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New Birth of Conscience
By Frederick Herzog

"What is our blindness today?" Theology moves forward when great questions arise. This one, posed by George E. Tinker, an Osage/Cherokee, will haunt us far into the twenty-first century. Tinker earlier had referred to what Christian missions have done to native peoples of South and North America by wanting to "do good," moving them into "reductions" or "reservations," while simultaneously robbing them of their cultural values and their way of life. "With the best of intentions, and with the full support of our best theologies and intellectual capabilities, do we continue to fall into the same sorts of traps and participate in unintended evils?" If this is the question haunting us, Tinker is very clear about its presupposition: "Without confronting and owning our past., as white Americans, as Europeans, as American Indians, as African Americans, and so forth, we cannot hope to overcome that past and generate a constructive healing process, leading to a world of genuine, mutual respect among peoples, communities, and nations." ¹

At the moment, some theologians are ringing their hands about the "death" of theology. What is happening to theology has been brought home by William C. Placher: "Theology has a bad reputation in most Christian churches these days-it's regarded as obscure, hard to understand, irrelevant, a bit of a joke. " ² What is theology's blindness? For lack of interest in theology, theologians themselves are partly to blame. In our capitalist society, theology too has often become private enterprise. As one

The late Frederick Herzog, Professor of Systematic Theology at Duke University and author of numerous books, including God-Walk: Shaping Dogmatics (1988), completed this article shortly before his death on October 9, 1995.
¹ George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. viii-ix.
² William C. Placher, "Why Bother with Theology?" The Christian Century 111 (February 2-9, 1994), pp. 104-108.

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theologian recently told me when I asked for whom he was writing theology: "For myself."

In an unsuspecting moment, there was Oklahoma City: the bomb heard around the world. Arab terrorists invading our shores? No, Americans killing Americans, especially children. The vast violence has been there all along in our country, but now it jolts us into common accountability. Where
did we go wrong?

In our American tradition, there have been moments of radical awakening from comatose states. One such moment was when Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, with the emancipation of the slaves on his mind, tried to appeal to the creativity of the American people: "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves" (December 1, 1862). ³

Also in our day, the dogmas of the quiet past are no longer adequate to the stormy present. What happened in Lincoln's day obviously was very violent. For our day, we have to create a nonviolent history, and we have to read the past critically. Recently, Swiss theologian Walter J. Hollenweger tried to sum up the "difficulty piled high" in much of the theological heritage we received from Europe: "Scholarly theology is bankrupt not because its products are completely worthless, but because it cannot transport its products to where they are more needed than the daily bread, that is, to church and society." ⁴ In parts of Protestantism, transporting our products to church and society has been a theological compulsion for the past two hundred years. Much North American Protestant theology has promoted the apologetic notion that it had to adjust itself to the "man come of age." In an inverted sense, Protestant missions often have not done things very differently, for example, in Latin America, as they tried to cater to the economic ambitions of explorers, pioneers, and entrepreneurs.

Hollenweger suggests, as a way out, renewal through a narrative theology close to the Bible, and he compares the theologian's job with that of a car manufacturer who, in the process of designing the car, always keeps the buyer in mind. ⁵ This does not help, however, in view of the Oklahoma City bomb. Our unique North American challenge is not primarily a hermeneutic one: to communicate the gospel to church and society. Our mandate is to become the theological detective, to discover the basic flaw in the history of the American church and society: the contempt for the dignity of the Indian, the black, and the woman. We have "known" this for some time. But our primal flaw, the genocide of the Indian, has

³ The Living Lincoln, edited by Paul M. Angle and Earl Schenck Miers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), p. 522.
⁴ Walter J. Hollenweger, "Theologie tanzen: Warum wir eine 'narrative Exegese' brauchen," Evangelische Kommentare 7 (1995), p. 403 (my translation).
⁵ Ibid.

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hardly been explored theologically together with American Indians. I suspect this repression keeps us from seeing our present flaw: our continuing domination of those who are weak.

With today's situation also "piled high with difficulty," we can "rise with the occasion." We had thought at times that we had solved at least a few of society's problems. Oklahoma City woke us up to the fact that the terrorists were "patriotic" Americans who, in an atmosphere fostered also by ultraright Christians, were killing other Americans at random. Now we need to do even more theological detective work. Western Christianity has a long history of "patriotic" violence since the days of Constantine and, on our shores, since the Spanish Conquest. From Columbus on Hispaniola in 1492 to Wounded Knee in 1890, the "patriotic" cruelties done to Indians by well-meaning Christians are mind boggling. As an Indian witness, American Horse:, described the scene at Wounded Knee, fleeing mothers with their children were "shot right through," including those who were pregnant or nursing. ⁶ L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz, as editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, dared to write: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians." ⁷

"What kind of christology do we operate with as people who sustain the Indian reservation? Our habit of heart is the violent. "

Historian David E. Stannard and others figure there might have been 100 million Indian dead from Hispaniola to Wounded Knee. ⁸ Add the brutal story of six million blacks dying on the "passage." While these events seem long past, they force us to detect our present blindness-which brings us to our sweet advantages of life in the "rich" nations today derived from the exploitation of poor nations, involving a war by other means:

The third world war has already started. It is a silent war. Not, for that reason, any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying, there are children. It is a war over the Third World debt, and which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam. (Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, head of Brazil's Workers' Party)

⁶ Quoted in David 1:. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 127.
⁷ Quoted in Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 126.
⁸ Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 261-268.

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The hidden terror of this war also reaches into our cities and Indian reservations, where poverty is worse than a decade ago. Our continuing complicity in the domination over other people in our own country is focused', in the Indian reservation. What kind of christology do we operate with as people who sustain the Indian reservation? Our habit of the heart is violent. 'Nonviolence involves the Sisyphean task of shaping an alternate society or "reinventing" America.

So "our case is new" (Lincoln). With the event of Oklahoma City, we are under the gun of our gun culture. Had we realized what violence we, as one of the world's top weapons dealers, inflict upon ourselves? It is not just the weight of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex but also the cultural violence in every nook and cranny of society: battering of women, rape, child abuse, and the violence of movies and TV Will we theologians immersed in such violence share in God's own walk into the turmoil of our violent history? Abandoning a theology of private self-consciousness, "God-walk" would be the fusion of our bodies with our words, and truth would be that for which we put our life on the line.

"What is our blindness today?" We do not as yet detect how deeply we are caught in the mass psychology of violence that antecedes the two World Wars and goes back at least to 1492 and the subsequent Conquest. It is ingeniously disguised. Just like slavery and segregation, the reservation has novas yet entered the ken of our theologies as starting point and mold of our doctrinal deconstruction and construction. Yet in the midst of disguise, we cannot but detect also the nonviolent hope, the life-affirming dream of our history.

So we need a new primer of what it means to be human. "Thinking anew and acting anew" (Lincoln) today means for a while to hold back reproducing the creed with its doctrines of God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and church! Dogmas are part of our past. We can interpret them. I have done this for more than four decades. Right now, we have to face ourselves in the mirror and learn how the violence we as human beings bring to dogma shapes its use-at times brutally. We need a transformation of our superiority madness and its implicit power wielding. We need a new birth of conscience.

The first step for me is to continue facing the truth of Auschwitz and linking] it to other Christian inflictions of death. For half a century, we tried to understand how the Holocaust could have happened among "Christianized" German people. Among many others, Sidney G. Hall, in Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul's Theology, calls for a theology that "evolves out of Auschwitz." ⁹ When theologians claimed that Jesus was the only child of God for all humanity, not just a child of God embodying God's invitation to all, it paved the way for intolerance: Everyone who was not a Christian

⁹ Sidney G Hall III, Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul's Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), p. 19.

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had to become a Christian. Paul, rather, seems to contend, Hall claims, that Jews could accept the gospel of Christ without becoming "Christians." ¹⁰ Since God's work in Christ results in the liberation of nonpersons, the church is moving toward an inclusive theology "out of the cries of dead Jewish children." ¹¹

Hall calls attention to the tragic error: Christians assuming they have a better faith than Jews. Yet are not we theologians still blind to a further feeling of superiority? In reviewing Judaism, Christianity, and liberation theology, Hall claims he could not call his theology a liberation theology because he does not belong to an oppressed group. ¹² Is it not rather the other way around: that theology needs to describe what God is doing in any group? "God-walk" will not allow theologians to determine beforehand where God's liberation can or cannot take place.

Hall quotes Bonhoeffer about the need "to see the great events of world history from below," the place of the underdog. ¹³ As we walk on this land, we need to look below our feet, where lie buried the bones of Native Americans whom we forced to die before their time. To break the spell of present-day theology, we can begin with reflecting on God's walk among the Indians. It involves a transvaluation of our values of superiority. God puts pressure on human conscience to evoke value change. When we lose the last vestige of superiority feeling over those who owned the land, we are weak, yet therefore strong (2 Cor. 12:10).

"Jesus in his walk embodies the protection privilege of the poor. He invites us concretely to commit ourselves to others in distress. "

In our weakness, we find ourselves theologically between postmodern theology, with a great variety of religious sensibility, and a nonfoundational theology, practically denying variety as foundation of theology. Terrence Tilley, together with various co-authors, has given us an excellent overview of the former stance in Postmodern Theologies: The Challenge of Religious Diversity. ¹⁴ One tacit-and occasionally not so tacit-assumption here is Christianity's need to be in solidarity with other religions. But how are we to understand this solidarity? Tilley speaks, on

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 19-20.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 139-140.
¹² Ibid., pp. 138-139.
¹³ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 17; quoted in Hall, Christian Anti-Semitism, p. 140.
¹⁴ Terrence W. Tilley, with others, Postmodern Theologies: The Challenge of Religious Diversity (Maryknoll : Orbis, 1995).

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the one hand, of postmodern approaches emphasizing a reductive pluralism of religious traditions and, on the other hand, of approaches that stress irreducible particularities while nevertheless aspiring to inclusivity or even universalism of religion.

Theological postmodernism here presses toward a universal category of religion. Yet Jesus did not appeal to some "religious otherness" (apparently a major postmodern reference to God) but to God's walk among the suffering. Instead of universality, Jesus in his walk embodies the protection privilege of the poor. He invites us concretely to commit ourselves to others in distress. That pertains to Wounded Knee and hundreds of other places of the Conquest, including the auction blocks of black slaves and the abuse of women. Walking this road, we break the spell of fitting Jesus into the universal of religion.

Rejecting a Jesus subservient to any universal framework of religion is forcefully expressed in nonfoundationalism. The critique, for example, in Theology without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth, edited by Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation, is based on a reaction to Descartes' assumption that modern thought had to rebuild the foundations of reason and to the later claim of theological liberalism that theology had to be raised again on this new foundation. ¹⁵

While modernist and postmodernist frameworks are here left behind, some no foundationalists end up with an exclusive base in the church that borders on the doctrine of "outside the church there is no salvation." All important things theological happen within the confines of a kind of "Loveboat" church. Yet God's protection privilege of the poor often grabs people outside any "churchianity." The communal conscience of humanity is the place where Jesus today may be working most effectively. Instead of churchianity, God offers us communal conscience. St. Paul keenly detects this "umpire" of truth: "We appeal to every person's conscience before God" (2 Cor. 4:2).

Here lies the need for time out, for "disenthrallment" (Lincoln), a common effort at breaking the spell of superiority, universality, and churchianity. It calls for a radically different theology. We are called to mutuality in truth seeking that transcends individual theologies. We forget that the church did not begin with books about Jesus or religious talk, but with people walking with Jesus, sensing God's nearness in their communal conscience, and, later, breaking bread with each other, celebrating Jesus' presence. Being people of "the way" (Acts 9:2), their life was the art of listening together to communal conscience, a knowing together with God, conscientia in a corporate way. Present in this conscience is God's constant transvaluation of values in the protection privilege of the poor. Here art unites, but religion divides.

¹⁵ Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation eds. Theology without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994). h

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Vincent Van Gogh knew of a Jesus who is

the greatest artist of all, disdaining marble, clay or colour, working with living flesh ... this unbelievable artist, one who is scarcely conceivable to such an obtuse instrument as the modern neurotic, wornout brain, made neither statues, nor pictures, nor books; indeed, he said clearly enough what he was doing-fashioning living men, immortal beings. ¹⁶

We grasp Jesus' art by walking along with God among the Indian dead of yesterday and the culturally dead of today's Indian reservation. Vine Deloria, Jr. observes: "Indians were encouraged to adopt the values and attitudes of the consumer society." ¹⁷ The best way to stop imposing our consumer values is to join God in resisting them. Forty-five percent of the potential Indian work force is unemployed. That compares "favorably" with the percentage of young blacks unemployed in the United States. Only if we change ourselves in view of these "invisible" people, will we become aware of the "invisible God." Here anchors our theological future. There is the modern brutalization thrust among Christian nations from the First through the Second World War until today, weighing heavily on our theological thought patterns. It all circles around the fiendish destructiveness of economics, of money, or mammon, increasingly ruling our lives more than God. Being freed from mammon's demonic power, we will excruciatingly learn, in Lincoln's words, "to think anew and act anew."

"What is needed is a basic revamping of all theology as we relate it to the `common tradition' of conquest-violence between South and North America."

Secular analogies today prove that the art of peaceful revolution is becoming a viable option. The Berlin wall fell on account of the courage of countless conscience-bound people when nobody expected it. With Greenpeace appealing to the communal conscience of the world, neither government nor commercial "powers that be" could afford to have the Brent Spar hauled off to its ocean-polluting grave. Contemporary governments and transnational corporations can be compelled to let conscience-evoking groups cogovern without recourse to violence-toward an alternate society.

If we detect the true character of our North American social dilemma, we will discover that we are still accomplices of our society's war and violence machinery. Its metaphor, Oklahoma City, is a mandate for a weaponless society. In Tilley's postmodern book appears Edith Wyschogrod's moving story of the French Protestants of Chambon, people who rescued Jews

¹⁶ Vincent van Gogh, Letters to Emile Bernard (New York, 1938), p. 44.
¹⁷ Vine Deloria, Jr., in American Studies Newsletter (January, 1995).

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during World War ii. Her point is that the postmodern saintly life "is a plea for boldness.' and risk." ¹⁸ There are similar examples in nonfoundationalism. Stanley Hauerwas' stress on the Holocaust memory is an instance. ¹⁹ This is bedrock we cannot ever evade. Segregation had to go, but there is still the Indian reservation. We now need immense boldness not to continue forcing the Native American into the harsh choice between bingo palace and unemployment. We need to risk the protection privilege of the poor to resound in North American communal conscience, so any future theology will be compelled to take its starting point here: exegesis, church history, systematic as well as practical theology.

Thirty, years after the first signs of black power appeared on the horizon and we could hear the distant thunder of black theology approaching, there is hardly an impact to be detected in the dominant Protestant theology. James Cone proves to be right: Blacks do not "exist" for us. We should not be surprised about the hue and cry over new racism. Theology is even less affected by Native American theology. What is needed is a basic revamping of all theology as we relate it to the "common tradition" of conquest-violence between South and North America, compelling us to shape theology with both continents in mind, demanding their equal due. This project will bring about a new christology and a new theological education. Yet first of all, we need time out for what Lincoln called "disenthrallment" : a new birth of conscience.

So "in my soul" I kneel in the grass of the Dakota prairies that gave me birth. Today, knowing a little more of the "Trail of Tears" that led also through these prairies to Wounded Knee, I bury my head in the grass, incapable of tears. Looking up again, in my mind I see on the horizon toward the East the smoke of the ovens of Auschwitz. "Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died." In small compass, this is my life-gutted yet not burned out, with "miles to go before I sleep." God all along is walking against the tyranny of mammon, superiority, and power while reinventing the American-nonviolently. "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children" (Irving Greenberg). ²⁰

¹⁸ Quoted in Tilley, Postmodern Theologies, p. 70.
¹⁹ Stanley Hauerwas, "Remembering as a Moral Task: The Challenge of the Holocaust," in Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 61-90.
²⁰ Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust," in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust, edited by Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1977), p. 23; quoted in Hall, Christian Anti-Semitism, p. v.