125 - A Fresh Awakening?

A Fresh Awakening?
By Craig Dykstra

SOMETHING interesting is happening. Religious searching is going public again, and people seem to want to talk about God. Television programs, recent novels, magazine stories, and newspaper articles increasingly reflect a more serious attention to religious matters. What, if anything, it all will amount to is unclear. Are there cues here that some sort of religious awakening is just over the horizon? Who knows. But it makes sense to pay attention.

I

"Thirty-something" is a hot television show in the U.S. these days. In one episode this season, Michael, who works in advertising and is a few years over thirty, finds himself wandering into a synagogue service. He hasn't been anywhere near a synagogue for years, but when his wife and infant daughter are in an automobile accident he seems driven toward some deeper context within which to deal with the shakenness he feels. Synagogue is the only such place he knows. And to a friend who wonders what he's doing lurking around the edges of religion, he answers (with no small hint of ambiguity), "I don't know. I think maybe I believe."

On a recent edition of "The Wonder Years," another popular show, two young boys turn thirteen. For Paul, the rite of passage is marked by a joyous bar mitzvah and the passing on to him of a Talmud that has been in the family for generations. For his friend Kevin, there is only a desultory little birthday party that doesn't seem to mean much to anyone. Afterwards, Kevin asks his mother: "Who are we?" "What?" "Well, Paul's Jewish. Who are we?" A halting, complicated genealogy of Anglo-ethnic cross-breeding is about all Mom can come up with. There is no sense of identity here at all-religious or otherwise. And Kevin's disappointment shows that that is just not good enough for him.

Television is not the only place religious searching seems to be getting more attention. Novelist Dan Wakefield wrote in The New York Times Book Review that "God-who for so long seemed absent if not 'dead' as a subject of concern in serious fiction, as in the culture at large-has returned as a force or a 'character' in the action" of many recent literary works. Religion has almost always been a theme in fiction, of course, because religion is, for better or worse, a dimension of the human condition. But this is something different, surprising, and significant, according to Wakefield. The difference is that it is not just religion, but God who has become the subject of serious discussion.

126 - A Fresh Awakening?

John Wheeler, president of the Center for the Vietnam Generation, a research and advocacy group, senses that "questions of faith and spirit have emerged... strongly at the close of this decade," especially among that cohort of the population we call the baby boomers. He finds three causes. First, this is a generation that has faced and remembers death. "Memorials," he says,

awaken questions of faith. Are things worth dying for? Is death the last word? My education in this came as chairman of the committee overseeing construction of the Vietnam Wall. One day, I noticed a boy of 4 or 5 at my feet playing with toy soldiers, chirping to himself. His father said, in a strong Boston accent: "Hush, Timmy. This is like a church."

Second, says Wheeler, this is a season of re-evaluation for many, a time of asking what all the striving and acquiring finally amount to and of how what really does have value actually comes to us. The answers are often almost opposite of those anticipated. Material security and self-concern do not save us from a sense of spiritual void, while "the deliverance's of life lead us to the idea that God loves the world and acts within space and time." Finally, Wheeler mentions science, which though it gives us no final answers drives us to metaphors reminiscent of Genesis.

II

The irony in this situation may be that while television writers, novelists, scientists, war veterans, and young professionals may be ready to talk about God in public, many theologians and pastors are not.

Roger Lambert, a divinity school professor in John Updike's Roger's Version, gets very nervous when a young computer specialist studying in the mathematics department of the same university claims modern science has made the fact of God almost impossible not to believe. The idea that "God's face is staring right out at us" is a prospect that to the tweed-coated, pipe-smoking Lambert "sounds rather grisly, frankly."

Lambert is something of a caricature. But if most theologians actually do want to talk about God, they are not all that confident they know how. The radical suspiciousness about claims to knowledge of God that first emerged during the Enlightenment now infects contemporary theological discourse to such an extent that its dominant topic of conversation is no longer what to say about God, but whether and how it is possible to say anything about God at all. This is because, as Edward Farley has put it,

in recent years the theological community has entertained what might be called a nasty suspicion about itself.... Could it be that there are no realities at all behind the language of this historical faith?... Are Christian theologians like stockbrokers who distribute stock certificates on a nonexistent corporation?

Claims to knowledge of God have been so profoundly questioned that theologians find it very difficult to get beyond the task of describing how

127 - A Fresh Awakening?

one could ever possibly make a valid claim. Once the "nasty suspicion" is raised, it is hard to say anything at all about God until that suspicion is rooted out.

Besides, not everyone wants the suspiciousness rooted out. For indeed, numerous religious "corporations" are bankrupt. There is no God there, only claims to power in the name of God that turn out to be pathological. Violent fanaticism's regularly come theologically garbed, and the world is strewn with victims of palpable evils committed under theological justification. Academic theologians are not the only people aware of this problem. All of us, pastors and lay members of churches included, know religion takes corrupt forms. And not all the corruption is terribly obvious. Religion is spiritually dead not only when it turns mean, but also when it goes flat, or sweet, or sentimental.

Perhaps this is why the critic, Walter Goodman, worries about the way religious questing is now being portrayed on television. If God gets to be "in," will anybody ask hard questions about religious truth? Goodman points out that "the prevailing soupiness over religion, anybody's religion, gets particularly thick in the treatment of the television pulpit. A television preacher may be criticized for political activities, like Jerry Falwell, or for odd bookkeeping, like the Bakkers, or for failings of the flesh like Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart, but an unkind word is rarely uttered on screen about the credulousness of the millions who shell out for their effusions-and then it is inevitably accompanied by a good word for faith in general. Holy hypocrisy."

Goodman is right: Don't throw out the suspicion! But he is wrong when he suggests that suspicion is the privilege only of the atheist. No, suspicion is a religious vocation. It is the work of those who can tell an idol when they see one. And the discernment of idolatry depends ultimately on knowledge of God.

III

I have no real evidence, only a hunch. But I think the religious search that seems to be emerging, the desire to talk about God that seems to be increasingly expressed in all sorts of ways, is not a nostalgic revisiting of a safe, comfortable, sentimental religiousness. It has a wary quality about it that keeps any such thing from happening. The suspiciousness of the '60s has not gone away, and no escape from it is sought by the new religious seekers. Rather, the search is for a truer, healthier suspiciousness, one that really can smoke out deceit, oppression, violence, and evil-even in its loveliest and most attractive forms-and tell it for what it is. To support the suspiciousness, there must be something that is not suspiciousness itself, something that is not so ultimately suspicious it must finally suspect everything. What we have here, I think, is a search for God.

If a fresh awakening is taking place and if I am right about its character, pastors and theologians need to be prepared. Many of those who are searching may be coming in our direction. They may turn to us

128 - A Fresh Awakening?

for help, wanting to see if there is any food left in the cupboards of religious institutions they long ago may have left. They may even come with a sense of hope and anticipation. But they will be testing us to see if we know what idols are-including religious ones-and to see if we are willing to call them by their names. If they sense we do not and will not, they will go away again, perhaps more cynical than before. If they sense we do and will, they may become interested.

But even this is not enough, for they are asking for something more. The deepest question they are asking-and may not yet dare to ask out loud-is this: Do you know God? If they sense we do not, again they will go away-perhaps this time more sadly than cynically. And if they sense we do, it will not be because we say we do. It will be because they see it in the way we live, in the manner of our speaking, and in our willingness to listen and to search. They will see it in the freedom this knowledge provides and in what this knowledge commits us to.

All this is true not only of the "thirtysomething" crowd who may have been reading the paper and buying bagels on Sunday mornings instead of going to church. It is true as well of people of all ages who populate the pews from week to week or spend their money on religious books and magazines. They want to know theological things. They want to know God.

As Dr. Kerr explains in the following note, this is my last issue as Editor. I feel a considerable sense of loss in leaving this post, for the work at THEOLOGY TODAY has been a great joy to me. We have a little community here who work well together. And after a while, one begins to sense the presence of the community of readers and authors who are touched by each other through our pages. So on leaving, I want to express my gratitude to Nancy Pike and Pat Miller for being such wonderful colleagues, and especially to "Tim" Kerr for inviting me into the fellowship and teaching me the craft. Thanks, too, to all those people whose names appear on our masthead and back page-and to our student assistants and others at Princeton Seminary whose names never show up in print-for all they have done to make being here such a blessing. Finally, I pray "Godspeed" to all of you whom it has been my privilege to serve.

Craig Dykstra

129 - A Fresh Awakening?

OUR LOSS IS LILLY'S GAIN

After serving with distinction as Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY for the past several years, Craig Dykstra is moving to Indianapolis to assume the position of Vice President for Religion of Lilly Endowment, Inc. His new responsibility will entail direction of the many Lilly projects already established as well as creating new programs to study issues relating to American religion and theological education. "We are entering a period," Dr. Dykstra said, "during which important and difficult decisions will need to be made by many religious institutions. Good scholarship and solid theological education are essential to wise leadership, and the Endowment will continue to foster and support them." Thomas W. Gillespie, Chairman of our Editorial Council, noted that "our loss is the gain of the larger religious community."

Those of us in the THEOLOGY TODAY office at Princeton and at Science Press in Ephrata together with the members of the Editorial Council will feel most acutely the loss of Craig Dykstra's editorial supervision. He took to the sometimes tedious job of copy-editing and manuscript evaluation as if by instinct, and, over the years, he has shown a remarkable talent for all phases of editing. Carefully following each quarterly issue through the various stages preceding publication is not everyone's idea of how to "redeem the time," but Craig Dykstra never complained and always met his deadlines.

It has been a great pleasure to work with Craig Dykstra, and we all wish him and his family God's blessing.

Hugh T. Kerr