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Continuity and Change In Society and Theology
By Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

"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.'"

IN a fit of whimsy some years ago, Karl Barth told a reporter that, if he had not been a theologian, he might have liked being a traffic cop. "What a thrill it must be," Barth mused, "to stand in the middle of the intersection and tell all those cars where to go!"

One must not make too much of whimsy, but theologians should know that the traffic-cop image of theology is as problematic as the old image of the Queen of the Sciences. All images of intellectual authority are apparently outdated. The modern sciences live and act together in a variety of coalitions, but they have no Queen. Even on the level of politics and economics, society has an increasing number of "directors," no one of which can presume that it has obvious priority over the other.

To say this is to point to the new situation in which modern man must pursue his age-old project of thinking through his actions and acting on his thought. No longer can we assume, in theology or any other human enterprise, any simple laws of cause and effect.

Donald W. Shriver, Jr., is Associate Professor of Religion, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, and Visiting Associate Professor of Church and Society, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va.

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In the past, human life has been virtually dominated by the image of such laws in a variety of guises: one physical body moves another because it is bigger; one man commands another because he is politically stronger; God himself controls the world because he is infinitely powerful. Such images of order and change are beginning to break down. The sciences, from physics to theology, are finding reason to affirm not only the truth that "one thing causes another" but also the truth that "two things in relationship cause each other." Human history in particular is increasingly seen, not as a deterministic mechanical system, but as an open adaptive system in which controls are two-directional.

I

Such language, of course, is the language of cybernation, the word that Norbert Wiener invented to denote the new sort of "steering" that is becoming characteristic of man's. machines and man's societies. Significantly enough, one of Wiener's last published writings, God and Golem, Inc., concerned religion. In this book, he posed very astutely the question with which these paragraphs will be centrally concerned: "How can man change what lie has loved the most-including his religion-without destroying what is still to be loved in it?" As Wiener pointed out, man's own historic survival in a threatening environment can be credited largely to his superior capacity for adaptability. Other creatures, more impressive than man in many respects, have failed to survive because they somehow lacked the capacity to be influenced by their surroundings. In a time when man is himself adapting his environment to himself through technology, human life as an ongoing system of relationships is unprecedentedly complex. What "worked" as a response to change in man's natural environment, e.g., the retreat of the glaciers, will not necessarily work as a response to change in his technological environment-the existence of push-button weapons of mass destruction. If there is one rule for human life in the near future, it is: "Reconsider your old optimization."¹

But there is a second commandment like unto the first, says Wiener: "Remember the truth in your old optimization, lest you change the things that you never really wanted to change. Resist the monkey's paw of technological change long enough to be sure

¹ Cf. God and Golem, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; the M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 82.

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that you program into your new machines the most important of your old rules for machines." Otherwise society itself will perish, for society is nothing if not a continuous web of agreements between people about what is proper and improper in their relations with each other. Definitions of "proper" and "improper" were never more important than in an age in which one man's life has unimaginable numbers of connections with other men's lives.²

Alfred North Whitehead summarized Wiener's two points nicely when he said: "That society which cannot combine reverence for its symbolic code with freedom in its revision is destined for decay."³ And since religious symbols are by definition the commanding symbols of any society, the question of change and continuity in theological interpretations of God, man, and the world is central to discussions of social change. Most discussions of theology and social change usually err on one side or another of the twin dangers identified by Whitehead and Wiener: theologians are ready to change too much or too little of man's total inheritance from the past.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, there is a group of some twenty-five physical scientists, social scientists, and theologians who meet once a month to discuss the moral and religious dimensions of scientific and technological change in our time. These men are well aware that there is no going back to a time before man's discovery of nuclear energy, computers, and instant global communication. They know, for example, that the "mushroom cloud" is now a cultural symbol overshadowing many another symbol in potency; and they wonder if conventional religion has anything humanly significant to say to the problems of using and misusing nuclear energy. One of the group's sharpest critics of religion, in this respect, is a very capable physicist, Jewish by origin and a refugee from prewar Germany. On more than one occasion this sensitive man has expressed frustration over the tendency of theologians in the group to ignore or dismiss new decision-making problems confronting modern man. "You religious people," he says, "are always talking about something that Moses or Jesus said; I'm tired of the ancient history."

² For example, in The Human Use of Human Beings (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1954), p. 109, Wiener pointed out that the American Indians originally sold their Ian to the white man tinder the illusion that only hunting rights were being transferred. The rules governing the use of property were different in the two cultures, and tragic self-willed losses came to the Indian because there was no agreement with the whites about the rules. In the far more complex transactions of men in our own day, the need for mutually accepted rules, e.g., the uses of scientific research, is far more acute.
³ The Aims of Education (New York: The New American Library).

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About a year ago this man was asked by the group to do an ethical analysis of the famous Oppenheimer case in the mid-1950's. After considerable study, he put down in succinct fashion his own sense of the ethics that should have been followed in that case but were not. Among other things, said he, "the pure scientist must at no time incur any obligation to the authorities who support his work." Furthermore a scientist like Oppenheimer at work on technological development "has the duty to dissent and desist; he must not participate in the utilization of science toward the achievement of goals which are in conflict with his code of ethics." It was irresponsible, he went on to say, for Oppenheimer to abandon his protest against the manufacture of the H-bomb simply because Edward Teller had discovered a technically "sweet" way to do the job.

The physicist's paper provoked a lively discussion. In the process, some members of the discussion group questioned his ethical presuppositions by asking him why he was willing to place such a burden of decision upon the moral shoulders of a single individual scientist. Why was he ready to let one man's judgment outweigh the collective word of governments and scientific committees? "Well," said he with a smile, "I suppose it is because I am more of a Jew than I thought I was." A strong sense of individual responsibility and a willingness to confront political power with ethical claims are not characteristic of all "symbolic codes." They are characteristic of historic Judaism.

The point is simply that even those of us who are most thoroughly committed to solving new human problems have our debts to the past which shape our commitment to change, the content of our desire for change, and our very definition of "new human problems."

Doubtless the other point demands equal stress: the theological input of a dynamic, changing culture cannot maintain a static, uniform relation to its own past if it is to continue as an input into that culture. In such a culture, power to promote change is correlative with capacity to be changed. This was the original, valid objection of my physicist friend to the conservatism of much theology; it fails to make contact with the reality of a new human environment.

II

Almost all analysts of social change in relation to symbol-change agree on the double responsibility of man as thinker and as social

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actor. One Such analyst, Mervyn L. Cadwallader, repeats the point on which Wiener insisted so much,⁴ and then goes on to ask the practical question how "open systems" can remember their past without getting "frozen" in it.

Three general strategies are reported by Cadwallader. Open, change-vulnerable systems discover the right combination of continuity and change when they: (1) take the risk of making those mistakes from which they can learn without disaster, so that they stumble "accidentally" into new, effective combinations of the new and the old; (2) selectively "forget" their past; and (3) deliberately "program" new combinations on the basis of the learning and selectivity of the other approaches.

If only as one experiment in a "new combination" of theological analysis with current sociological analysis, theologians might find it useful to apply these three strategies to the question of continuity and change in their own discipline. Indeed, Cadwallader's suggestions are suggestive of wisdom already latent in the church's own intellectual wrestling with social change in bygone eras. As preliminary to asking about theology's relation to certain pressing modern social changes, we can inquire about this latent familiarity of "the tradition" with these strategies.

(1) The risk of making mistakes. Anthropologists tell us that primitive man has a low tolerance for making mistakes. Functionally interpreted, primitive culture tends to be a bridgehead of human defense against the ever present destructive threats of nature and the centripetal forces of social disintegration. Primitive culture has found a way to "hold body and soul together"; in the minds of its members, its way has hardened into the way. Its great rituals celebrate the unchanging validity of this way; and its sense of time, as Mircea Eliade puts it, assumes the "myth of the eternal return." In such a culture, "mistakes" can be cut to a minimum; actions that challenge the standard definitions of mistakenness are effectively discouraged. It is a mistake to venture beyond certain mountains, a mistake to tamper with the tribal water supply, to marry into a novel tribe, etc.

This scheme has long since been broken in human history, and western religion, not exclusively but distinctively, played a role in

⁴ Amitai and Eva Etzioni, Social Change: Sources, Patterns, and Consequences (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 160, 162.

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the breakup. Abraham "went out, not knowing where he was to go,"⁵ a drastic unprimitive act. From the standpoint of primitive religion, and from the standpoint of a lot of commonsense standards, he made trouble for himself and his descendants by his willingness to trust the future as much as his own ancestors had trusted the past. The symbolic result of this was eschatological religious faith; and the social result was that curious mixture of success and failure which the world has always recognized in the history of the Jewish people, who at their best always managed to believe that from every Egypt there is promised deliverance, that in every Babylon there is a backdrop to the coming "city whose builder and maker is God."⁶

The chemistry of this attitude toward the future has precipitated many elements of modern life. Conceptually speaking, the line from Abraham to Columbus is a very straight line indeed. The two men are linked by a common courage and a common willingness to stumble into something that they were not looking for and to treat that unanticipated discovery as important. A mutual impact of expectation and experience is obviously assumed here. As scholars such as Perry Miller and H. Richard Niebuhr have made very clear, the history of American religious institutions is partly bound up with religion's wrestle with the conflict between expectation and experience. John Winthrop and the Puritans came to the new world with the vision of establishing a "city upon a hill." In imagination at least, that city had a variety of debts to Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, London, and the New Jerusalem yet to come. In their imagining, however, the Puritans failed to reckon with the input of one huge factor: the economic, technical, and social allurement of the American frontier, which for two hundred and fifty years eroded every attempt of even the most religious people to set up hill-cities immune to the perpetual criticism of immigrants and emigrants. Out of this "mistake" they stumbled into an important social invention, namely, pluralism, which has become more highly developed on the American continent than anywhere else in the world.

In this process, of course, they went through some theological re-evaluations. They scaled down their ambitions for the power of religious institutions. They invented the "denomination" and abandoned the culture-comprehending church. Thus they did that

⁵ Heb. 11: 8.
⁶ Heb. 11: 10.

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second thing which both men and machines learn to do in order to change: they selectively "forgot" the past.

(2) How to forget the past. A measure of unscrupulous forgetting is obviously endemic to the Hebrew-Christian tradition. "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on…,"⁷ said the Apostle Paul; and it is interesting to note in the context what he was forgetting: the impressive nature of his own and his ancestors' human achievements, on the one hand, and the depressing nature of his own and his ancestors' blunders, on the other. Involved on the one side was an assumed doctrine of God as man's center of trust and loyalty, the same sort of trust and loyalty which enabled Abraham to forget some of the wisest wisdom of his own ancestors. Involved on the other side was a doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, whereby a man was responsible for his mistakes but not imprisoned by them.

I cannot prove it, but the doctrine and the practice of the forgiveness of sins is probably one of Christianity's greatest contributions to social change and to its own change. A Christian historian has suggested that the parliamentary system is dependent upon the forgiveness of sins,⁸ and one might even say that any struggle for political power short of war is similarly dependent in the long run. "To be social," said Robert Frost, "is to be forgiving."

In any event, some forgetting is basic to life as conceived in the biblical tradition, and there are elements in that tradition which are instrumental to the very forgetting, which raises again the question of theology's relation to its own change. 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." Certainly among the principles of selection in the tradition itself, I would affirm several. One is the distinction between Creator and

⁷ Phil. 3: 13.
⁸ Cf. William L. Miller, The Protestant and Politics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1958), p. 49.

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creation, which demands some notion of transcendence. Another is the ultimate status of love and personality in the history of which the Creator is the author. Concerning both these principles, Gordon Kaufman's article, "On the Meaning of God,"⁹ rings true to the Hebrew-Christian tradition when he says: "The constitutive experience underlying the word 'God' is that of limitation; the constitutive image which gives the term its peculiar transcendent reference is personalistic." Yet a third principle already suggested is the value and potential meaningfulness of every scrap of human and universal history. (On that principle the curiosity of the scientist is characteristically based.)

There are other such principles. A mere moralist like myself may be excused for not dwelling on them here more extensively and technically, but on such principles much of the reformation of Christian theology in the past hundred years has probably proceeded. Certainly the historico-critical approach to the Bible was made possible within theological seminaries because scholars were orthodox enough to believe that there is a distinction between the Word of the Creator and the words of the creature. The history of the Social Gospel in America is hardly imaginable apart from what the evangelical revivals assumed about the status of love and persons in God's world. And it is hard to explain the theological vogue of the idea of secularism apart from the assumption of many readers of Harvey Cox that nothing historically human is alien to the God whom theologians call the Lord of history-nothing, not even the seeming "death" of God.

These are examples of theology reformed on the basis of its own internal convictions. But theology is also reformed from outside, and its capacity for reforming the outside in turn depends on this reciprocal relationship. That brings us to Cadwallader's third suggested procedure for the induction of change within organic or social systems.

(3) A system can articulate with a changing environment by the deliberate programming of novel combinations. Enough has been said already to imply that deliberate provoking of novel circumstances is a characteristic of people who claim some community with the God of Abraham. Isaac, and Jacob; and the rest of these pages I

⁹ Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (April, 1966), pp. 129-130.

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should like to devote to some "novel suggested combinations" that theologians might deliberately "program" into personal and institutional vocations on the American scene. In a such a process, theology may find for itself new flexibility in its response to social change and new vigor as a contributor to that change.

III

In that much-discussed book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan says that the essential social change of our time is the reversal from fragmented, specialized forms of human knowing to two-way, organic forms. This reversal has occurred with the advent of electric communication on a global scale. Says McLuhan:

"It is not the increase in numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives … likewise … our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed."¹⁰

Unfortunately, this media-message has not yet infiltrated the chancellories of all great nations and great universities. Nationalism and specialism are not moribund there. But they are certainly not what they used to be; and of this many people in diplomacy and on university campuses can testify. For example, from the local group of scientists and theologians mentioned above, there emerged at one point a unique series of conversations. Once a week for about three months a nuclear engineer, an economist, and a theologian started having lunch to ask themselves the question: "How do you interrelate engineering, economics, and moral factors ill the making of decisions that affect the economy of underdeveloped countries?" This conversation rode on the momentum of a surmise that McLuhan states eloquently but which was there before any of these three persons read McLuhan. Each of us in our specialties knows that somehow we are at the "end of lineality" and at the beginning of the age of systematic intellectual feedback.¹¹ But what we intuit

¹⁰ Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1965), pp. 35-36, cf. p. 243.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 354.

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here is at variance with how we were educated. The economist in this particular conversation put his finger on, this recurrent pattern of one-way specialism when he said: "We know with our upper minds that we need each other's perspectives on the subject of technological change; but we are always talking our own specialty without really taking into account the other man's specialty. We do not suffer impact from the other man enough in the things that we say. We ask for feedback, but then find it hard to incorporate it into our language and our thinking. One is constantly tempted to start teaching the other fellow one's own sophomore course, and constantly suspicious that it wouldn't do any good."

The question for theologians, inherent in this comment, might be phrased: "Do theologians read the signs of the times well enough to undertake their own tortuous Abramic journey toward intellectual brotherhood?" Does the role of "theologian" in our time increasingly include the specification of self-willed intellectual neighborliness? By that I mean deliberate attempts to establish bridgeheads in the strange territory of "alien disciplines," and to permit those disciplines to establish their bridgeheads in theology's own territory. From the side of physical science, Robert Oppenheimer evidently had something similar in mind in 1958. After some sad experience of his own and others' scientific and political insularity, he said that the days are gone when an Aristotle or a Leonardo could presume to build an intellectual "architecture of global scope." What we can build, he said, is "an immense network of intimacy, illumination, and understanding." And we can do this in such modest ways as "having each other over to dinner."¹²

For theological methodology, this means something like the approach of H. Richard Niebuhr, who once spoke of:

"The infinitely complex pattern of our internal dialogue as it proceeds from one thing to another in a back and forth movement; using familiar patterns as hypotheses in understanding the unfamiliar; refining and changing the symbols or analogies as it discovers that they do not fit completely the new set of experiences; coming back to the original phenomena with a changed pattern and making new discoveries there…. Perhaps it is a consequence of this process that there is similarity among the symbols used in the various

¹² "Daedalus, vol. 87, No. I (Winter, 1958), pp. 75-76, as quoted by Harold Schilling, Science and Religion: An Interpretation of Two Communities (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), p. 218.

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spheres of understanding and of action but never a one to one correspondence."¹³

As Hans Frei put it, commenting on Niebuhr's method, there is a "double start" in this style of theologizing:

"A continuing conversation between concrete persons involved in making this double start-between selves in a community of other selves, which is the Church. And this community, in turn, and the persons in it are in conversation with other persons and communities."¹⁴

To build "community" into the very fabric of an intellectual method may be appropriate for only a few disciplines in the universe of knowing. It may be an exceedingly risky, moralizing sort of method. But it is appropriate to the particular faith that motivates men who speak in this particular way. Theologians have reason to be at peace with this appropriateness. How often they are the ones who want to start up a "dialogue"; and their potential intellectual partners want to know why they should bother. Others do not include theologians in their scope of interest; why should theologians include them? One provisional answer may be McLuhan's analysis of the communications implosion that is making shambles of our specialisms. But the basic theological answer is that theologians believe in dialogue because they believe in God and in his human community. This answer was well expressed by Michael Novak when he said that Christian faith does not offer a man "security, but reconciliation: a wellspring of creative, painfully growing brotherhood."¹⁵

From this general prescription of interdisciplinary companionship for the theological pilgrimage, one may go on to suggest two specific areas in Which some programming of novel combinations will be increasingly appropriate for theologians, especially those willing to call themselves "moral theologians."

IV

For some time it has been the fashion to set the classic Christian bias toward the personal in metaphysics and toward love in ethics

¹³ "The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy," Church History, Vol. 23 (1954), p. 129
¹⁴ "The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr," in Faith and Ethics, ed. Paul Ramsey (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 66. Cf. H. R. Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1949), p. 136
¹⁵ " Christianity: Renewed or Slowly Abandoned?," Daedalus, Vol, 96, No. I (Winter, 1965), p. 264.

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over against modern society's "massiveness." In part, the conflict has been between communalistic, small-town versions of personal life and urban, functional versions of that life. As Harvey Cox says, a single person can accommodate only a certain number of highly personal relationships but a large number of segmental, functional relationships.¹⁶ Urban life enables him to choose the former and still to benefit from the latter. This is a realistic revision of the usual theological bemoaning of the impersonal secular city; but on two counts, both of them moral, Cox's revision itself needs revision or extension.

On the one hand, modern mass society permits the individual to function in relation to millions of unknown persons in expanding political and economic systems. Must we not recognize a profound, morally welcome relation between this increase in social scale and both the quantity and the quality of interpersonal relationships? Should either our ethics or our experience incline us to demarcate strictly the "functional and segmental" from the "personal and holistic"? Both theoretically and practically, is it not the business of the moral theologian to be constantly pushing back the boundaries between the two?

An illustration of that boundary being pushed back came to me recently from a surprising quarter. In an answer to an examination question in a university social studies class a student from a small town in North Carolina intoned a disturbing, neurotic set of praises for the objectives of the Ku Klux Klan. But a few months after the test, something evidently happened to him, perhaps partly from exposure to discussions of American social problems in that class, a segment of the "mass education" of our crowded campus. In his final examination, he wrote:

"I have previously lived in a framework that was under control, very conservative, and very weak. Now I am disturbed about this framework. Has the time come for me to quit being a follower and to become a leader? Has the time come when I should stand out of my conservative shell and express my opinions? So far I have been like the man who passed the injured man on the street. There was a crowd around, and no one offered help because all felt that the next man was better qualified. Now I believe that the time has come for me to act. I have a duty to the poor man in the slums, the Negro, the businessman downtown, middle class man in the suburbs, and to North Carolina State University."

¹⁶ Cf. The Secular City (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1965), p. 43.

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The remarkable thing about this quotation is that it gives us a glimpse into a young man's becoming a free, expressive person in connection with the expansion of his ability to identify with "all sorts and conditions of men." At the very least, he illustrates the capacity of mass-institutions, like the university, to contribute to a reciprocal growing sense of personal identity and interpersonal identification. Perhaps he also represents an instance of religious conversion. Nothing should agitate the theological imagination more than the question of how modern forms of social organization can be increasingly used to promote just such conversions.

But just here the theological, moral, and social analysis of the interrelation of small scale personal growth and large scale societal membership needs to focus on some severe institutional conflicts; and it is here that Harvey Cox's praises of the secular city have been justly criticized. It is one thing to have a sense of personal relationship to "the poor man in the slum, the businessman downtown, etc.," and another to be in an active, change-producing relationship to such men. It is one thing to see the rioting in 125 cities via the ubiquitous television camera; it is another to act to reduce the danger of riots. There is great danger here: that we will become surfeited with the spectacle of personal need in our world neighborhood before we learn to reorganize the neighborhood for the meeting of those needs.

Certainly we are only at the beginning of such a reorganization. At the 1966 World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, Margaret Mead said that New Guinea tribesmen have only recently been initiated into the secret of how to organize more than five hundred persons into a single society; and a Dutch international civil servant noted that our progress in this respect is not half fast enough. After centuries of war, only in the past twenty years have French and German farmers had the imagination to see that they both have the same stake in the price of tomatoes. Such a mutual identification of human interest, he said, is a "passing moment of grace, a crack in the structure, and you can plant something in it"¹⁷ -a new, more inclusive sort of structure, like the European Economic Community. But the major moral problem of the EEC right now is that it is not inclusive enough. Any African or Asian businessman will testify to that.

¹⁷ Max Kohnstamm, "Peace in a Nuclear Age," Conference Address No. 32, World Conference on Church and Society. July 12-26, 1966

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In the struggle to make our institutions inclusive, the struggle to serve the cause of personal identity by expanding the person's social identifications, we are very much "between two worlds." We all are in functional relations with the slum; we are beginning to have our imaginations tutored enough to identify with slum people and to be disturbed by those functional relations; but the institutional handles for relating what we can imagine to what we can do are often very few. A minimal input of the moral theologian here might be simply the affirmation that technologies and institutions capable of personalizing the relations of many previously unrelated people are subject to improvement until they thus relate many more. Until we find the improvements, of course, such an affirmation is likely to sound utopian; but as Wilbert Moore said in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, great is the utility of utopias.¹⁸ They sometimes move men to act like Abraham and to effect a third sort of combination.

V

As suggested above, the theory of a split between theory and practice has never grown healthily in American soil. The frontier pushed us toward implicit pragmatism. James and Dewey easily became "our philosophers." Of all the disciplines, theology has been the slowest, perhaps, to adapt the contributions of pragmatism to its own method; but the straws are in the wind for this change also. Reinhold Niebuhr's unsystematic, prophetically potent, situational-relevant assault on the specific sins of American society; Richard Niebuhr's careful attempt to move "back and forth" between "the symbols" and "the new set of experiences"; and the recent discovery of the ivory-tower theologian that there is some theology to learn on a picket line, these and many other signs point to the emergence in this country of a theology that opposes in principle the setting of "mere theory" over against "mere practicality."

One of the best recent statements of this tendency among younger theologians is a work of James Sellers, Theological Ethics. For too long, says Sellers, we American Protestants have used the Reformation rhetoric of man's passivity before the active grace of God, while ignoring the possible theological significance of our own "ageric" or action-prone culture. In so doing we have failed to wrestle with the

¹⁸ American Sociological Review, Vol. 31, No. 6 (December, 1966), p. 770.

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paradox stated by Jonathan Edwards: "God does all, and we do all … God is the only proper author and fountain: we only are the proper actors."¹⁹ American theologians have talked that way ever since, in their most American moments at any rate. Sellers goes on boldly to say:

"Natural human activity, in short, must now be assigned a primary place rather than an ancillary one in theological investigation. God speaks through human acts and words as well as through receptivity and silence, for either state is at best a kind of finite witness to the divine. I would argue that on the whole the divine initiative and grace are now more faithfully mediated through the symbols of human initiative (especially at the level of human relations, but not excluding muscular effort) than otherwise. We will always need the complementary symbols of receptivity, to be sure, for silence, emptiness, and dependence will continue to symbolize one aspect of man's stance before God. But in any case one must represent divinity with the materials of his own culture, and since the Enlightenment, Western man's inevitable discovery of himself has rendered inaccurate the older view of man as in and of himself ethically and socially incompetent.²⁰

On the surface, this account of the God-man relationship is reminiscent of the old free will-determinism argument in western theology; but in fact Sellers is bypassing that argument in a way akin to the cybernetic analysis of change. In the terms of the first part of this paper, if we return to Gordon Kaufman's analogy from the transcendence of personhood to the transcendence of God and combine it with the notion that reciprocity characterizes all "open systems," we arrive at a reaffirmation of Jonathan Edwards' assertion that the "action" is on both sides of the divine-human relationship at all points. There is no separation of divine liberty and human liberty.

In a similar way, on the level of ethics, neither is there separation between "faith" and "works." Each is dead, inhuman, apart from the other; and the old Protestant-Roman Catholic debate on the subject depends on worn-out categories. And if, as biblical theologians have insisted in the past generation, the Word of God is not to be disentangled from the historical deeds of God, how much less should men expect their ideas to be disentangled from their activities? This is tantamount, of course, to saying that Christian theol-

¹⁹ Theological Ethics (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1966), p. 43.
²⁰ Ibid., p. 46.

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ogy and ethics must go pragmatic and experimental. There is risk to the tradition in this alternative; but there is even greater risk to the future of man in other alternatives.

VI

How can the theologian who believes that theology is servant rather than queen or traffic cop draw back from theological pragmatism? He may be whistling in the dark when he speaks of interdisciplinary reconciliation; but the way to find out is to seek such a reconciliation. We may be merely utopian when we speak of a large-scale society that is more personal and interpersonal than any society known to man; but the way to see is to participate in attempts to rethink and restructure the secular city. For man is both an initiator and a responder, both a thinker and an actor. Ideas and activities have reciprocal, mutual impact on each other. In the future, theologians in a changing society would do well to build from such presuppositions.