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The Hartford Declaration

IN the April issue of THEOLOGY TODAY (pp. 94-97), we printed the full text of "An Appeal for Theological Affirmation," popularly known as the Hartford Declaration. The Declaration, consisting of thirteen themes of contemporary thought considered dangerous to the church's message, was signed by eighteen people from various Christian churches. Several other people were involved in preliminary consideration of the ideas expressed in the document. A meeting at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in January, 1975, was in large measure organized by Peter Berger, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, and Richard John Neuhaus, pastor of the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Brooklyn, and out of that meeting emerged the text of the "Appeal for Theological Affirmation." THEOLOGY TODAY erred in giving the impression that the text had been formulated in consultations prior to the January meeting.

We have asked four people to respond to the Hartford Declaration, and their reactions, plus a response from Dr. Berger, are printed below. Ernest Campbell is minister of the Riverside Church, New York City, and author of the recent Locked in a Room With Open Doors (1974). Joseph Fletcher has been a regular contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY and is the author of Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966). Formerly Professor of Pastoral Theology and Christian Ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, he is now Professor of Medical Ethics, University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, Va. Letty M. Russell is Assistant Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and author of Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective-A Theology (1974). Earlier she served as a pastor of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York. Richard Shaull, Professor of Ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary, has also been a frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY. Formerly a missionary in Brazil, Dr. Shaull is the author of Encounter with Revolution (1955) and, with Carl Oglesby, Containment and Change (1967). Dr. Berger is a member of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council and his most recent book is Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (1974), which is reviewed in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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ERNEST CAMPBELL

Sooner or later it had to come, a Statement to the church that would attempt to make some sorely needed mid-course theological corrections. I, for one, am grateful for the baker's dozen of affirmations that came out of the Hartford experience.

For too long now the church has been busy seconding other people's motions at the cost of fidelity to its own documents. Haunted by the threat of being branded irrelevant, we have struggled to reach an accommodation with an age that was sure of its ability to solve the ills of humankind without invoking biblical categories.

The Hartford appeal is not for the church to abandon its concern for history, but to work for the transformation of history in terms congenial to its faith.

Worship in recent years has degenerated into an unworthy subjectivism. Personal moods have mattered more than the reality of God. Jesus has been twisted into whatever prototype of humanity was "in" at the moment. The miraculous element in faith has been scuttled out of a desire not to appear irrational. The uniqueness and finality of Jesus have been sacrificed on the altar of religious affability.

But this is not all. The church has allowed its docket to be drawn up by a world that is largely indifferent, if not hostile, to the pearl of great price. The "mystery of iniquity" has been simplified to mean only that which is inhuman. This reductionism has denied evil the cosmic scope suggested by New Testament references to "principalities and powers."

The Hartford statement puts its finger on a number of sore spots. Where one winces most upon reading it depends on where one has compromised most grievously. The holiday from theology is over. We cannot hope for long to be pragmatically helpful while being conceptually wrong or obscure.

I see the Hartford paper as summoning the church to recover the initiative and go on the offensive. The prevailing motto in a pluralistic society is "Live and Let Live." We've done a better job of "letting live" than "living." Falling over backwards to welcome the initiatives of others, we have failed to release compelling initiatives of our own.

The thirteen articles that come to us in this affirmation might be suspect had they been hammered out by Gnostic Christians who want no truck with history. Happily this is not the case. The intent behind this document is not to foster a retreat from history but to give us better reasons for getting in and staying in and knowing why we're there.

There is something salutary about an ad hoc group of concerned Christians coming together on their own to wrestle with issues of this magnitude. Had the venture been "sponsored" or "commissioned" by a major denomination or two, some of its appeal and fire-power would likely have been lost.

As a pastor, I hope to use this document as a text for study with my

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people. In fact, we have an officers' retreat in sight at which these thirteen propositions will serve as major fare. Any Christian who can read this paper and fail to get turned on doesn't have all his switches!

JOSEPH FLETCHER

The Hartford Declaration's thirteen Themes (theses?) are shrewdly selected, probably on target, possibly important. Only time will tell whether the Declaration is a cry from a witches' coven or one more perceptive warning in the long history of primitive Christianity's retreat.

As still another affirmation of orthodoxy, succinct but well focused, it has clarity; but it is hard to see how it needed "courage" to make it, as it claims. If anything, it is stubborn rather than brave, although its signers probably like to think of it as being faithful to the classical tradition-which it is.

We ought to thank the group's redactors not only for their lucid formulations but for going directly to the heart of the matter. Their opening paragraph, or protograph, puts all thirteen charges or complaints under the umbrella of a "loss of a sense of the transcendent." Theme #11 ("An emphasis on God's transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.") only drives the point home harder. The day is gone when we can seriously suppose that "God" is up there or out there; God is in here, or nowhere.

They surely had no reason to say this loss is "apparent." It is real and a palpable fact among believers or confessors of all kinds. And there are so many kinds. At the same time, looked at realistically, it would be hysterical to say that transcendence in god-talk has been wholly lost; it hangs on in the rhetoric of many Christians, as well as with some semi-Christians and ex-Christians. It even enjoys a certain faddish revival by Jesus freaks, faith healers, and talkers in tongues.

Looking over the Declaration's themes has provided an interesting exercise in self-examination, and I've done so with most of the predictable agreements and reservations. If I were still engaged in academic theologizing, I would certainly want to use the Declaration as a "syllabus of errors" quite superior to Pope Leo's; it goes far deeper in its analysis. Its "theme" statements are better phrased and better founded than the group's explanatory commentary. For most of the Themes, I would have no substantial caveats or nit-picks. But I am inclined to pause and ponder over three of the Themes, as stated in the Declaration.

Part of the commentary for Theme #3 ("Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity's noblest creation") reads: " We did not invent God; God invented us." Now for

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me, it makes no sense at all to claim that God is our creation, whether the noblest or not. If we created God, then we are atheists and very much alone in the universe. A human-made idol isn't "God" in any admissible sense.

As to Theme #6 ("To realize one's potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation"), taken as stated this seems to see those of us who might be called "revisionists" as far too individualistic and narcissistic to make sense either biologically or socially.

I find much the same kind of solipsism in Theme #9 ("Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion"). In my own case, whatever others may think, I realize I have a very real and substantial debt to "institutions" and "historical traditions," and however much I depart from their "letter," if not their "spirit," I know nevertheless that I stand on their shoulders.

Maybe it is the seeming ingratitude of the "modernists" that turns the Hartford group on, but, in truth, those they so accurately characterize are moved much more, I think, by a nostalgic honesty.

LETTY M. RUSSELL

In the Hartford Declaration, there is much repudiation but very little affirmation. There is even less concern "to sit with the others" who are indirectly accused of heterodoxy. The so-called "eighteen Christian heads" have attacked "false, debilitating secular influences" (The New York Times, Jan. 28, 1975). 1 am not sure what "Christian heads" are; I thought we had only One. As one of the "non-heads" who doesn't know whether or not I'm included in the Themes, I will try to speak, not to persons, but to the style and intention of the document.

The style and form of the Hartford statement conveys the impression that it is a declaration. Like the Barmen Declaration (1934) and the Frankfort Declaration (1970), it seems to have certain persons in mind that it intends to include in the damnamus rubric. Yet unlike these other declarations where the preliminary statements make clear who the "enemies" are, this one never bothers to tell us against whom the document is addressed.

Perhaps it is a confession of sin. Some of those who signed the Declaration have at other times appeared to be part of a secular Zeitgeist, and they might be confessing their true orthodoxy and past errors. If this is so, the style does not convey it, nor is there much humility evident in the rather self-evident repudiations of "pervasive themes" of today.

Certainly there is little "theological affirmation" in this appeal, and

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I would conclude from the form of the document that it is a declaration with an only vaguely concealed damnamus rubric. If that is the case, it is a bad piece of Christian theology. The Good News is addressed to "Themes," and the bad news of heterodoxy is not even directed at specifically named people or groups who would then be given the opportunity of colloquium and response. This is no way to engage in mutual dialogue with one's sisters and brothers in Christ.

From my own experience as a pastor and teacher engaged with others in the struggles against racism, sexism, and economic oppression in society, I have no trouble agreeing with the substance of the document. I always thought that the "renewal of Christian witness and mission" was directly connected to the biblical message of God's freedom to be with us as Creator, Liberator, and Advocate. The traditioning action of God in Jesus Christ is the basis of our participation as Christians in the struggles and groaning of the world.

So, the document bothers me, not because of its orthodoxy, but because of its implied intention to warn those who think that the key issue for our time is orthopraxy. As Martin Marty has pointed out, the framers of the document appear to be very much a part of the transcendence Zeitgeist of the 1970's, and by implication say that those who stubbornly think that the church is in danger of losing its soul for lack of acting out the gospel belong to the incarnational "anachronisms" of the 1960's (The Christian Century, Feb. 19, 1975, with responses in April 2, 1975).

Like many other schooled and unschooled theologians, I continue to affirm that sound theology includes wrestling with the agenda of the oppressed-whether or not that agenda is at the top of the "hit parade." Somehow the liberation of the "crushed ones" of whatever race, sex, or nation seems to be high on the biblical agenda, and needs to be higher on the agenda of a church that follows One who came "to give his life as a ransom for many." If this leads some people to search for truth away from the path of orthodoxy, at least it means the Word is alive and active in their struggles and may even come to us in new and unexpected ways.

If there is time at all for such "broadside" declarations (and I do not think there is), then it should be devoted to relating orthodoxy to orthopraxy. For today we are not in danger of losing transcendence because of secular society but because of those who refuse to hear the groaning for liberation as a Word to the church to speak Good News through actions of justice and liberation.

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RICHARD SHAULL

When people arc dying of thirst in the desert, it doesn't help much to talk to them about the pure water once at their disposal in wells now filled with sand or to condemn those who are digging in the wrong places. What matters is for us to use our energies to clear the way for water to flow once again.

I share the intention of those who signed the Hartford Declaration. My experience of faith and of the modern world leaves me appalled at the lack of vision and vitality, the mediocrity and barrenness of a world without transcendence. I also want to affirm the dimensions of transcendence they are after.

But I can't assume any longer that speaking of God in the old theological terms-within the framework of traditional world views and types of rationality-will get us anywhere. For I am surrounded by students-many of them among the most sensitive ones I know-for whom neither our traditional affirmations of faith nor life in the church are any longer the bearers of insight, meaning, or power for living: students for whom a metaphysics of transcendent being no longer makes sense; women who can no longer accept our theological formulations or our ways of thinking; young people whose consciousness of life and the world is not touched by what we have to say; students who have suddenly become aware that what they have experienced as "Christian faith" until now has limited their life and thought and reduced their world, not broken it open to new horizons. For most of these women and men, there is also something about their religious past that makes them yearn for a new experience of faith-and that is precisely what we have not yet offered them.

I want to find ways to respond to their cry. The Hartford "affirmations" don't help me for several reasons:

1. Rather than affirming radical transcendence, this statement is one more reflection of the mood of our time. In one area of our common life after another, we tend to respond to the erosion of traditional concepts, values and perspectives by affirming, in a louder voice, precisely those things which have become most problematical. If we are living a dynamic experience of Christian transcendence, then we have the freedom to see and admit the cultural conditioning of our theological formulations and our religious institutions, to face the most serious questions being raised about those things we have taken for granted, and to risk moving into and through death in the hope of resurrection. I get no sense of that possibility in this declaration.

2. To live by faith in this situation is not primarily a matter of defending Christianity and the church against modern errors; it is rather a call to accept the fact that our theological world is failing apart and see, in the midst of this, a new task to be undertaken. We can explore new ways of drawing on a broken-down tradition to challenge the

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limits of much contemporary secular thought, to discover and affirm the unique contribution of our Christian heritage in dialogue with other religions, to express in worship and ritual the transcendent realities breaking into one-dimensional existence, and to live our concern for human justice and well-being within institutional structures of death-and take the consequences.

3. If we believe in, and in some way live, the reality of transcendence, then we are free to concern ourselves about creating conditions for a new experience of faith. We can trust that, along that road, we will be surprised by the emergence of a new language that will eventually provide us with resources for theological reflection.

4. We are surrounded today by men and women who are struggling to affirm, very tentatively, life and hope in the midst of irrationality and disintegration. Many of them, often those from a secular background, are looking to us for help, but are turned away by any form of Christian triumphalism which gives the impression that it has answers. This is an extraordinary occasion for us to discover once again that God's power is manifested in weakness, as we demonstrate our capacity to engage in a long term search and make visible to others the excitement this has for those who live by faith.

PETER L. BERGER

IT seems somehow unfair to say least in response to Ernest Campbell, since his comments are by far the most positive. I can only say that he has understood very clearly what we intended to do with the Hartford statement, and I'm very happy that he not only agrees with the intention but finds the statement useful. From now on, whenever I pass Riverside Church, I shall do so with a new sense of affinity!

Joseph Fletcher, I take it, feels that the statement is a little hard on the "modernists," who maintain the themes it repudiates, and he also feels that he should not be counted among them. The former feeling is obviously debatable; I'm glad to take note of the latter. But there is one point made by Fletcher (the same point may be found in other comments) that should be addressed-namely, that the Hartford statement is "still another affirmation of orthodoxy."

The group that issued the statement was, of course, very heterogeneous. I don't doubt that for some of its members the meaning of the statement was, indeed, a call to Christians to return to the tradition. I know that this was not the case with everyone in the group; it certainly was not with me. Theologically (not politically) I was probably the farthest on the "left" in the group. Insofar as I can locate myself theologically at all, it is within a stream of thought that

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comes from liberal Protestantism; I'm emphatically heterodox in a number of central theological positions; consequently, I have no interest in any orthodox or neo-orthodox reconstruction projects. For me, the meaning of the statement, on its affirmative or positive side, is a call for a return to transcendence-which is an altogether different matter. As to the tradition (more accurately, the traditions-since there are several), I have my own difficulties in this area. For me, the issue is not a call to return to the tradition, but to return to a struggle with the tradition. But one can only struggle with the tradition if one takes it seriously, which is why I reject the facile way in which the tradition has been utilized to legitimate this or that contemporary ideology.

More important, the Hartford statement could not be an orthodox manifesto, for the simple reason that its signatories could never agree on what this orthodoxy should be. We did not set out to write a creed. We could not have done so. Quite deliberately, we addressed ourselves to a negative agenda. What we agreed on, unanimously, was where to say no! Nevertheless, we called the statement an affirmation because we intended our repudiations to be the start of a positive theological enterprise. I don't quite see why such a procedure is "stubborn"; we did not claim that it took courage, though I should mention that some of the signatories (not including me) have experienced personal unpleasantness as a result, while others thought it impolitic to be associated with the statement. If nothing else, these facts verify that we were not addressing ourselves to strawmen!

Letty Russell is offended not so much by the substance as by the tone of the statement, which impressed her as arrogant and aggressive. To her ears, it rang with the hoary sound of damnamus. I'm sorry about that. Protestations of humility are always futile, but I would like to point out some simple facts. A "damnamus rubric" is always issued by an ecclesiastical authority; we had no such authority; indeed, we came together with no official authorization whatsoever. We did not list "enemies" because we did not intend to engage in an act of war; more important, we omitted references to individuals because the themes at issue are indeed pervasive, so that it would only be distracting to polemicize against this or that particular expression. The last thing we had in mind was to shut off discussion; on the contrary, since the January meeting in Hartford we have gone out of our way to invite criticisms.

What bothers me most about Russell's comments is the implication that "orthopraxy" is somehow more open or even humble than our alleged orthodoxy. One wonders where she has lived during the last few years. 1, for one, have had little trouble with fellow-Christians damning me for doctrinal deviations, but I've had a lot of trouble with a whole series of "damnamus rubrics" directed against all who would not assent to various social and political programs of "orthopraxy." I'm not sufficiently familiar with Russell's views on the "struggles

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against racism, sexism, and economic oppression" to know whether I would always agree with her on the "praxis" called for by Christian concern. But I have the uncomfortable feeling that she would damn me rather enthusiastically in those instances where I might disagree.

Somewhat to my surprise, I find little to quarrel with in Richard Shaull's comments (though, obviously, I disagree with his perception of the Zeitgeist). I welcome his affirmation of transcendence; I agree with what he says about the theological task at hand (though I seem to recall his saying rather different things not so long ago); and I hold no brief for "triumphalism." What I would like to know is where he finds those students "for whom a metaphysics of transcendent being no longer makes sense." Perhaps they are all studying theology at Princeton? I can assure him that, a few miles up Route 1, where I hold forth, there seems to prevail a very different spiritual situation. What I detect in my students is a veritable metaphysical hunger. It remains mostly unsatisfied. Or it is offered the lurid supernaturalism of what Fletcher aptly called "a witches' coven." One presupposition of the Hartford statement is that the Christian churches can do very much better.