1 - Foundations for a Contemporary Piety

Foundations for a Contemporary Piety
Diogenes Allen

Almost everybody nowadays talks about the future. Marxists, theologians, businessmen, stock analysts, and urban others, ponder what will be or what ought to be. I do not have any ideas about the future; my concern is with what a man needs for his future. I presume, you see, that devotion to God has something to do with being a Christian, and I take it that people find it hard to be devoted. Worship services are a bore, the Bible is unread, distrusted, or found to be impenetrable, and theologians for the most part seem to have gone mad. Things are rather out of joint, and a lot of people seem to be falling apart.

What I think this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY has to offer is some of the foundation stones for being devoted to God, now and in the future. John Kent describes several ideas around which a religious life was once built, and he suggests why none of them is now possible. Bertil Gärtner and Bernhard Anderson both consider central biblical and theological problems which involve our ability to use the Bible. No Christian piety can endure without the Scriptures, and yet we are all sophisticated enough to have heard of myth, demythologizing, and the elusive Jesus of history. Gärtner takes on the monumental task of showing that the continuity between the earthly ministry of Jesus and the faith of the primitive church lies in the person of Jesus. One's reputation in biblical studies these days is usually proportionate to one's skepticism; Gärtner, however, is will-

2 - Foundations for a Contemporary Piety

ing to argue that the primitive church did not blunder, but faithfully grasped the significance of Jesus as the bearer of the Kingdom of God and rightly proclaimed him as the Christ. Anderson builds on an unpublished paper by Will Herberg in which ten types of myth are distinguished. In his own paper, Anderson argues for a unique pattern in the employment of myth among the Israelites. The general effect of his article is to enable one to see how one may read the Old Testament as indeed revealing saving truth, without ignoring the existence of myth and without sacrifice of the intellect.

The most vivid article in this issue is William Mueller's study of Hermann Broch's novel, The Sleepwalkers. Here you have several remarkable characters portrayed with all the flesh and blood reality of actual life. All of them are guided by some principle or ideal. They undergo the upheaval of events which they cannot control or foresee. Mueller's essay suggests to me the possibility that things may get much worse for both church and world, and that one of the foundations of piety is to have faced this possibility squarely. It is to consider what it would be to live one's entire life in a time of decline, without sight of a ray of the dawn, and yet to work faithfully and to hold fast to God. We Americans seem to be incapable of entertaining seriously this possibility; we shudder at the cold wind of unfavorable membership and giving statistics, and already show signs of running scared. Yet it may be our lot, in the providence of God, to make our confession during one of the troughs of history and to have very little, if anything at all, to do with producing the next wave. About thirty minutes of reflection on this ought to be enough. It might make the difference between our continuing to act like raw recruits the first time under fire and our becoming people who know what it is to be dealing with God.

The short selection from the works of Teilhard de Chardin will not be to everyone's taste. His vision may appeal to some, but his lack of precision leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, for a piety to be viable today, it must face the question of Christianity's relation to other faiths and come up with more than we have in the past. Our provincialism is all too apparent to both the man in the pew and the man on the street, not to mention the child before the television set.