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Theological Table-Talk
By Theodore A. Gill

WOULD that there were a theological equivalent for the song, "Keep Your Confederate Money, Boys, The South Shall Rise Again." Such a hymn of comfort and hope is highly in order, these days, for the grizzled veterans of Neo-Orthodoxy who once prevailed so mightily on world-sized battlefields.

Strange, what happened to that triumph, isn't it? It seemed so solid-and, in its scholarship and artistry was so solid, compared to the success of the motley troops who shortly mopped up on the New Reformation generals. Those generals were so great, and their transitory victories so impressive, in fact, that many of the present holders of the field insist that their own winning programs are just necessary extensions of what they learned from the greats.

But, if that is so, how shall we account for the fact that we have come again so swiftly to the pre-Barth theological loggerheads? Present forces and their alignment, the field and its contours, are almost laughably familiar (weak laughter, of course). Talk about déja vu! The battle that was engaged in the Römerbrief was on two fronts: Barth and his fractious lieutenants bombarded both the humanistic voluntarisms of the liberals and the picky literalisms of the biblicists-and the Kultur-complicities of both (nasty letter, that K: when you want to be really mean, fit it in; thus, Amerika, and Kultur-but, of course, never counter-Kultur).

Well, where are we at the moment? Are we talking about now or then? Time goes accordion-pleated, and present is past or past is present. Anyway, whatever their derivations, the reigning therapists, guerillas, and troubadors occupy the old humanist hill happily, albeit a bit anxiously as supplies run low and there is little enthusiasm in the populace for essential support services (coteries don't really count as populace).

Meanwhile, sniping from across the valley, a powerful conservatism, solidly ensconced on its ancient and honorable hill, enjoys rich provisioning by a generous following. For a time, while these oncerouted forces were regaining their nerve, a certain camouflage of conternporaneity was in vogue over there, but with confidence rapidly recovered, the spiky old outlines emerge in ever starker detail.

Theodore A. Gill, for many years a member of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council, is Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Department of Arts, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College in New York City. Formerly the editor of the Christian Century and President of San Francisco Theological Seminary, he is the author of Memo for a Movie: A Short Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1971) and has edited a volume of John Donne's Sermons (1958) and a Festschrift of sermons in honor of George A. Buttrick, To God Be the Glory (1973).

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It is all very wearying and uninteresting. Vapidity versus orneriness-and you distribute the adjectives. Who cares, except the professional whose skin is invested? Interest and importance have to be discovered and offered again. Where is a description of the Christian faith that doesn't dither and dicker over a piecemeal compromise, but features instead quite another vision in which God and people, God's work and our work, God's future and our future are seen in intriguing, energizing perspective?

The rhythm won't fit, so a new tune will have to be whistled up, but it just might sell, one of these days: "Keep Your Neo-Orthodox Sermons, Boys and Girls, A New Reformation Has to Happen Again."

Recently The New York Times announced that Edward B. Fiske, who had served for several years as the paper's Religion Editor, would become the new Education Editor. It is hoped (though this may not be the journal in which to hope it) that Mr. Fiske's move is, in the Times' steady wisdom, a stately reportorial and editorial step ahead. Ecumenically, though, it is a loping step backwards. Education, and especially higher education, is centuries behind the church in this regard. Educational denominations are now spikier, more hostile, and exclusive than any religious grouping has dared be for a long time. Schism is still in process in the school world, generations after such casual fracturing became an embarrassment in church circles. In education, a new philosophy or philosopher, a trend, a suddenly ascendant discipline can immediately engender a new denomination full of what religionists easily recognize as sixteenth to nineteenth century hostilities, pugnacities, rapacities.

Somehow, seeing academicians settling comfortably into sectarian hubris is more discouraging than remembering what church people did for such a long time-and teeter on the brink of doing again. It is ugly to see Christians roughly reading each other out of related parochialities. But it is peculiarly devastating when brilliant secularists do the same thing in their world where repentance and grace are not necessary contextual referents, and where the single human community whose service justifies all enterprise is not an established fact to be exemplified, but is a case still to be made, debated, proven by us and in our way.

It is exciting for an editor, though, and Mr. Fiske's church history courses will fit him admirably for his new field. Education is, of course, in many parts of the world, still a religion, itself. To it, millions look for both revelation and redemption. Education has its true believers, and who among the rest of us but hopes they will be justified in their faith? Still, it may be a plus for us, who live where the educators' denominationalism and mutual jugular fixations can hardly be missed, that our expectations of the schools will be more modest. We will be

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much less apt to mistake this particular part of the problem, in this period of its divisional petulance, for any large part of the answer.

Tell us about the fascinating, out of season Knoxes and Münsters and Loyolas you must be encountering, Ted. Who better than you could know a dogma when you see one, or reckless dogmatism? But above all, sing out if you catch a glimpse of one who might turn out to be education's John XXIII. You will know him by, and we all need him for, his breadth.

Pity the poor seminary presidents who are currently scouting out new professors of systematic theology for their faculties. Those fields are just not ripe unto the harvest these days. For about twenty years, now, professional theologians have been a short-breathed lot, and their discipline tended to gasp as it raced from emphasis to emphasis. This helter-skelter, so unbecoming in a Queen, has no doubt been very exciting for the scholars engaged in the free-for-all. It has, however, looked just a little frantic from the sidelines-and finally, not really very rewarding. (The number and the price of the little books one has had to buy just to keep up hasn't helped either.)

The liveliest theologians around have written patently ad hoc theologies. That, of course, makes them interesting teachers-while their trends hold. But they are too pro tem; their scholarship is too tendentious in its use and abuse of theological tradition to suit them for the great, comfortable chairs whose massy legs must straddle without squashing many epochs of honest variety in theological reflection.

The prominent German scholars, otherwise so amply shaped to just such seats (their "radicality" in these days reassuringly modulated) can't be lured away from the German academic pension system, which makes the American retirement benefits look stingy to cruel. American faculties benefit from the presence of brilliant young Continental scholars, but about the time that fame and authority settle on our visitors so does middle age. So, when an invitation comes, many go home to an income that changes little, not just as long as they live, but as long as the spouse lives, too. Who wouldn't? And so, just when our seminary boards start salivating for that fame and authority, the candy is snatched from their sticky fingers.

Creature comforts figure in the availability of American scholars, too. Some of the most arresting theological minds of the century are now happily employed in the great universities of their country. Especially those in state universities may be priced right out of the seminary market. And, if that seems crass, consider the professional and personal delight in the contact with many disciplines, brilliant dissents, unexpected concurrences in a large faculty. Not to mention the satisfaction of students, who, when they do respond to the teacher

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and the teacher's material, respond to that and not to its possible role in their role.

Beyond this, there is the plain fact that many (even most?) of the scholars, who might once have been busy in systematics, have for the last twenty years been more interested in historical theology, myth, sociology of religions (all of that once-scanted "Chicago stuff "; Joachim Wach would be having, if not the last laugh, the next laugh). Ironically, the current turn toward more aesthetic understandings of religion will, sooner or later, produce a new appreciation of systematic theology in its artfulness and its integrity. But that is just beginning to happen and is no help now.

Of course, given the nature of quarterly journalism, after all this, both Princeton and Union will have made splashy announcements, before press time, of glittering appointments to their hoary Chairs in Systematic Theology. O well; at least we all know now how signal an accomplishment such an announcement is in this era of our Lord, and against what odds.

It was the usual collision at the slide-trays that raised the question. After the first week or two of classes, there is no problem. The religious studies teachers have by then gone off to do their own lectures on their own things: theologies, ethics, this cultus and that, some politics, perhaps. That leaves the slide collection and projectors and screens to the art history teachers, who daily build in light and color the outlines of other worlds around their students in darkened classrooms.

But those first few days are a mess. All of us, religionists and artists, are after the same slides at the same time. "Cave drawings, cave drawings, my kingdom for the Lascaux drawer." "Would it be too much to ask you to put Stonehenge back where it belongs so I can use it, too?" For about ten days, bedlam. After that, everybody loves everybody again, and we greet each other happily when we pass in the corridors going to our very different classes.

But why? When did it happen? In the most distant beginnings 15,000 to 30,000 years ago-men and women responded to the knowns and the Unknowns in their lives with an activity and a creativity which today is claimed and studied by both art and religion historians as basic data for the disciplines of each. The very same evidences of that ancient response-action-creation is called art by one set of scholars and religion by the other.

Isn't that because, originally, these relic evidences weren't either art or religion (as we call them), but were durable and salvageable parts of one holistic response to the encompassing mystery, as envisaged by our marvelously imaginative progenitors? Was not all of their life such a response, and, insofar as it was, would not all of it be somehow "re-

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ligious?" Were not the earliest institutions, calendars, customs attempts to order the physical imperatives of human living in some ways appropriate to the accepted hunches on the nature of the creating and sustaining reality? And isn't that all religious? Arranging a daily life that gets by the supervisory spirits, shaping a government that squares with the vision (and works), installing the wispy furniture of a barely built conscience, telling far-fetched, curiously apposite stories (proto-theology), making broad-beamed little mammary figurines, dancing deep in richly muralled caves that weren't ordinarily on exhibit-all, all religious, insofar as it is part of one, whole response, one personal, social re-presentation (in many materials) of the originative vision, that is, of the primordial sense of human placement and positioning in an imaginatively perceived Scheme of Things.

And all, all art, too. All of it, every bit of it an artful creativity, a making, a doing, a giving of shape to the vision, a giving of form-personal, social, ethical, institutional, intellectual, material, doctrinal, graphic, glyptic, musical, choreographic, narrative, devotional form to the faith.

No religion and art, then. Instead, profoundly moved people, making multiform response. Or, everything religious, everything artful. Two aspects of one phenomenon, the imaginative, reflective, responsible life. Two aspects: one the occasion and impetus, the other the shaping activity; and both reflexive to what we much later learned to call the Encounter, one being the will and the other the way to represent in every available earthly medium the galvanizing vision. No wonder we late-comers in our artificial disciplines dive for the same slides. They show us marvels from the eons before things fell part.

Where did the split come, that truly tragic bifurcation? Why and when did religion first let itself be downgraded to a separate, logical, juridical phenomenon of limited place, studied mostly now in its literary evidences? What cut off the arts, and sent them to their corner, there to squabble and to excel, alternately yearning after and despising the world for which they alone would seem to guard the aesthetic grail.

What would it take to get things back together again, with the religious occasion for all kinds of creation recognized and consciously active, and aesthetic canons at home again in industry, ethics, politics, theology-and art? I can tell you what the sign of that healing would be: future religion and art teachers squabbling over the slide collection all semester.

Would a theologian at table only talk about the energy crisis (and what a theme that will be for the next few years' stewardship sermons: Our Energy Crisis-even these rusty homiletical pipes and creaking pulpit lips loosen at the thought), or might he pray?

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While governments and industries
   look for ways out of our energy crisis,
   give strength to our spirits
   O Spirit of God.
Add fuel to the fire of our faith.

Remind us of other crises overcome,
   of the strength that can come from testing,
   of the benefits that emerge from some trials,
   of the growth there may be in denial,
   of the endurance possible in those who know
   in whom they can believe.
Turn up the flame of our imagination.

Show us new ways to cope,
   other things to do, other ways to go,
   other arrangements, other satisfactions,
   other rhythms and other tempos for living.
Increase the current of our zeal.

Put new strength in our sense of justice,
   in our sense of humor,
   in our will to survive,
   in our will to do right by each other.
Stoke up in us patience.

Fan up in us a good spirit.
Help us to learn the lesson in the event
   and to show you, at last,
   a cleaner, fairer, leaner world.
For Jesus' sake, and for ours. Amen.