142 - The Vision Authentic

The Vision Authentic
By Nels F. S. Ferre

THE January issue of THEOLOGY TODAY was surely an interesting one, and though I seldom report on individual numbers of the journal, I offer some comments on this one. My head began to ache halfway through Langdon Gilkey's excellent review of John Cobb's book (A Christian Natural Theology). I got my face pelted from many directions for daring to say in reviewing Cobb that there is a Christian Gestalt. Of course there is!

The editorial, "The Open Option," is modish and expresses the truth that theology can never compel consent. If it could, there would be no freedom. But we have to have a far fuller faith, beyond substance and process, beyond the presence and absence of God, far beyond all present theological trends.

I read Altizer and Hamilton with such wistfulness! Against Barth and Tillich, they are right, let alone against traditionalistic Christianity. But why not go on to the fuller faith? I don't know whether to be scared by or to laugh at the new optimism. The old depravity pessimism was bad enough and unreal. Do we want anything but that fullness where God has to hide from freedom to be real and yet leaves his presence in history and nature in different forms? God's fullness comes with neither optimism nor pessimism but with a searing joy that discloses the depth of our pain and the surface nature of our hopes.

The world needs help and hope as never before. We are too guilty hardly to care, even to feel. If our Christian journals, for thrill or modernity, serve up the world's malady for medicine, what will it avail?

One open option is to catch the vision authentic within which the absurd gives the creative depths to the faith that is too strong to ache at trivial self-seriousness as it waits for the unveiling of the truth against which we can finally do nothing.