prematurely he is absent when in fact we are the ones who are not there.”
The Clown as the Lord of Disorder
Authors: Zucker Wolfgang M.
Published: February 2011

“The clown, a human-like being, may dare to challenge the nomos of the gods as did the hero in Greek tragedy; by this he demonstrates that a release from the restrictions of order is, at least, within the possible scope of human existence. Aristotle's remarks on catharsis, the purging of the soul from its antinomial tendencies, apply also to the clown. But, like the hero of tragedy, he must not eventually get away with such freedom. While the hero suffers his catastrophe in grand style, the clown… is chased around the ring before an applauding audience. … What a spectacle, what a two-fold pleasure, to experience vicariously the assault on order and to witness simultaneously the reduction to nothingness of the transgressor!”
The New Iconoclasm and the Integrity of the Faith
Authors: Outler Albert C.
Published: February 2011

“Our main contention here is that the Christian problematic is an entity, that it has a history, that its continuity consists more decisively in perduring frameworks of interrogation than in definitive answers designed to exhaust or conclude reflection—and that the process of development is very far from finished. … If the hard core questions focus on God and man and Jesus Christ, surely it is significant that, although the church has achieved stable frames of inquiry (dogmata) about God and Jesus Christ, its explorations into man have never got so far.”
Hope and History
Authors: Moltmann JÜRgen
Published: February 2011

“If one hopes for the sake of Christ in the future of God and the ultimate liberation of the world, he cannot passively wait for this future, and, like the apocalyptic believers, withdraw from the world. Rather he must seek this future, strive for it, and already here be in correspondence to it in the active renewal of life and of the conditions of life, and therefore realize it already here according to the measure of possibilities. Because this future is the future of one God, it is a unique and unifying future. Because it brings eschatological liberation, it is the salvation of the whole enslaved creation. The messianic future for which Christianity arouses hope is no special future for the church or for the soul alone. It is an all-encompassing future. As all-encompassing future, its power of hope is able to mediate faith to earthly needs and to lead it into real life.”
Continuity and Change in Society and Theology
Authors: Shriver Donald W.
Published: February 2011

“Are there abiding principles of selection in the Hebrew-Christian tradition which provide for the re-formation of tradition itself? Perhaps the major division among theologians today is over that question. Some argue that the Hebrew-Christian tradition is to be reformed from within its own presuppositions; others argue that it can only be reformed from without by some really new presuppositions of the twentieth century. As a participant in the cybernetic age, I am inclined to think that the answer here again is ‘both.’”
Theological Reflection on the Natural World
Authors: Allen Diogenes
Published: February 2011

“My first concern will be to show that present knowledge has not precluded reflection about the universe. My second concern will be to show that our inability to determine whether the universe is dependent, taken in isolation, is of not particular importance. It is not therefore surprising that theologians today neglect reflection on the natural universe. But when the question of the status of the universe is considered in conjunction with other matters, there is good reason to affirm that the universe is dependent on God. Such an affirmation forms an indispensable basis for theological reflection on history, society, and the nature of man.”
The Demonic: From Aeschylus to Tillich
Authors: Zucker Wolfgang M.
Published: February 2011

“In contrast to Goethe, he [Dostoyevski] saw in the demonic the fundamentally inhuman and destructive trend of a society which has turned away from God and therefore, eventually, must turn against itself. He discovered a new element: Stawrogin is not simply a single bad man. Rather he becomes the focal point of evil itself, a center of polarization around which everything mean and bad, dirty and base, gathers and from which it gains its horrible strength. As the saint represents the power of good in a fallen world saved from perdition by his mere presence, the demonic corrupts everything that is under its fascinating attractiveness.”
Calvin's View of Man: A Psychological Commentary
Authors: Pruyser Paul W.
Published: February 2011

“The regeneration of willing, which is perhaps the most crucial concept in his [Calvin's] doctrine of man, is a complicated affair which requires an intricate psychological theory. …For the will to be regenerated much more is needed than an infusion of new power (perhaps from a new power source), or the furnishing of more suitable objects, or a better and wiser law, or any process of molding or curbing. What is required is a replacement of the ‘me’ as an action center. For even if I will the good, even if I will God, the seducing power of the ‘I’ who wills so lofty a thing remains. The trouble with the ideas of self-realization and self-actualization from a Calvinistic perspective is that they are self-propelled activities emanating from a center called ‘I’ or ‘Self.’ They imply continuity of Self in the process of time, whereas the Calvinist (and in the wider sense all Christians) demand a discontinuity of self.”
How are Revelation and Revolution Related?
Authors: Boston Bruce O.
Published: February 2011

“The general biblical background of promise and fulfillment provides the context for the relationship between revelation and revolution. Specifically, the categories of Exodus, Messianism, Incarnation, and Death/Resurrection are peculiar instances of this relationship. … To recognize revelation as decisively revolutionary in its thrust is to opt for the risk of commitment to radical change.”
The Faculty Meeting
Authors: Nielsen Charles M.
Published: February 2011

Setting: A Protestant seminary in the near future. It is 5:00 a.m. The faculty members are slinking down the corridors like tenth century monks fleeing the Vikings. There are no Vikings living in the seminary, but there are students. Why is the faculty hiding from them? Because it intends to assemble illegally, that is, without the students (who constitute the majority of the voting members), and at an irregular hour. (The stated time for faculty meetings is, of course, Sunday morning at 11:00. The notices for illegal meetings are sent out one day in advance and simply read: “collegium illicitum”).
The Black Experience and Black Religion
Authors: Williams Preston N.
Published: February 2011

The black man is many, not one; he is man, not problem. Understanding him, therefore, is a difficult and elusive task. And yet understand him we must, for the safety and survival of our society is as much dependent upon our ability to understand and know him as it is upon our ability to find proximate answers to the questions raised by technology, population explosion, and nuclear devices.
The Case for Reparations
Authors: Campbell Ernest T.
Published: February 2011

“That which we are called upon to do does not come under the category of generosity. It belongs to justice. The term reparation insures that insight. The Good Samaritan was generous. He only found his victim in the ditch; we put ours there.”
On the Dark Side of the Love of Art
Authors: Fehl Philipp
Published: February 2011

This is a slightly revised version of a contribution to a symposium on the spiritual aspect of creativity in the arts, held at the Reform Synagogue, Durham, North Carolina, in March, 1969. The author, formerly a refugee from Vienna, who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, is now Professor of the History of Art at the University of Illinois. He is presently engaged in the preparation of a book on the art of Paolo Veronese. His special field of interest is the history of the classical tradition in the arts. He is himself a practicing artist.
The Ecology of Creation
Authors: Froehlich Karlfried
Published: February 2011

“Theologically, the recovery of the lesson to be learned from our belief in God's good creation will mean two things. First, it will mean that we sacrifice our demanding attitude toward God, which may be one of the worst forms of human hybris, religious hybris. We cannot rely on God to bail us out when it is our hybris that has caused the problem. God is patient. He can wait. His major form of punishment, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, is not fire and hell, but his leaving us alone, his ‘giving the sinner over to his own passions and desires.’ God has time. He can wait until we have destroyed our world and ourselves, and he may choose to do so. What we perhaps need after the theologies of hope, is a theology of radical humility which is ready to face this waiting God. Second, it will mean a sacrifice of our present style of life and of the goals we preach for the lives of others.”
The Future as a Source of Freedom
Authors: Braaten Carl E.
Published: February 2011

“Man is free when he is open beyond himself. … By turning in upon himself he may think he is in possession of himself, and therefore free, but in actuality he is imprisoned in what he already is, determined by the sum of his past history. To be free is to be open to the future, to find the reality of one's freedom in the oncoming future of God.”
How Revolutionary is Revolutionary Theology?
Authors: Banks Robert
Published: February 2011

“Revolution, reformism, anarchism provide the categories with which an examination of the ‘theology of revolution’ must be undertaken in order to determine the extent to which it actually possesses a revolutionary content. Such a survey may be best approached by documenting briefly the attitudes expressed by Christian thinkers in the various centers of revolutionary activity in the Third World, and then turning to the writings of certain figures who have been most forthright in promoting the revolutionary cause in the west.”
Education in General and Theological Education
Authors: Kerr Hugh T.
Published: February 2011

“If there is fault to find with education, and if the system appears to be breaking down, we assume that the first place to look for trouble must be teaching and the teacher. … My own research on general education began with teaching as the primary focus. But I have come to see that the real problem in education today is not teaching and the teacher but learning and the student. The big question is not how to teach but who the student is and how he learns. … Until today, the big question has always been content-oriented: ‘What is education?’ But now high school, college, university, and graduate students are asking a different kind of question: ‘What is education for?’ When translated into the area of theological education, this becomes a ‘professional’ question”.
Mass Murder, or Humanity in Death
Authors: Fehl Philipp
Published: February 2011

“Disappointment often has been voiced, with a gratuitous condescension that presumes to excuse as it heaps scorn, at the silence and the obedient grief with which the vast majority of the Jewish victims [in Nazi Germany] accepted their doom. They cooperated, it is alleged, with their murderers. … The martyr … accepts his death not at the hands of his enemies … but from God to whom he has to give an account of the state of his soul.”
Freedom and Human Fulfillment
Authors: Allen Diogenes
Published: February 2011

“There is something which saves Christianity from cheapness. It does promise a pearl of great price, but it is a pearl for which one has to sell all the other pearls in the collection (and the other pearls are valuable). Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ Kierkegaard adds a gloss: Purity of heart is to will one thing. It is very difficult to will one thing. It is saved from cheapness too by the fact that what one has is promises, not certainties. One is promised a great deal, but to be attained much must be lost without any guarantee that the losses will be made up. The price is a venture on an uncertainty, a price that is one's life and affections.”
God is My Quarterback: Theology and Football in America
Authors: Evans David
Published: February 2011

“It is thought that the origin of sport lies in religious cults of preparation for life. From that modest beginning, the sport of football has emerged into an institution perhaps more influential in some ways than organized religious institutions. However, much of its power is derived from the assimilation of many religious symbols and rituals into the football complex. Thus, many aspects of American religious life can be observed at any football game; and conversely, much of football's influence has spilled over into our nation's religious institutions.”
Authority and Freedom in Preaching
Authors: Meche James L.
Published: February 2011

“Perhaps it is too simple to say that the authority and freedom problem is at base a problem of communication and commitment, but surely that is part of the difficulty; at least it is the source of the problem in the environmental context of my doing of theology. … The following three homilies represent one attempt to do theology in the context of preaching.”
Baalism and Yahwism Updated
Authors: Peterson Eugene H.
Published: February 2011

“Worship, in the biblical sources and in liturgical history, is not something a person experiences, it is something he does, regardless of how he feels about it, or whether he feels anything about it at all…. Baalism provided a rich array of ‘worship experiences.’ Israel and the Christian church insisted that worship was the proclamation of the will of God and the call for human response to it.”
Gone the Sanctus Bells
Authors: Brennan Carole Z.
Published: February 2011

Editor's note: In order to distinguish between the descriptive text and the various voices in what follows, different type styles have been used. When a Catholic Sister, or the Priest, speaks to the children, the text is printed in bold face type. When the author reminisces about her past, or speaks out of her day-dreaming, the text is printed in italic type. When the Priest speaks the Latin words of the Mass, THE TEXT IS PRINTED IN CAPITAL TYPE.
The National Day of Prayer
Authors: Fox Frederic
Published: February 2011

“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President shall set aside and proclaim a suitable day each year, other than a Sunday, as a National Day of Prayer, on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.”—Public Law 324, approved April 17, 1952 by President Harry S. Truman
Youth's Role in the Church: A Dialogue
Authors: Leod N. Bruce Mc
Published: February 2011

This exchange is reprinted with permission from The United Church Observer, Nov. 1972, Toronto, Ontario. Bruce McLeod, recently elected Moderator of the United Church of Canada and the youngest in its history, is the pastor of the Bloor Street United Church in Toronto. A graduate of the University of Toronto and of Emmanuel College, he took his doctorate at Union Theological Seminary, New York, where he served as student assistant to the late Paul E. Scherer.
God and Creation: A Biblical–Scientific Reflection
Authors: Jaki Stanley L.
Published: February 2011

“The failure of the Greeks about science was a derivative of their failure to recognize a Creator who truly transcended nature. History has also served ample evidence that to have science, one first had to have a knowledge of the Creator, and history also showed that this could effectively come only from the biblical ambience.”
Hasidism and Elie Wiesel
Authors: Fehl Philipp
Published: February 2011

Elie Wiesel's“purpose is not to negate the old tales [of Hasidic rabbis] and their pious interpretations, but to show, without endorsing them, their loveliness and inner coherence, and to prove to us that Hasidism in a confrontation with the philosophy of despair can hold its own–not necessarily in truth (he delicately avoids this point) but in majestic picturesqueness.”
Exegesis-Eisegesis: Is There a Difference?
Authors: Williams Jay G.
Published: February 2011

“The longer I work at the task of interpreting the Bible, the more I recognize that the task of exegesis involves, more than most of us would like to admit, the baring of the exegete's soul. No one can talk about the meaning of the Bible without describing what it means to him. And when he does that, he tells the reader as much about himself as he does about the Scriptures. If he tries to escape that predicament (if it is such) through objectivity, what he does is to present himself as a detached and alienated human being.”
Schweitzer's Reverence for Life
Authors: Tuck William P.
Published: February 2011

“If all life is regarded as sacred, as the principle enunciates, then man cannot knowingly allow life to be destroyed whenever it is unnecessary or preventable… . The application of the principle of Reverence for Life could be the corrective force for preserving and maintaining the balance of nature. True ethics involves the quest to preserve everything which wills to live.”
The Crucified God
Authors: Moltmann JÜRgen
Published: February 2011

“The God of success and the apathetic man of action completely contradict what we find at the core of Christianity: The suffering God and the loving, vulnerable man. On the other hand, the crucified God contradicts the God of success and his idol-worshippers all the more totally. He contradicts the officially optimistic society. He also contradicts the revolutionary activism of the sons of the old establishment. ‘The old rugged cross’ contradicts the old and the new triumphal theology (theologia gloria) which we produce in the churches in order to keep pace with the transformations of an activistic and rapidly changing society.”
Doxology as Suspension of the Tragic
Authors: McLelland Joseph C.
Published: February 2011

“The suspension of tragedy is accomplished by what appears in our midst as a presence of more significance, a ‘weight of glory’ that shifts the balance in the human drama. The ‘comic sense of life,’ as we may term it, sees things as caught up in a wider horizon, weighted toward gospel. Just as in classical drama the moment of recognition provides a shift in orientation, so the gospel story tells of a hidden God and the surprising joy he proves to be when recognized. This sort of cognition contributes to a kind of ‘comic epistemology,’ sadly missing from classical theism.”
Inter-Play between the Religious and the Dramatic
Authors: Dillistone F. W.
Published: February 2011

“In Greece, drama reached its apogee in such a tragedy as Antigone. In Israel, drama gained its highest expression in the passover ceremony. In Christendom, at least until the beginning of this century, sometimes the one type, sometimes the other, has been in the ascendant. But always there has been drama, for in some strange way it appears that no society can hold together with any permanence unless it engages in some form of dramatic expression.”
Jesus and the Uterus Image
Authors: Wahlberg Rachel Conrad
Published: February 2011

“A woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it! ’”—Luke 11:27-28 (RSV).
Situation Ethics and Watergate
Authors: Fletcher Joseph
Published: February 2011

For some strange reason, evangelicals find curious delight in linking the “mistake” of Watergate with what they take to be situational ethics. In the June 10, 1974, issue of Time, Billy Graham (“both a stern moralist and a firm friend of Richard Nixon's”) is reported to have said: “A nation confused for years by the teaching of situational ethics now finds itself dismayed by those in Government who apparently practiced it” (p. 18). In the Sept. 13, 1974, issue of Christianity Today, Erwin W. Lutzer, a Baptist pastor and part-time professor at Moody Bible Institute, accuses Joseph Fletcher, one of the early spokesmen of contextualism, of advocating that “when love (i.e. the best for the greatest number) conflicts with the law, we ought to ‘sin bravely’ and do what is best for the majority.” So it follows that “the Watergate conspirators followed just that principle,” (p. 27). In the Sept. 18, 1974, issue of The Christian Century, Martin E. Marty struggles to contain his editorial composure over this correlation, using a naughty word to describe the Graham-Lutzerline. We asked Joseph Fletcher to comment on the implied connection, and what follows is his response.
Sheldon's In His Steps: Conscience and Discipleship
Authors: Smylie James H.
Published: February 2011

“Our purpose here is to retrace Sheldon's In His Steps, to place it theologically within the Christocentric evangelical tradition in which context the author was able to emphasize Jesus as the pattern of Christian life, to examine some cases of conscience within the book and the cost of discipleship for his characters, and to suggest that Sheldon was interested in comprehensive reform programs.”
A Bibliographical Critique
Authors: Stroup George W.
Published: February 2011

“If experience has an intrinsically narrative quality about it, then the question of the relation between experience and narrative form is of paramount importance for theology. For example, is the reality of redemption best described theologically by discursive argument or by some form of narrative?”
Re-Imaging Psycho-History
Authors: Wiggins James B.
Published: February 2011

“In the writing of history, the discipline required is that of constantly guarding against the temptation of treating the datum at hand, whether it be a document, an artifact, a statistical chart, a tombstone epitaph, or whatever, in its literal givenness as if it exhausted that in which the historian is most deeply interested… With very few exceptions, such as Charles Williams' The Descent of the Dove, a truly imaginative history of Christianity is yet to be written.”
The Hartford Declaration
Authors: Campbell Ernest , Fletcher Joseph , Russell Letty M. , Shaull Richard , Berger Peter L.
Published: February 2011

IN the April issue of Theology Today (pp. 94–97), we printed the full text of “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation,” popularly known as the Hartford Declaration. The Declaration, consisting of thirteen themes of contemporary thought considered dangerous to the church's message, was signed by eighteen people from various Christian churches. Several other people were involved in preliminary consideration of the ideas expressed in the document. A meeting at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in January, 1975, was in large measure organized by Peter Berger, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, and Richard John Neuhaus, pastor of the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Brooklyn, and out of that meeting emerged the text of the “Appeal for Theological Affirmation.” Theology Today erred in giving the impression that the text had been formulated in consultations prior to the January meeting.

We have asked four people to respond to the Hartford Declaration, and their reactions, plus a response from Dr. Berger, are printed below. Ernest Campbell is minister of the Riverside Church, New York City, and author of the recent Locked in a Room With Open Doors (1974). Joseph Fletcher has been a regular contributor to Theology Today and is the author of Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966). Formerly Professor of Pastoral Theology and Christian Ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, he is now Professor of Medical Ethics, University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, Va. Letty M. Russell is Assistant Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and author of Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective—A Theology (1974). Earlier she served as a pastor of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York. Richard Shaull, Professor of Ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary, has also been a frequent contributor to Theology Today. Formerly a missionary in Brazil, Dr. Shaull is the author of Encounter with Revolution (1955) and, with Carl Oglesby, Containment and Change (1967). Dr. Berger is a member of Theology Today's Editorial Council and his most recent book is Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (1974), which is reviewed in this issue of Theology Today.
Yahweh, Women, and the Trinity
Authors: Williams Jay G.
Published: February 2011

“Might it not be possible, just at this moment when the fortunes of the church seem to be at low ebb, that we may be entering a new age, an age in which the Holy Spirit will become far more central to the faith, an age when the third person of the Trinity will reveal to us more fully who she is?”
The Mystic and the Theologian
Authors: Shideler Mary McDermott
Published: February 2011

“Anyone who has ever gone to the zoo and tried to communicate with a hippopotamus knows the problem. It is simply impossible to get a word of sense out of the hippopotamus. The hippopotamus undoubtedly feels the same way about the human being. The consequence is that relations between human beings and hippopotamuses tend to be meaningless.”
Joshua, Calvin, and Genocide
Authors: Goetz Ronald
Published: February 2011

“The book of Joshua is embarrassment enough, with its ferocity and its religious advocacy of mass murder … What is the reason for resurrecting Calvin's commentary on the book of Joshua? I find that as I reflect upon both Joshua and Calvin, I feel, in somewhat different form, my own personal version of the Reformer's bad conscience—as if a whole host of long-forgotten theological vultures were coming home to roost.”
Theology: Sociology = Orthodoxy: Orthopraxis
Authors: Quinn G. J. , Davidson J. D.
Published: February 2011

“Empirical sociology pays special attention to the factual, as opposed to the normative, and in so doing often plays the role of debunker, showing that assumed norms and doctrines are not always accepted or manifested in the behavior of people in society. … The evidence suggests that certain kinds of intellectual and doctrinal beliefs have little or no bearing on Christian moral behavior. … Orthodoxy-orthopraxis can be understood, not only as believing, but as ‘doing’ religious faith in a social context.”
How historical is the Resurrection?: (A Dialogue)
Authors: Migliore Daniel L.
Published: February 2011

The following dialogue is an imaginary conversation between four prominent modern theologians. The topic is the resurrection of Jesus as an historical event. My choice of Barth, Bultmann, Pannenberg, and Moltmann as participants in the dialogue no doubt reflects my own theological odyssey. But it also has a more objective basis. These theologians represent the four currently most influential interpretations of the New Testament witness to the resurrection.

I have tried to be fair in stating the four positions and the ways in which they both agree and clash with each other. The theologians in the dialogue prove to be both abrasive and occasionally humorous. I have seldom been party to a good theological discussion which did not contain a bit of both of these qualities. Finally, I should explain that the dialogue form is used to solicit the reader's own engagement in the on-going discussion.
Reflections of a College Chaplain
Authors: Ferm Deane William
Published: February 2011

“My impression is that the time is ripe for a genuine theological renaissance and that the role of the chaplain in the immediate years ahead may be crucial … It is never easy to live or minister ‘on the boundary’ between one's own particular religious faith and the universal needs of students … The mission of the college chaplain continues to be that of singing the Lord's song in a strange land.”
The Christian Scholar in Academe
Authors: Campbell Dennis M.
Published: February 2011

“Specific relationship to a religious community or church is irrelevant to the scholarly work of the specialist in the history of religions, religious ethics, or many other of the disciplines which comprise religious studies. But vital constructive theology requires some relationship to the community of faith … Our theological discipline requires that we never forfeit the vocation of the Christian scholar.”
Options for American Religious History
Authors: Bucher Glenn R.
Published: February 2011

“I believe that an historical understanding of one's self and one's situation constitutes a kind of essential wisdom…. It helps people—individually and collectively—to know who they are.” —Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Pop Psychology and the Gospel
Authors: Greeley Andrew M.
Published: February 2011

“Therapy groups replace worship, encounter weekends substitute for retreats, sensitivity training replaces contemplation. Transformation of religion by pop psychology has been so complete that we take it for granted. [But] personal development is an erratic, uncertain, and arduous process. It takes a long, long time to become holy and even longer to become a saint. The rhetoric of the personal development craze in American religion conveniently overlooks these harsh and unpleasant facts.”
Serpent-Handling as Sacrament
Authors: Daugherty Mary Lee
Published: February 2011

“And he [Jesus] said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” –Mark 16:15–18 (AV).
The Human Potential Movement
Authors: Raschke Carl A.
Published: February 2011

“Elaborate attention and, frequently, adulation have been heaped on the movement by magazines and media. The popularity of the trend is confirmed wherever paperback books are sold. Visibility and popularity, however, do not necessarily certify the worth or soundness of the movement over the long haul. Interestingly, few theological critiques of the Human Potential Movement have appeared.”
The Ambiguity of Biblical Religion
Authors: Baum Gregory
Published: February 2011

“The claim that in Jesus Christ the ancient promises have been fulfilled and the final age of the world has arrived has led the church to look upon itself too uncritically as God's holy people and become insensitive to the ambiguity of its piety, its teaching, its life and practice, in short its religion.”
The Hero and the Minister in American Culture
Authors: Holifield E. Brooks
Published: February 2011

“America within the past hundred years has produced a panoply of images of ministry, which have remarkably paralleled the changing image of the hero in secular journals and magazines … When images of the minister become an issue, either for the pastor or the congregation, there is a dual temptation. Some struggle to escape the old images … But there is also another temptation. Many ministers are tempted to barricade themselves within inherited images.”
The Arts in the Local Church
Authors: Bodo John R.
Published: February 2011

“My memories of six years with an arts program are bittersweet. I wonder: would I have succeeded better in rooting the program in the life of the church if I had been more of a ‘democratic leader’? Or is any attempt really to integrate the élite arts into the life of a church foredoomed to founder on the twin rocks of American ‘babbittry’ and Protestant ‘wordboundedness’?”
Network: A Film Critique
Authors: Elliott Clifford
Published: February 2011

By Paddy Chayefsky, directed by Sidney Lumet, produced by Howard Gottfried. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film released through United Artists, 1975. With Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall.
John Wesley: Folk-Theologian
Authors: Outler Albert C.
Published: February 2011

“Wesley can be read, and usually has been read, without the broad and intricate tapestry of his sources unfolded as a background for interpretation. This was part of the price he paid for self-divestiture of his theological apparatus. Even so, it is just as this background is recovered and reevaluated that Wesley emerges as a more interesting and impressive theologian than his stereotypes have presented—precisely because he was a folktheologian.”
The Changing Abortion Debate
Authors: Ostling Richard N.
Published: February 2011

“The abortion debate has become noticeably secularized, in seeming obedience to Justice Blackmun's dictum that the law cannot favor Christian thought over pre-Christian morality, or the activists' insistence that church leaders should not ‘meddle’ in abortion politics.”
The Trinity and the Motorcycle
Authors: Placher William C.
Published: February 2011

“Pirsig [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] rightly points out the evil fruits of the bifurcation between technology and values in our culture; and, as he says, the solution lies neither in just more technology nor in a Romantic rejection of technology. Somehow, we need to put things back together again… What we need is a way of understanding the world that preserves both the structure of intelligibility and the objectivity of values.”
The Shaping of Jonah
Authors: Deeley Mary Katharine
Published: February 2011

This imaginary exchange of correspondence between his editor and Jonah, the fifth in line of the twelve minor prophets, reminds us of the literary process of transcribing prophecy to prose. Authors always tend to be suspicious of editors; witness the dire anathema pronounced by the author of the Apocalypse against all meddling redactors (Rev. 22:18-19). But sometimes editors and publishers are needed to get immortal narratives into print. Biblical scholars are usually so busy scrutinizing the text, or disputing about hermeneutical methodology, that the rest of us may be completely unaware of the initial state of manuscript copy-editing. Anyway, here is a witty, and scholarly, fantasy about the writing of Jonah, one of the fantastic biblical books. The correspondence comes to us through the good graces of Professor Brevard Childs of Yale Divinity School. Mary Katharine Deeley is a graduate student at Yale, working with Dr. Childs in Old Testament studies. She is an alumna of Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois, and she has taught religion in a parochial high school. We hope our readers are not confused as to who is who among authors, editors, publishers, and literary entrepreneurs. After a reading of the correspondence, perhaps a fresh perusal of the Book of Jonah is in order. It's a little book with a big message—one that Jesus applied to himself (Matt. 12:40).
Christian Faith and Radical Equality
Authors: Tracy David
Published: February 2011

“Feminist theologians … have raised issues and proposed criticisms and constructive proposals for Christian theology which cannot be ignored by any serious Christian theologian. The issues they raise are as central as one can find in constructive theology: The very nature of God and the nature of the human. … If we are to take seriously the full implications of Paul's words, ‘Neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. …,’ we must all learn to listen together again and again to that command. Then, as a community, we may eventually find out concretely just what, after all, it might really mean to become a human being.”
Sanctification, Liberation, and Black Worship
Authors: Cone James H.
Published: February 2011

“Black American spirituality was born in the context of the struggle for justice… When the meaning of sanctification is formed in the social context of an oppressed community in struggle for liberation, it is difficult to separate the experience of holiness from the spiritual empowerment to change the existing societal arrangements.”