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The New Iconoclasm and the Intergrity Of the Faith
By Albert C. Outler

"Our main contention here is that the Christian problematic is an entity, that it has a history, that its continuity consists more decisively in perduring frameworks of interrogation than in definitive answers designed to exhaust or conclude reflection-and that the process of development is very far from finished. . . . If the hard core questions focus on God and man and Jesus Christ, surely it is significant that, although the church has achieved stable frames of inquiry (dogmata) about God and Jesus Christ, its explorations into man have never got so far."

THE current theological scene has been declared a disaster area by a sizeable panel of competent observers. It has been variously described as a shambles, a bedlam, a scrimmage-anything but a focused, orderly debate. It is the sort of situation in which men have to shout to be heard, exaggerate to get attention. Moreover, the central issues have shifted-from theology to anthropology, from gradualistic to radical views of change, from amelioration to revolution, from a rootage in the Christian past to a revulsion from it.

It is, of course, an old story that each upcoming generation proceeds to the ritual murder of its elders; each new age requires a trans-valuation of its inheritance. Novelty is the spice of theological life. Displacement is the straightest way to fame and glory. This is all the more obvious in a time when a great galaxy of giants (Barth to Tillich) have, almost abruptly, lost their grip and when a huge seg-

Albert C. Outler is Professor of Theology at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. He has served as a delegate to various World Council Meetings and was an observer at Vatican Council II. He is the author of The Christian Tradition (1957), Who Trusts in God (1968), and the editor of works by Augustine and John Wesley.

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ment of the Christian community (the Roman Catholic Church) has suddenly erupted in a turbulent theological ferment. Most of us could make our own Daniel Callahan's rueful confession: "At a time in my life when I should be solidifying and developing positive convictions-any kind-I see in my mind more of chaos than order, more blind alleys than clear paths."¹

I

And yet one recalls other times when other Christians were also baffled by radical cultural mutations and new dimensions of the human visions. What is new in our current situation is the zealous and dedicated iconoclasm that has come to dominate the temper and the tone of the theological nouveau-avant-to apply Federick Morton's odd phrase to the theological forum. Typically, the role of the iconoclast has been primitivistic. His cause is the purging of the holy temple of its corrupt accretions--of those abuses of truth and faith that he sees debasing true believers' true belief. This spirit is still in evidence today: in their pitiless denunciations of self-serving ecclesiastics and their manhandled deities, in their drum-fire blasts against the impotence of the church in a cataclysmic age. Deeper than any of this, however, is what must be recognized as a deliberate rejection of traditional Christianity as such. This rejection would seem to reach to Christianity in any of its mass manifestations, in any of its traditional speech-habits about transcendence or the "supernatural" (Robinson, Pike), to the Christian past entire [Vahanian: "Church history is in itself nothing but a series of sins"²], to the institutional church as it now stands (Colin Williams, Ruether, Adolfs), to traditional God-talk (Van Buren, Dewart, Wicker), to God himself (Altizer, Hamilton). What we are witnessing is a syndrome of repudiations aimed at cutting our ties with a detested past, promising to free us for a future that is bound to be better. It takes it for granted that the semper, ubique, et ab omnibus bit is for fossils only. Even the more constructive among the new frontiersmen are emphatic on their point that we must start all over again from scratch:

"What we need to do is to carry through to a new theological construction on the conviction that the relation between God and his

¹ "The Relational Nature of Theology," The Christian Century, February 2, 1966, p. 135.
² "Foreword" to Rosemary Ruether's The Church Against Itself (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967).

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creatures is through and through social. All the traditional doctrines must be reconsidered: creation, freedom, election, community, the nature of love, sin, grace, incarnation and eschatology. Nothing can be left out. Nothing is unaffected."³

In every age, the young have cast about for new stigmas with which to beat on the old dogmas. Now it is the substance of the dogmas themselves that is weighed and found wanting.

This sort of deracination may be at least partially understood as the equivalent in the theological community of a wider phenomenon that the psychiatrists have taught us to call "alienation." One notices its similar constellation of negativities, its typical preoccupation with the present and the future ["the Now Generation," fascinated by "the theology of hope"], its bitter disenchantment with the Christian heritage-"a general estrangement from that part of one's history and affectual life which links a man to his society and family."⁴ Its confidence is pinned on its expectations of a tomorrow unlike our yesterdays-out of the ashes, the phoenix!

And yet, one cannot be quite certain. The rhetoric of repudiation readily slides into hyperbole, and one never quite knows how much or how little to make of it. Leslie Dewart's landmark essay, The Future of Belief (1966), is an interesting case in point. After an itemized rejection of the philosophia perennis (in his own private version of it!), Dewart comes up finally with his own vision of an alternative program: an "ontological inquiry" that will be "no more and no less than the study of reality as such, that is, without abstraction from its reality, concreteness, immediacy, actuality, historicity and factuality" (p. 169). Even if one is unboggled by that daunting phrase, "the study of reality as such" [it could be taken as some sort of phenomenological slogan!], one is still stuck with the logical oddity of a blanket proscription of all abstraction by means of a series of six abstractions! This, then, is followed by a promise of a philosophy to redeem all previously sterile philosophizing about religion. Its concern, we are told, will be

"… with the presence and reality of God. Such a God, however, Would not be even partially that of Greek metaphysics. For this would be an integrally Christian philosophy. Its God [and such a

³ D. D. Williams, "The New Theological Situation" in Theology Today, January, 1968, P.456.
⁴ Cf. Seymour L. Halleck, M.D. (Director of Student Psychiatry, the University of Wisconsin), "Alienation in Students," in a paper read to the American Psychiatric Association, Detroit, May 12, 1967.

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phrase would clearly imply a member of a class with other members!] would be wholly and exclusively the Christian God . . ." (p. 170).

The italics are my own; they signify cocked and aporetic eyebrows.

Even a quick, random collection of characteristic over-statements by the radicals is rich with confusion. For example, in Honest to God, it is boldly said that "traditional Christian theology has been based upon the proofs for the existence of God" (p. 29)-which are now, or so it is implied, fully exploded. This would have sounded passing odd to a sizeable host of reasonably intelligent men who fancied themselves "traditional" theologians, from Clement of Alexandria to John of Damascus to John Calvin to Karl Barth. Or again, in Rosemary Ruether's vigorous exercise in what she herself calls "image-breaking," we learn that "all of the old representations ("the cultural images of Christianity") have become dead and lifeless, and even when we do not have the power to raise our hand against them, they are crumbling away before our eyes. . . . This means nothing less than the loss of faith in our own great cultural creation of the past millennium."⁵ Are they all dead-really dead and gone? Has everybody lost faith in everything in "our own great cultural creation" [if that, indeed, is what it was]? But if all the old icons are crumbling of their own inanition, then why all this grim flailing? Or, in a different vein, take Father Robert Adolph's furious indictment of the Catholic Church in The Grave of God, and then try to explain his relatively timid proposals in the crucial area of practical church reform-is this the best that self-appointed prophecy can come up with? Finally, of course, the record for recklessness belongs to the "death of God" people and the plethora of their unsuccessful clarifications of their arresting metaphor.

II

There is yet another reason why one cannot be certain of the finality of this avowed rejection of traditional Christianity. In the retchings of the iconoclasts to be shed of it all, one notes a curious brinkmanship, a sort of self-checking before the last consequence of their repudiations. Why, for example, if "God-talk" really is inadmissible save only in humanistic translation,⁶ why not just abandon it, quotation marks and all? If the institutional church

⁵ Ibid., pp. 221-22.
⁶ Cf. van Buren in Front Line Theology, ed. by Dean Peerman (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967), p. 50.

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is as moribund as they say, then why bother to execrate it? Why stop with "Christian atheism" when honest-to-God disbelief is a livelier and less ambiguous option? Why propose radical church reform and then balk at the whole bag (disestablishment, end of tax exemptions, etc., etc.)?

Increasing numbers of "modern" men have been persuaded that traditional Christianity does not merit their serious attention-and this at least in part by the eagerly publicized negations of our current eversores.⁷ Precious few of these lapsi, however, have been recovered for "reformed" Christianity. Many more wholehearted humanists, like Philip Rieff,⁸ have taken the proclamation of the end of Christianity as actual information and have turned to other options in their concern for a truly human culture; so have the Marxists,⁹ and at least some of the Zen roshi. What hinders the Christian iconoclast?

It is one thing to cry havoc in a panic-stricken Zion, quite another to commend the Christian gospel, in any of its versions, to the devoted technocrats who make up the enlarging bulk of the people in our universities, industrial laboratories, and social agencies. There cannot be many thoughtful Christians left, in any of the churches, still inclined to defend the semper eadem; fewer still who would deny the virtues of an updated version of Christian truth and praxis. And there is a larger company than the iconoclasts admit who are busily engaged in significant reform and renewal, in conscious loyalty to the Christian past. But "moderate" has become a dirty word; such people are easy targets for the extremists on either side. And this suggests one of the reasons why the church has never thanked the iconoclasts for their pains. They are, after all, the real puritans and perfectionists: self-righteously certain of what is best and worst for others, arrogantly contemptuous of all iconodules.

There are some signs, however, that their fury is waning and that the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. Professor Hamilton, for example, has promised himself more homework before releasing any further mortuary notices about God.¹⁰ Pro-

⁷ "The 'upenders'"; cf. Augustine, Confessions, III, 6, and James Kavanaugh in Look, passim!
⁸ Cf, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), pp. 126-30, 250-53.
⁹ Have any of the Christian secularists taken the full measure of a really hard-nosed exposition of Marxist humanism, as, for example, in Tadeusz Kotarbinski's "The Humanities Without Hypostases," in Gnosiology (Oxford, 1966)? If not, why not?
¹⁰ Cf. The Christian Century. "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Library," April 12, 1967, pp. 469-70.

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fessor Altizer has begun to talk about "the deity" in terms that either deny its death or else affirm its inexplicable resurrection.¹¹ There is, besides, that curious sequel to Honest to God,¹² in which the swinger has turned square again. Bishop Robinson's "new" summary of "what is integral to any God-statement" (p. 66) could be included in any anthology of Anglican "laditudinarian" theology, from Benjamin Whichcote to Ian Ramsey. And this, in turn, prompts another speculation by the way: what if James Pike should discover a positive meaning in the doctrine of the Trinity? What if Harvey Cox found a good word to say for the civitas Dei?

All of which reminds us once again that when Moses clobbered that golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai, he still had a sullen people on his hands, with the hardest half of the trek to the promised land still ahead. And even if there is only a slight analogy here, there can be no denying that we are left with an uphill job for the unfolding future. What many may have hoped for-that the toppled idols of culture-Christianity would hasten the day of pure, unflawed faith, hope, and love-simply hasn't come off and is, of course, improbable. What's worse, the melée has left us with at least one major casualty: the collapse of all the erstwhile loci of consented authority for doctrine and Christian action. The claims of sola Scriptura have been made to seem quaint even in Protestant ears; meanwhile, the authority of the episcopal magisterium has been macerated for many Roman Catholics. James Kavanaugh (who says that his "job has changed just a little bit") now assures us that he is "working on the modern magisterium, public opinion"¹³--as unedifying a thought as ever crossed my mind! The appeal to "reason" is more suspect now than ever before in theological argument, and the claim that truth is a function of existential sincerity has ceased to convince. And this helps to explain the dismal fact that, despite the heartening abundance of theological talent in all ranks, there is no dominant current viewpoint and no foreseeable prospect of one. The best we have is a medley of monoideistic programs organized around singular motifs ("history," "hope," "process metaphysics," "the Christian revolution," "secular sensibility," etc.).

¹¹ Cf. The St. Louis Review, November 3, 1967. "The [Death-of-God] movement believes the deity should be understood as an evolutionary process, a self-transformation…. The basic concept is that the deity has a nature which changes and becomes different from what it was . . ." Albeit incomprehensible, such a statement implies some sort of theological program that is no longer chiefly negative.
¹² Exploration Into God (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1967).
¹³ LOOK, February 20, 1968, p. 102.

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We might, of course, suspect that iconoclastic rage is the scowling face of some kind of love and ask therefore what the radicals really are for? Here the answer is clear and straightforward. They are all avowed champions of man, "modern man." Their ruling passion is for human freedom and self-determination, for civil rights and economic justice, for social harmony and world peace. One way and another, they have come to agree that traditional Christianity is the sworn enemy of humanity, the hypocritical tool of a monarchian view of God that deliberately degraded man to a servile status:

". . . Christianity and Christianity alone has reduced human existence to sin and guilt, confronting a broken humanity with a wholly other God who demands total submission to his numinous and judgmental power. Religion assumes its most repressive form in the Christian religious tradition because only here-and in its historical antecedent, the book of job-may one find a God of naked and absolutely sovereign power, a God who was evolved out of a reversal of the movement of the Spirit into flesh and who now for the first time becomes abstract, alien, lifeless and alone…. "¹⁴

III

In response to this temper of rejection, it is scarcely hopeful to undertake a summary restatement of integral Christian doctrine, even in what might be a repristinated version of it.¹⁵ This would mean the reassertion of a claim already denied by the radicals-that Christian tradition continues integral and viable. At this stage in the debate no such claim can be established or evacuated by simple assertions and negations. It might, however, gain somewhat in plausibility if we repositioned it as a problem: why do the basic Christian questions persist in and through the long succession of their diachronically changing answers?

My own first comment here is that in every age since the beginning, the Christian answers have been more obviously time-bound than the Christian questions. There has been, and still is, a typical configuration of perennial inquiry which seems to be generated by the bare fact of the Christian community, with its characteristic truth-claims about God and man, and about Jesus as the decisive

¹⁴ Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), p. 45.
¹⁵ Such as my own recent book, Who Trusts in God: Musings on the Meaning of Providence (Oxford University Press, 1968), which is addressed to a different audience: viz., to "the cultivated" who have not yet come to despise religion-a switch on Schleiermacher's design in the Reden.

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revelation of God to man. Once such claims are made-as they are in any extended sample of Christian God-talk-some sort of critical inquiry is unavoidable. Any reference to God or to his self-manifestation is an implicit question about the reality of life's ultimate environment and its import for our existence. The religious concern of such a query is not normally focused on the "proof" of God's reality but rather on the question of his quality (quod qualis sit?). And this, too, becomes an inescapable question, however it may or may not be answered.

It is no accident that classical theologians, overall, have spent so little time and energy on the issue of God's "thatness"-since both atheism and theism assume more than can ever be "proved" by any hard warrant of empirical verification. The perennial agony of the biblical people, and the church theologians, has sprung from man's hunger to know what God is like and how he disposes himself toward his human creatures. It is an old story that all declarative statements about God are radically apophatic, since God "as he is in himself" can never be known through discrete categories of any sort. But the same men who readily thought in this way also believed that the ineffable God has his own modes of self-disclosure-to all men over the whole range of human history. Here is the ground for man's irrepressible intuition of "the holy," his impulse to what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit. There can be no sustained reflection about existence that does not finally raise the question of God and there is no consistent answer to that question, once it is raised (atheism, agnosticism, theism, or what have you), that does not imply some sort of trans-empirical reference ("mystical," "eschatological," "supernatural," etc.).

But there can be no question about God without a correlative question about man and his ultimate environment. The crucial issue here is man's personal identity (haecceitas), and this involves the coaxial problem of the individuation of human selves and their matrices in "nature" and-whatever else? Any pondering of this mystery leads to some analysis of our flawed existence, personal and social, to some evaluation of our hungers: for healing, for being fully human, for participating in the divine perfections. But then, any light on the question of human haecceity exposes, in turn, the problem of inter-personal relations and, with this, the marvelous mystery of human community and its functions within and for the human enterprise.

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Such ponderings are not, however, specifically Christian until they include Jesus: until some allegement is made about his unique importance in the correlation between God and man. Such allegements began very early (with the ho Iesus ho Kyrios), and they have still continued despite the incredible tangle of Christological speculation over the centuries. This suggests that all these speculations are so many diverse essays in answer to one or another of the questions that are locked into this integral Christian problematic of which we have been speaking. Traditional answers can be faulted, but the import of the questions continues to instruct and to baffle. Discarding the old answers is only to place the old questions in a new context-not necessarily at an advantage, either.

There are other basic elements in this integrated cluster of doctrinal queries: God's "creation" and his "Kingdom," here and hereafter; the efficacy of God's grace in man's passage from "death" to "life"; the authority of freedom-in-love as the cachet of the Christian style of life; the koinonia of the Spirit and man's foretaste in the sacramental community of the fully realized human community; our hope for the final future of love's pilgrimage.

Each of these concerns, normally professed as beliefs, is actually a problem, and all of them are raised by implication in even the skimpiest "Christian conversation": biblical, liturgical, ethical, doctrinal. Other notions might be added, but they, too, would fit somewhere into this integrated constellation of experiential questions which prompt doctrinal answers.

No item in this constellation of problems is wholly separable from the others, none is negligible, none is finally soluble. But the cluster cannot readily be dealt with as a whole; every creed, regula and summa is admittedly fractional. The history of Christian thought is the story of successive crises that have focused now on one, now on another, element in the total problematic. The earliest Christian "heresies" were Christological, but the deeper stake in each was the qualis of God. Even a superficial survey of the struggles of the first five or six centuries makes plain that the integrity of the faith turned less on the uniform consistency of the answers of the doctors than on the constancy with which the right questions were put, by the whole Christian community, and on the probity of the successive communal judgments as to what constituted unacceptable answers. In this sense, "heresy" has always preceded and provoked "orthodoxy."

At Nicea and Constantinople, the church achieved consensus on

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the problematic framework in which the question about God's qualis could rightly be put. The Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed is less an explicit doctrine of the Triune God than it is a sort of grid, marking out the limits of fruitful theological reflection-a verbal chart that helps apophatic language to serve the needs of paralinguistic communication. And not even the theologian who rejects the creed as it stands can quite evade the problems it poses-or dispose of them with simple denials.

But the consensus that Jesus shares fully in God's ultimate quid-dity (which is the point of homoousion t
M Patri) left open the question of his relation to us and to the human condition. This was finally put into its normative frame of reference at Chalcedon-again, not as a discrete answer but as a guideline for valid worship and fruitful reflection. Any Christology that allows for Jesus' co-ordinate participation in both God's quiddity and ours (homoousion t
M patri kai homoousion h
Mmin) and that also manages to correlate the divine and human energy systems (physeis)-without fusing them (asunchut
Ms), without absorbing either into the other (atrept
Ms), without dividing them so that either is said to function separately (adiairet
Ms) or alone (achorist
Ms)-is an "orthodox" Christology; and the supposition that these four delimitations exhaust all conceivable alternatives is itself a clue to the way in which we have come to confuse questions with answers.

IV

There is an open question as to how many dogmas the Christian community has thus far achieved--or how many of the dogmas have been received and by whom-and we shall leave it open. Our main contention here is that the Christian problematic is an entity, that it has a history, that its continuity consists more decisively in perduring frameworks of interrogation than in definitive answers designed to exhaust or conclude reflection-and that the process of development is very far from finished. This last comment suggests at least one way in which we might view the "future of theology." The persistence of such an aggregate of problems, in the face of repeated mutations in the succession of attempted answers, is some sort of sign of a reality that cannot be shrugged off. Lay an embargo on God-talk and how will we then continue as glibly as we do about "man" (whose haecceity is clearly as "unknowable" as God's)? In-

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hibit speech about Jesus Christ and you have, in effect, abandoned the Christian enterprise itself. Leave any two of the items in the triad together, in any problematic relation, and you will still have the third to deal with.

It is also clear from Christian history that this integral cluster of questions-theology, anthropology, Christology, pneumatology, soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology, ethics, etc.-does not arise in the first instance as a process of abstraction or analysis. It is posed, even when not consciously probed, whenever two or three are gathered and act together "in the name of Jesus Christ," for any self-conscious purpose whatsoever. Communal Christian faith is normally expressed liturgically, and this is why liturgy provides the grist for theology's mill. Liturgical statements answer no theological questions directly, but they do expose presuppositions that have then to be assayed for credence. It is, therefore, the task of theology to assess such truth claims as are implied in liturgical language and action and to assess the language allowable in liturgy.

Much of this may sound more like a mere reassertion of the tradition than an argument for it. And yet two notions are implied here that might deserve critical notice. One is that perduring questions are in themselves significant clues to reality. The other is that whatever the new iconoclasm has done, in its efforts to shatter the "traditional" answers, it has not yet succeeded in squelching the traditional problematic. The same questions about God and man and Jesus Christ still remain today, even for those whose rejection of the traditional answers was meant to be final. The "death of God" affair set off a fine hysterical fit. It was, however, more than anything else, a rude exposure of the pathetic failures of the teaching church. And yet, it has left us with the problem of God, in a somewhat altered context and with a new exigence. Bishop Robinson's dramatic disposal of God as cosmic spook helped dispel a false answer to the ancient question about God that many of us had thought, mistakenly, had already been disposed of. But this only reopened the old question so insistently that he himself has now proffered a "new" answer-about which a sufficient comment could be that good icon-smashers rarely do as well at icon-repair. Mutatis mutandis, the abiding value of Professor Van Buren's Christology consists in his reopening the question about Jesus at its most elemental level. Again, if and when the current reign of terror in

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the church ever subsides, the problem of the nature of the church and the terms of its creative service to society will still be there, challenging whatever churchmen may survive. And, finally, when the point has firmly been made that God is as vitally present in the secular city as anywhere else, somebody in a ravaged world will surely think to ask the same questions that lay behind Augustine's imperfect answers in De civitate Dei.

We are thus reminded of what one had thought was commonplace: that Christian theology is a sort of intellectual iconography in response to perennial questions that reveal and conceal the Christian reality. Theology is the conceptual symbolization of the religious reality witnessed to in Christian liturgy and served by the disciplines of love. The meanings of its formulations are iconic in their functions and affect-and when their iconic force is stifled (by whatever cause), their affective values and warrants are altered accordingly. Demoded icons may be superannuated (their kindliest fate), or they may be smashed. But the reality to which they once pointed remains, and so do all the questions ever posed by any mode of human recognition of that reality. The integrity of the faith depends less upon its formulated doctrines than on its irrepressible questions, generated as they are by the Christian reality-that "God was in Christ reconciling the world [and mankind] to himself," or any other form of words to that effect.

V

If the hard core questions focus on God and man and Jesus Christ, surely it is significant that, although the church has achieved stable frames of inquiry (dogmata) about God and Jesus Christ, its explorations into man have never got so far. To be sure, the Augustinian teachings about sin and grace, as revised by the Second Council of Orange (529), have had a certain dogmatic standing in the west-though not without opposition (Vincent of Lerins) and not without significant modifications (St. Thomas in one direction, the nominalists in another). But this consensus was chiefly a reaction against the notion of human self-salvation, and it never amounted to an adequate analysis of the human condition or an identification of the individual human person.

Actually, this lack of an anthropological dogma has been a blessing in disguise, since the prevailing psychological model that

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Christians have had to work until this century was fatally flawed: the long tradition of body-mind dualism, psychophysical parallelism, "faculties" and "instincts," and their attendent notions of witchcraft, ghosts, disembodied spirits, etc., etc.¹⁶ The problem of the haecceity of the human person was dealt with mainly in terms of the relations between universal man and the innumerable instances of individuated humanity. One has only to read Of the Nature of Man by Nemesius of Emesa¹⁷ and the psychological essays of Maximus the Confessor¹⁸ to recognize the tensions between the anthropological insights of the biblical tradition and their speculative models even in the most talented of the ancient fathers.

St. Thomas came closer to a psychology that could support a modern" anthropology, but it was Sir Charles Sherrington in Man on His Nature (1941) who explained how far the Christian problematic on man has remained under the spell of "platonism" and how readily this tradition accommodated itself to authoritarian political and social patterns. It was surely this borrowed and defective anthropology of traditional Christianity that sanctified the Roman imperial establishment and feudalism thereafter; that supported the political vision of a class-conscious society organized around the notions of birthright stations and duties, superior and inferior nations and races; that prompted, as metaphysically valid, the stark disjunction between "secular" and "sacral." And surely it was this monarchian anthropology that dominated the misdevelopment of the original biblical insights as to God's "personal" involvement in creation and history. This can be seen from the second century forward, and it is the present day collapse of the value-systems derived from monarchian anthropologies that has also undermined the authority of the monarchian modes of theology.

How traditional theology managed over the centuries even as well as it did with so grievously defective an anthropological perspective is something of a puzzle, but it does help to explain how Christians came to correlate their valid notions of God's sovereignty with their invalid notions of man's abjectness, their one-sided stress on God's primacy and man's passive dependence, their fusing of God's

¹⁶ Cf. D. R. G. Owen, Body and Soul; A Study on the Chrsitian View of Man (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956).
¹⁷ LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN CLASSICS, Vol. IV, ed. and trans. by W. C. Telfer.
¹⁸ Cf. the remarkable reconstruction of Maximus' thought in Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: the Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1965).

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righteous will and man's unquestioning obedience. And this has finally helped to "justify" our "new" iconoclasts. Their positive cause is man, but they also need an enemy-and who is man's natural enemy? God-who else? They would, one thinks, have done better if they had trumpeted the "death of man"-the death of feudal man, of class man, of servile man-and then had gone on to celebrate God's grace and providence at work in the travails of human freedom and dignity, in the current birth pangs of the human future.

For, plainly, the current definition of the adjective "modern" is: "preoccupied with the human condition and its prospects." Similarly, the meaning of the mystic rune "secular" is: "Man in the human world and with his human fellows." It is easier to explain the swift decline of neo-orthodoxy in terms of the fading credibility of its anthropological models (and this would apply to Tillich's, too) than with any reference to its intrinsic theological defects. Now, in the vacuum left by the passing of the neo-orthodox titans, two divergent tendencies have become apparent. One (stemming more from Bonhoeffer than any other) might be called the reduction of theology to anthropology-the thrust to move man front and center and God back into the wings. The other is the elevation of human dignity to a coordinate status within the theological problematic alongside an undiminished stress on God's sovereign grace in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This is strikingly evident in many of the Vatican II documents (especially in Religious Liberty and The Church in the Modern World) and, curiously enough, in such things as Paul VI's allocution at the close of the Council (7 December, 1965):

". . . The Church of the Council has been concerned not only with herself but with man-man as he really is today … man as he is, the creature who thinks and loves and toils and is always aspiring to something . . . man as an individual and man in society, and so on… We call upon those who term themselves modern humanists . . . to recognize our own new type of humanism. We, too, in fact we more than any others, honor mankind. . . . "¹⁹

This from a disciple of "the peasant of the Garrone"!

When so many diverse minds converge so intently on so critical an issue, it is an omen and portent. Is it, therefore, only fanciful

¹⁹ Council Daybook, Vatican II, Session 4, September 14, 1965 to December 8, 1965, ed. Floyd Anderson (Washington, D. C.: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1966), p. 360.

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to guess that we are in the beginning of a major movement in the direction of a Christian dogma of man (i.e., a consented problematic as to his "nature" and human reality)? If such a dogma were achieved, it would have faithfully to reflect the integrity of the entire Christian revelation (our flawed bonitas, our self-transcendence and radical incompleteness, etc.). To be about man, it would have to be faithfully "secular" and, quite literally, "catholic." In such a process, we might actually hope to see the sub-Christian rivalry between God and man eased and sublated into a truly Christian notion of the vincula amicitiae between Creator and creature, between heaven and earth, between men and nations.

Some such prospect would suggest a place on the time-line of doctrinal development for this outstanding item of unfinished business in the history of Christian thought. The dogma of the Triune God came first and even those most confident that they have got "beyond Nicea" are struggling still with the problems that Nicea set in train. Then came the Chalcedonian dogma of the coordination of divine and human energy-systems in Jesus Christ and-despite its bad press since Schleiermacher-I know of no modern essay in Christology that has more accurately stipulated the unevadable Christological issues. It is arguable whether there is a consented problematic about sin and grace, and also how far Lateran IV, Vatican I, and Vatican II have brought us toward a possible agreement as to the basic questions defining a suitable dogma about "the church." But the case is plain to all that we never have had, and do not now have, anything close to consensus in the area of theological anthropology.

Here, then, is where modern theology really has its work cut out for it: a doctrine of man emancipated from the psychological models of "Christian platonism" (including those implicit in "process metaphysics") and yet also liberated from the pseudo-empirical models of Marx, Freud, Pavlov, Pareto, et al. It would be a fruitful sublimation of the frustrations of our new iconoclasts if they could get themselves variously involved in the constructive tasks of psycho-anthropo-sociological theory and practice.

VI

But not-God forbid!-in terms of any of the theoretical options currently available. For if "man" has finally become modern man's

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chief and proper study, it cannot yet be claimed that this study has come to anything like valid summation anywhere at all. On every hand there are exciting and promising breakthroughs-molecular biology, reflexology, chemotherapy, learning theory, mass motivation and mass communication theory, ethnography, anthropology, etc.-but they have not yet been added up into any magisterial theory of man as person or of society as specifically human. So far, our vastly increased knowledge has simply increased the complications in the project of producing a reliable account of the known data of human consciousness-not to speak of our increasing confusion about the suspected (and still suspect) data that may lie along its fringes (ESP, Pike-like seances, etc.).

Consider what an adequate summa anthropologica would call for: verifiable correlations between psychic states and blood chemistry, between thought and neural processes, between biological individuation, sex and personal haecceity, between appetition and value, between self and society, between "the savage mind" and the "modern," between human bondage and freedom, between the human possibility and the human good. All these will finally have to be integrated within a feasible program for a man's becoming and being fully human in the face of pain, tragedy, and death in a world in chronic catastrophe. And when we turn from this very partial inventory of an optimum agenda to a coolly critical assessment of even the best recent efforts in anthropological reconstruction (Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Jaspers, Erikson, Mayo, Koestler, Adler-and who else?) one can only wonder at the hypocrisy of those who reject traditional theology as incredible, without passing equally bleak judgments upon the glaring insufficiencies of modern anthropology for the purposes of human self-understanding. Van Harvey has reminded us of "the new morality of knowledge" which requires critical and funded warrants for all our professions of faith.²⁰ Applied to theology, this new version of Occam's razor has cut the lashings on an abundance of dispensable baggage. But if it were restropped and applied, without indulgence, to the bristling dubieties of modern wisdom about anthropology, what would be left? The truth is that secular humanism is in at least as parlous a shape as Christian humanism-and both for the same reason: our common and abysmal ignorance of the final reality of the human subject.

²⁰ Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 103.

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Any Christian dogma about man would naturally involve the coaptation and synthesis of the wisdom of the sciences of man and the Christian views of man's origin and end in God-which is to say, the general problems of the psychology of religion, sociology of religion, religion and psychotherapy, etc. Here, again, we are in an area pre-eminently "modern" and yet ironically barren of significant results in terms of really fruitful personality theory. The literature in psychology of religion and Christian nurture is inexplicably sparse, that in sociology of religion inexplicably irrelevant. In the crucial joint inquiry into "psychotherapy and a Christian doctrine of man," the bright promises of significant theoretical progress (David Roberts et al.) have not yet been fulfilled.

Any soaring hope for any imminent achievement of an adequate doctrine of man is grotesque. And yet the enterprise is undeclinable-if only because it is one of the few irresistibly fascinating topics left us in our overstimulated urban culture. The difficulties are overwhelming. The distortions of three millennia of dualism and authoritarianism die hard. And, in their dying, new mutations in "human nature" are happening to befuddle the vision and judgment of the best observers. The most evident signs of this are the phenomena of displacement in all conventional moral demand systems based on customary morality and conscience. They have taken away our super-egos and we know not where they have laid them. And yet the question of moral self-control is the utterly crucial issue in the current crises of mankind.

VII

Meanwhile, the icon-smashing beat goes on, with peaked intensity and a waning confidence that rubble makes a firm foundation for what comes after. Part of what comes after, ironically enough, is new icons for old, or else old icons refurbished. Man does not live by eidoi (and hope!) alone. He must have icons, too-to signify his participation in the reality in which he lives and moves and has his being, the reality that reaches past his nerve-endings and in between his synapses. There are times and seasons when the old icons lose their iconic force and serve only to bolster men's illusions; and this is what has latterly happened. Our task, and that of those who may come after, is to "imagine" new images (visual, aural and whatnot) with which to signify the old reality. The business of iconopoesis

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is primarily the work of liturgy and the arts, not theology as such. Thus the experimental work in liturgical renewal and religious art holds more of the future for theology than the labors of the rest of us, however earnest. And this, incidentally, is also why the Roman Catholics are currently moving so much further ahead of their Protestant counterparts-in a vast iconopoetic enterprise aimed at new refractions of the visio Dei.

Theology is an endlessly inconclusive process of reflection on the questions posed by the designata of revelation-whatever they are, wherever and whenever. It is endless because its deepest impulses are inexhaustible, inconclusive because its aim is not to consummate the inquiry but to keep it open and growing. The crucial disclosures of Christian truth and love do not come as timeless truths but as insights and queries from opalising events that can be renewed by memorial and sacramental actions. The Christian understanding of the experiences that have defined the faith has been rehearsed in Scripture, ciphered into baptismal symbols, eucharistic creeds, catechetical regulae, and conceptualized in theology. But all these declensions from communion into communication are necessarily apophatic-to be taken seriously but not literally. They are also diachronic, bearing the signatures of their times, places, and mindsets, but also capable of renewal in later times and other mindsets. The communication of religious insight has to be maieutic, indirect, evocative. The warrant and reward for theological reflection is not in its positive statements but in the habitudes it helps to form: the confidence that we have our being from and in and to God and the joy we feel that it should be so. Theology is not the definitive knowledge of the divine object or a terminal probe into the inmost depths of the human subject. It is, rather, a stubborn effort to bring reason to bear on the awe-full angustia stirred in us by our intuitions of the abyssus in which all finites are pendant, the absurdum that brackets all lucidity. Its concern is not to fill up the abyss or to conceptualize the absurd but to test the gospel claim that we are upheld in the abyss by God's grace and that the absurd is itself redeemed by love.

Contemporary skepticism has succeeded in discrediting the more popular versions of the via eminentia. But it has virtually ignored the alternatives of the via negativa, the "way" that begins and ends in the apophatic mysteries of love and freedom, divine and human.

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What would be helpful now is a "method" that rejected the false disjunctions between "transcendence" and "immanence," between "sacral" and "secular," between "church" and "world"; a mood that trusts the God who is self-absconded in order to be self-revealed (pre-eminently in Jesus Christ), the God who leaves our lives unfulfilled until we find their fulfillment in that "man of his own choosing" who was never unfulfilled. Some such perspective could nerve us for our part in the human fray and pilgrimage, could help redeem our hopes from orectic self-deceit, could set both life and death in the custody of grace and so free us to spend our powers in ventures that lie within our proper competence.

I would not wish to contend for the finality of any single sentence in this statement or to reject any alternative that might better grasp and convey the inner gist of what I have been urging. But if that gist is to be rejected and its contraries affirmed, I would want to know what better cause you propose to serve, what firmer warrants you suppose you have-rational or otherwise-and what higher human hopes and values you propose to support. The stakes have now been hiked too high for logomachies and fads. Sooner or later the jihad against the Christian heritage will abate. Alienation is not a durable style of life. But if not alienation, then what-and how, and why? Your answer to these questions, is in effect, your prescription for the "future of theology."