Theology Today - Vol 26, No. 3 - October 1969 - EDITORIAL

235 - Where Is Theology Going?

Where Is Theology Going?
By Gregory Baum

Theology, like everything else in the church, is changing. In this article I want to describe what I regard as the new direction Catholic theology is taking. This direction is shared by some Protestant theology; in fact, it was among Protestant theologians that the new direction was anticipated. What is characteristic of Catholic theologians, however, is that they elaborate this new orientation in perfect fidelity to the church's tradition.

If I wanted to characterize the new direction in a startling phrase, I would say that theology is becoming "secular." This phrase is ambivalent. But it gives forceful expression to the widespread conviction of theologians that divine revelation has to do not only with the religious dimension of human life but with the entire process, personal and social, by which men enter into their humanity. Since the Word of God affects the whole of human life, theology reflecting on this Word must be concerned with the entire human condition. The Gospel sheds light not simply on man's religion but on his total life in history. That is what I mean by saying that the concern of theology is becoming secular.

At a time when theology and piety looked upon God mainly as our heavenly Father, when in our thinking and prayer we regarded God as the supreme being, as man's heavenly over-against, as the king

Reprinted by permission from The Ecumenist, Vol. 7, No. 3, March-April, 1969.

Father Gregory Baum is a member of the Faculty of Theology, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. His latest book, The Credibility of the Church Today, appeared in 1968.

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of the universe and the ruler of history, we thought that man was related to God through the religious dimension of his life. We tended to regard man as facing two worlds: on the one hand, the world of every day, the human world of personal and social history, and on the other, the divine world of the transcendent God, the merciful Lord who ruled human history. Here was man and his history, and there, over against man, was the Lord who had created and redeemed him.

In terms of this theological imagination, it is clear that man's contact with the divine takes place in a very special section of his life. Man must turn away from his ordinary life, from the human world of every day, in order to face the God who is its author. This special section of life in which man encounters the divine is religion. In addition to the earthly preoccupations of man with the things of every day, he is in need of a living contact with the divine in his religion. If the section of life where a man turns away from earthly concerns to listen to God's voice was extensive, then we called him very religious. If this section was small, we did not regard him as very religious. We always insisted, of course, that religion, that special section, was to have an influence on man's entire life, but we tended to describe this influence in moral terms. The religious man encountered God in the section of his life which separated him from his earthly, everyday concerns; and this encounter inspired him with an ideal of holiness which he then tried to apply in his entire life and all his earthly concerns.

In such a context, God's Word had to do mainly with religion, and hence theology was mainly concerned with religious and ecclesiastical matters. It dealt with the problems of the religious community, the church.

What is happening in Catholic theology today-and has been happening with some theologians for a long time-is that God is not looked upon mainly as the heavenly Father. Catholic theology and, it would appear, Catholic piety tend to think of God not as the supreme being, ruling human history from above, but rather as the transcendent mystery present in human history and alive in the relations between man and man that create the human world. God is looked upon not as the supreme "outsider" who rules from above, but as the supreme "insider" who frees men to create their own future. In this context, man is not regarded as facing two worlds, the

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earthly world of every day and the divine world toward which he must occasionally turn in his religious moments, but rather as facing a single world, the world of every day, of which the transcendent mystery is the deepest dimension.

In terms of this theological imagination, man's encounter with the divine does not take place in a special section of his life, in his religious moments, but in the entire process, personal and social, by which he comes to be. In such a context, man would not turn away from what happens every day to face the divinity present elsewhere. It is rather by being in touch with what happens every day and by discerning its deepest dimension that a man opens himself to the divine. God's Word in human life does not trace out a section that is specifically religious. God's Word is present to the entire history of man. The Word of God, which became flesh in Jesus Christ, sheds light on and affects the whole of man's earthly life.

Divine revelation has to do with much more than with religion. It has to do with human life. The theologian reflecting on this divine Word is not restricted to religious or ecclesiastical concerns. He will have to deal with the ordinary issues of human life. He will be able to join the secular conversation going on in his own generation about man and society, and he will do this not in specifically religious terms or by offering a set of moral norms derived from religion, but in secular terms, in the terms of the conversation itself, because it is in this coming-to-be of the human world that God's Word is present.

It does not occur to me to suggest that the theologians of the past did not take the divine immanence seriously nor, for that matter, that contemporary authors neglect divine transcendence. But what has changed is the understanding of how these two divine characteristics are related to one another. For instance, today theologians insist that even God the Revealer is both transcendent and immanent to human life and that, therefore, the whole of human history is, strictly speaking, "supernatural." God's Word is not only present in the experience of Israel and the person of Jesus Christ, as recorded in Scripture and preached by the church; the Word of God is present in a more hidden and provisional way in the whole of human life. The Christian who acknowledges God's Word in-

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carnate in Christ should be able to detect this saving Word present as judgment and grace in the history, personal and social, of his generation. The task of the theologian, understood in this perspective, is to detect how human life is threatened by destruction and to discern the powers of healing which, miraculously, are already at work among men. The theologian is thus able to engage in conversation with men of his own generation, be they believers or not, on matters that concern them and make his theological contribution on the level of the common earthly concern.

III

Here is another way of indicating the new direction in which Catholic theology is moving. In the past, theology was usually taught at ecclesiastical institutions. Students in theology were ecclesiastics. They were concerned with the church's pastoral mission. The questions in traditional theology were raised from within the ecclesiastical institution. These questions mainly dealt with how we as Christians speak about God, who Jesus Christ is for us, and what the sacraments do in the life of the church. The concern of theology was inevitably ecclesiastical.

Today theology is sometimes being taught at secular institutions. The students of theology, frequently lay people, plan to spend their lives not as ministers of religion but as professional men, in dialogue with various branches of knowledge and the social and political trends in society. These students raise questions from outside the ecclesiastical institution. They wonder about the meaning of God's Word for understanding and transforming man and his society. What is history? What is social change? What is conversion and revolution? Theology for these students does not deal with the specialized ecclesiastical issues of how to speak about God in church and how to explain sacraments and ministry; these, in this judgment, affect only a comparatively small group of men in the world. Theology for these students has to do with human life and the problems that arise in it. They are concerned with ecclesiology, but the questions they pose in this field have to do with the ecclesial mystery present in every community of men. How can communities become the enemies of life? And what structures of healing are present in them that make them matrices of new life?

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We may amplify the new direction of theology by reflecting on the method used in theological inquiry. Theology is never a branch of knowledge that stands by itself. It is always developed in dialogue with another branch of knowledge. Since the divine Word always addresses man through a human medium, theology-which is reflection on this Word-is carried by, and developed in dialogue with, the branch of knowledge that examines the particular human medium. If, for instance, divine revelation is understood principally as addressing man's mind as truth, then the branch of knowledge which carries theology, and in dialogue with which it is developed, is philosophy. In order to put into words, to relate and distinguish the truth uttered by God to man's mind, the conceptual and methodological tools of philosophy are necessary. The theologian will ask himself whether certain philosophical notions can be used to express the divine mystery and how these notions can be modified or adjusted so that they may express this mystery more adequately. For many centuries theologians thought that this kind of theology, carried by and created in dialogue with philosophy, was the only theology properly so-called.

But God's Word addresses man through many human media. If, for instance, we consider the divine revelation present to man in the symbolic and dramatic content of literature, disclosing to him the deep things of life and permitting him to participate in them more fully, then reflection on the divine Word will be carried by, and developed in dialogue with, the branch of knowledge known as literary criticism. The biblical theologian must be a literary critic. But since the divine Word is present in the whole of human life, albeit in a conditional and provisional way, it is a valid theological inquiry to examine, with the tools of literary criticism, literary works of all kinds in order to discern how they celebrate the divine redemption gratuitously present in human life. For instance, do the plays of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee present audiences with symbols that lead them to self-knowledge or that lure them into superficiality?

Or if we consider God's Word as addressing people in the new man or the new humanity, then the theologian must be in dialogue with the social sciences, psychology and sociology, in order to put into

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words the awful things that threaten human life and the marvelous things God freely works among people wherever they may be. Such an inquiry may be properly theological, in the sense that it relies on God's Word in Christ and discerns the outlines of the new life in human history, even if the language and method of the inquiry are drawn from psychology or sociology. For instance, a theologian in dialogue with the achievement of Sigmund Freud may be able to put into words the threats to human existence which surround man from his birth on and, possibly, find a language to express and communicate the transformations which, however unexpected and gratuitous, are still part of the life experience of each person. If the paschal mystery is a divine reality constitutive of human history, then there are many ways of approaching it and talking about it. Psychology, or another social science, could be one of these.

In brief, because the Word of God, incarnate in Christ, is present in the whole of history, or, more precisely, in the process, personal and social, of man's making of man, it is possible to say that theology i.e., man's reflection on God's Word-is a special dimension of any inquiry whatever into human life.

In the past, Catholic theology has been in dialogue mainly with philosophy, and with a special kind of philosophy at that. This has narrowed our view of what theology is. Today, in the context of a multi-disciplinary university and a pluralistic world, it has become clearer to us that the sustained and systematic dialogue of the theologian with any branch of knowledge dealing with human life gives rise to a special and clearly definable theological inquiry in the conceptual language of this very dialogue. The church's dogma will be present in such an inquiry, even if its meaning and power will be expressed in the terms in which the conversation takes place; this is possible precisely because the divine Word uttered in the church and spelled out in ecclesiastical dogma is the same Word that is uttered in the lives of men and creates their history.

Again we insist that a theological inquiry need not deal with what are usually called religious issues but may examine, in the light of God's Word, some aspect of the total process by which men enter into their destiny. So far, Catholic theologians have not undertaken such studies on a large scale, but the dogmatic foundation for this

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work has been laid by the great theologians of the present generation, such as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx, and many theologians in all parts of the world are reaching out for this new approach in their articles, their conversations, and their wrestling with the problems of life today. It may well happen that in a few years the bulk of theological literature will not deal with religious or ecclesiastical issues at all.

On the same doctrinal basis we suggest that a Christian engaging in a study in philosophy, literature, or some other field may in fact, without knowing it, produce what must be properly called theology. For instance, William Lynch's Images of Hope is a theological work, even if the author occasionally explains that he is not doing theology or that theology is what he learned at the seminary. Similarly Aarne Siirala's The Voice of Illness dealing with the sources of sickness and health in the community, Lionel Rubinoff's The Pornography of Power examining the multiplication of evil in society, and Arthur Gibson's The Faith of the Atheist analyzing some atheistic writers, are in fact theological inquiries.

Especially in an age of cultural change, theology, with its critical and synthetic functions, could make a highly significant contribution, reaching beyond the circle of people interested in the church, to the creation of the human world and the transformation of man.