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The Boston Affirmations

We are printing in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY the text of the statement known as "The Boston Affirmations" together with some critical evaluations. In a time when theology is so frequently discredited as being unsure of anything, it is noteworthy that this present statement is the third such manifesto in the past few years (cf. "A Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern," Chicago, Nov. 1973; "An Appeal for Theological Affirmation," Hartford, Jan. 1975).

The Boston statement, which is dated Jan. 6, 1976, grew out of a series of meetings convened by the Boston Industrial Mission (56 Boylston St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138). Norman J. Faramelli, a co-director of the Mission, in a publicity release, says., "Our statement is not designed as a critique of what others have said, but as an affirmation of our beliefs. Our task was to articulate an understanding of the faith in a contemporary situation where theological reflection and social involvement are becoming increasingly separated…. Much of contemporary piety ignores the social dimensions of the gospel."

The following participated in the drafting of the statement:

Norman Faramelli ..................Max Stackhouse………...Constance Parvey

Harvey Cox…….…...............Scott Paradise…………...Joseph Williamson

Mary Roodkowsky….…........George Rupp……..……..Paul Santmire

David Dodson Gray………….Elizabeth Dodson Gray ….Richard Snyder

Jeanne Gallo…………......…..Ignacio Casteura…………Moises Mendez

Robert Starbuck…......………John Snow……………….Eleanor McLaughlin

Preston Williams….......……..Mary Hennessey……….…Jerry Handspicker

The living God is active in current struggles to bring a Reign of Justice, Righteousness, Love, and Peace. The Judeo-Christian traditions are pertinent to the dilemmas of our world. All believers are called to preach the good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Yet we are concerned about what we discern to be present trends in our churches, in religious thought, and in our society. We see struggles in every arena of human life, but in too many parts of the church and theology we find retreat from these struggles. Still, we are not without hope nor warrants for our hope. Hopeful participation in these struggles is at once action in faith, the primary occasion for personal spiritual growth, the development of viable structures for the common life, and the vocation of the people of God. To sustain such participation, we have searched the past and the present to find the signs of God's future and of ours. Thus, we make the following affirmations:

CREATION: God brings into being all resources, all life, all genuine meanings.

Humanity is of one source and is not ultimately governed by nature or history, by the fabric of societies or the depths of the self, by

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knowledge or belief. God's triune activity sustains creative order, evokes personal identity, and is embodied in the dynamic movements of human history in an ever more inclusive community of persons responsibly engaged in all aspects of the ecosphere, history, and thought.

FALL: Humanity is estranged from the source of life.

We try to ignore or transcend the source and end of life. Or we try to place God in a transcendent realm divorced from life. Thereby we give license to domination, indulgence, pretense, triviality, and evasion. We endanger creative order, we destroy personal identity, and we corrupt inspirited communities. We allow tyranny, anarchy, and death to dominate the gift of life.

EXODUS AND COVENANT: God delivers from oppression and chaos. God chooses strangers, servants, and outcasts to be witnesses and to become a community of righteousness and mercy.

Beyond domination and conflict God bears the cry of the oppressed and works vindication for all. God forms "nobodies" into a people of "somebodies" and makes known the laws of life. The liberation experience calls forth celebrative response, demands responsibility in community, and opens people and nations for a common global history.

PROPHECY: In compassion God speaks to the human community through prophets.

Those who authentically represent God have interpreted-and will interpret-the activity of God in social history. They announce the presence of God in the midst of political and economic life; they foretell the judgment and hope that are implicit in the loyalties and practices of the common life; and they set forth the vision of covenantal renewal.

WISDOM: The cultural insights and memories of many peoples and ages illuminate the human condition.

The experience and lore of all cultures and groups bear within them values that are of wider meaning. Racism, genocide, imperialism, sexism are thus contrary to God's purposes and impoverish us all. Yet all wisdom must also be tested for its capacity to reveal the human dependence on the source of life, to grasp the depths of sin, to liberate, to evoke prophecy, and to form genuine covenant.

THE NEW COVENANT: God is known to us in Jesus Christ.

The source and end of life is disclosed in that suffering love which breaks the power of sin and death, which renders hope in the action of God to reconcile and transform the world, which shatters the barriers of ethnic, class, familial, national, and caste restrictions. Meaning and divine activity are incarnate in history and human particularity.

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CHURCH TRADITIONS: God calls those who trust the power of suffering love to form into communities of celebration, care, and involvement.

Those called together enact renewing forms of association and movement to the ends of the earth, responding by word and deed to the implications of faith for each age and for us today:

• The early Eastern church celebrated the dependence of humanity upon the cosmos, and of the cosmos upon God, demanding a sacramental attitude toward the whole of creation.
• The Formers of doctrine set forth the meanings of faith in the face of cultured despisers, exposed the frail foundations of various secularisms, and gave new directions to both the faithful and civilization.
• The Monastics assumed vows to exemplify life-styles beyond preoccupation with gain, freedom from familial and sexual stereotyping, and disciplined lives of service.
• The Scholastics engaged secular culture, demanding of each generation critical and synthetic reappropriation of tradition.
• The Reformers preached the work of protest against religious pretense and demanded reliance upon the gifts of divine empowerment.
• The Sectarians nurtured the spirit that cannot be contained by priesthood, dogma, hierarchy, authoritative word, or any established power, and demanded democracy, freedom, toleration, and the redistribution of authority, power, and wealth.
• And today many reach out for wider fellowships, demanding ecumenical engagements and a witness which frees and unites.

Wherever the heirs of these movements are authentic, they confess their sins, worship the power that sustains them, form a company of the committed, and struggle for justice and love against the powers and principalities of evil.

PRESENT WITNESSES: The question today is whether the heritage of this past can be sustained, preserved, and extended into the future. Society as presently structured, piety as presently practiced, and the churches as presently preoccupied evoke profound doubts about the prospects. Yet we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses who prophetically exemplify or discern the activity of God. The transforming reality of God's reign is found today:

• In the struggles of the poor to gain a share of the world's wealth, to become creative participants in the common economic life, and to move our world toward an economic democracy of equity and accountability.
• In the transforming drive for ethnic dignity against the persistent racism of human hearts and social institutions.
• In the endeavor by women to overcome sexist subordination in the

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church's ministry, in society at large, and in the images that bind our minds and bodies.

• In the attempts within families to overcome prideful domination and debasing passivity and to establish genuine covenants of mutuality and joyous fidelity.
• In the efforts by many groups to develop for modern humanity a love for its cities as centers of civility, culture, and human interdependence.
• In the demands of the sick and the elderly for inexpensive, accessible health care administered with concern, advised consent, and sensitivity.
• In the voices of citizens and political leaders who demand honesty and openness, who challenge the misplaced trust of the nation in might, and who resist the temptations to make a nation and its institutions objects of religious loyalty.
• In the research of science when it warns of dangers to humanity and quests for those forms of technology which can sustain human well-being and preserve ecological resources.
• In the humanities and social sciences when the depths of human meanings are opened to inquiry and are allowed to open our horizons, especially whenever there is protest against the subordination of religion to scientistic rationality or against the removal of religion from realms of rational discourse.
• In the arts where beauty and meaning are explored, lifted up and represented in ways that call us to deeper sensibilities.
• In the halls of justice when righteousness is touched with mercy, when the prisoner and the wrongdoer are treated with dignity and fairness.
• And especially in those branches and divisions of the church where the truth is spoken in love, where transforming social commitments are nurtured, and persons are brought to informed conviction, where piety is renewed and recast in concert with the heritage, and where such struggles as those here identified are seen as the action of the living God who alone is worshiped.

On these grounds, we cannot stand with those secular cynics and religious spiritualizers who see in such witnesses no theology, no eschatological urgency, and no Godly promise or judgment. In such spiritual blindness, secular or religious, the world as God's creation is abandoned, sin rules, liberation is frustrated, covenant is broken, prophecy is stilled, wisdom is betrayed, suffering love is transformed into triviality, and the church is transmuted into a club for self- or transcendental-awareness. The struggle is now joined for the future of faith and the common life. We call all who believe in the living God to affirm, to sustain, and to extend these witnesses.

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WALTER D. WAGONER

Walter D. Wagoner is pastor of the Asylum Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut. He has previously served as Director of the Fund for Theological Education, Academic Dean of the Graduate Theological Union, and Director of the Boston Theological Institute. His books include The Seminary: Protestant and Catholic (1966), Bittersweet Grace (1967), and Say a Good Word for Jesus (1973).

In this salvo of manifestos my credentials are impeccable, having moved recently from Boston to Hartford!

I appreciate very much both the Hartford and Boston statements, and I hope that they gain systematic attention. Unfortunately, they seem to be occasions for personality fireworks, with such people as Cox, Holbrook, Marty, et al. trying to be very cute about it all. The Hartford statement is written with much more flair; the Boston one is heavily pedantic; but each of them is a genuine contribution to the church. I would like to see a good book come out of it all, with essays addressing the differences, real or apparent.

Personally and professionally, the Hartford Statement spoke to my needs. After all, the Boston Affirmation is what I have been immersed in for the last fifteen years, and I needed some corrective balance.

The Boston Affirmation makes the basic mistake of trying to cover the whole landscape, especially such with the inventory of the Kingdom of God as is listed in "Present Witnesses." It would have been better if it had taken two or three of the major issues and sharpened them. The worst paragraph is "The New Covenant: God is known to us in Jesus Christ," which is probably the most ambiguous non-Christology I have ever read. I like the "Preamble," "The Fall," and "Exodus and Covenant."

Norman Faramelli writes, "We hope that it will receive wide-scale use as it is tested out in the Churches." Left to itself, the Affirmation will not generate such follow-up. What I think is necessary is a conference of parish ministers who will try to deduce some specific programs from the theological generalities.

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

Richard John Neuhaus is pastor of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn and Senior Editor of Worldview. He was involved in the preparation of the Hartford Appeal and, with Peter L. Berger, has recently edited a series of responses to the Hartford Appeal, Against the World for the World (1976).

As one Hartford participant, I warmly welcome the Boston statement. Let a hundred flowers blossom, as the Chairman said. There have been other responses to the Hartford Appeal, some more succinct and critical than Boston's. More, I understand, are in the works. The discussion will no doubt continue for some time.

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George Lindbeck notes in Against the World for the World that Hartford is unique in that it is not itself a statement of theological position but is an appeal for such statement. In that respect Boston is responsive to Hartford, and its affirmation of Christian faith invites careful theological examination. I find Boston theologically eccentric and confused, both in its choice of themes and its handling of them. For example, cross, resurrection, sacraments, and final judgment are not explicitly treated; there would seem to be at some points what Hartford calls "false transcendence" in a God apart from nature and history who promises vindication beyond domination and conflict; at other points there is excessive confidence in identifying the presence and purpose of God with specific social changes; nor am I sure, for instance, whether "suffering love" can be so facilely substituted for Jesus Christ, who gets but one mention. The careful reader will find many other such problems.

In identifying where "the transforming reality of God's reign is found today," the authors seem excessively well briefed on what God is up to at the moment. Some of the changes affirmed are extraordinarily vague; for example, "an economic democracy of equity and accountability." One wishes the authors had said more clearly what they meant. Does, for instance, the reference to "sexist subordination" mean that those opposed to women's ordination, which I am not, are excommunicated from "the company of the committed"? I would much prefer an affirmation of Christian faith less dependent upon alleged certitude and better equipped to act in the courage of uncertainty.

In the continuing and I hope more substantive debate to come, we should avoid the temptation to rush to premature syntheses. Of course one can, with some interpretative imagination, affirm both Hartford and Boston. At this stage, however, the greater contribution is from those who clarify differences, thus helping all of us understand better the choices to be made if we are to be more fully Christian in this our moment.

GEDDES W. HANSON

Geddes W. Hanson is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Associate Director of Professional Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. He holds degrees from Howard University, Harvard Divinity School, and Princeton Theological Seminary.

I'm not sure that we, as a society, are sufficiently mature to accept the Boston "Affirmations" as anything other than a critique of the Hartford "Appeal." I imagine that the publication of the Chicago "Declaration" motivated this spate of pronouncement-making.

The design of the "Affirmations" raises the possibility that systematic theological reflection might have returned to vogue. The last paragraph, however, guarantees it a niche among the polemics.

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Obviously the people in Boston had something important to affirm, and many of us are thankful to them for having done so. We can only wonder why the introductory sections were deemed necessary.

Affirmations function to unite. Those of us who feel the Spirit of God wisting where it will must resonate with the "Affirmations." They speak to us and for us. We are joined in our faith that a God who will not be denied will continually work to frustrate the faithlessness of even those of us who are anxious to identify with him. We might wish, however, that the framers of the "Affirmations" had been more explicit about the nature of the "branches and divisions of the church" which are identified among the contemporary witnesses to God's activity.

It would be altogether possible to read and agree with the stance of the affirmers and yet hold a commitment to Christian activity in the affairs of the world on the localized individual or parochial basis. By not addressing themselves to the problem of the vehicle of self-consciously Christian involvement in the community, the affirmers have avoided one of the most pressing questions to do with the nature of Christian witness and, perchance, given comfort and solace to those with whom they would not choose to array themselves.

Those who would join the struggle for the future of faith and the common life need to affirm the necessity for the resources and commitment of a unified and institutional household of faith to be brought to the frontlines. The world community is too intimate; its problems too inextricably intertwined, both in nature and in scope; and the power/influence it is reasonable to impute to the individual witness is too meager.