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Theology in the Seventies
By Langdon Gilkey

" . . . represent not so much a description of the future as an expression of the priorities in the predictor's mind. Thus saying what theology will be like is really saying what I think it should be like; we extrapolate the trends that we think are creative, as if history were going to go in that wise direction. A strange view of history for a biblical realist to adopt! So let us agree to transpose all our verbs. When we guess what theology will be like, we are really saying what we think it ought to be like."

TO seek to predict the shape of theology in the next decade is an enterprise at present fraught with irony. For if we were to extrapolate from the most potent and so "In" theology of the moment into the future, we would have to say that theology will be increasingly futuristic and eschatological. The difficulty is that the content of that presently dominant theology precisely tells us that this is not the way to read the, future. The present is no clue to that future, and extrapolation from the present is therefore useless; for God will bring what is not an outgrowth of the present but is rather the utterly new. Thus apparently the only safe prediction that one who is "with it" in theology can make is to predict that the new will characterize the seventies, that that new will be, in fact, a reversal of present futuristic theology, and so probably represent a return to something like Parmenides. Strange it is how partiality does creep in to all our most exalted theological thoughts. The only thing that theologians think is not going to be replaced by the eschatological new is the permanence of their own theological vision. But theologies in our temporalistic day are gobbled up as fast as are

Professor Langdon Gilkey of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, after his recently published study Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language, is particularly well-equipped to discuss the future direction of theology. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Maker of Heaven and Earth.

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car and dress designs. Prediction in politics is safer (as the prophets knew) than in theological modes.

Andrew Schonfield was probably right when he said that predictions represent not so much a description of the future as an expression of the priorities in the predictor's mind. Thus saying what theology will be like is really saying what I think it should be like; we extrapolate the trends that we think are creative, as if history were going to go in that wise direction. A strange view of history for a biblical realist to adopt! So let us agree to transpose all our verbs. When we guess what theology will be like, we are really saying that we think it ought to be like. Granted the needs and the crises that we can discern now, here is how theology should, we feel, respond in the near future. Beyond that, the future is as opaque for me as for Herman Kahn.

I

The first and most obvious thing to say is that theology will, and should be, increasingly ecumenical. But how little we understand now what this word might mean for 1979. Undoubtedly in 1960 every theological seer predicted an ecumenical decade to come, meaning probably that Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and possibly even Baptists would grow closer together. He would have had, I would judge, no inkling of the sudden explosion of Roman Catholicism out of its fortress into our midst, an ecumenical leap that has completely transformed the whole religious and theological scene. This is one of the most momentous changes in church history. Nor could such a seer have guessed that our square, scientific, Boy Scout culture would suddenly find itself saturated with Oriental mysteries, the air blue with incense as well as smog, and swamis replacing psychoanalysts as healers of the young. Here was religious ecumenism with a vengeance, not yet entering the theological class or seminar rooms, but a flood lapping at the walls of each seminary building.

Protestant theology will, and must, be vividly and vitally strengthened by its new relations to Roman Catholic thought. One can now, and surely in the future, find and only speak of Christian theology, not of Protestant or Roman Catholic theology. These latter labels, will, I hazard, become as anachronistic as labels as are Presbyterian or Congregational theology today; and Karl Ralmer and Bernard Lonergan will be read as naturally and as widely as are now Barth and

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Tillich. The relations of Christian theology to other religions will surely be a major concern for us all. Our worlds, our horizons, and hence our cultures now interpenetrate; each of us, therefore, is seeking to deal with the same world of modernity. In so far as each offers itself as providing a religious interpretation of the same cultural world, our dialogue, if not our competition, is bound to increase. An ecumenical movement of religions is on its way. Probably the hardest ecumenical challenge will be between white and black theology, now moving unhappily into different spiritual orbits. Ecumenical growth and healing here will follow political and not theological changes. For it has been our moral and political failures, not theological dogmas, that have caused the present schism.

Second, theology will by necessity be more secular. But again, let us note, in 1960 we could not have begun to understand what that word would come to mean and to represent, nor to envision the proud theological castles of Word and Sacrament (not to mention a celibate clergy) that "secularity" would level in the last decade. By secular, I mean here a theology fundamentally oriented to the secular world in which we exist, a world which for good or ill largely forms us in life and in thought, in our sense of reality, of truth, and of value. Such a theology I contrast to any theology that moves us away from that world to another sacred realm, place, or authority. If we are anywhere to hear a voice that is not our own-and I believe we must -we must hear it in that world among its possibilities and upheavals, and we must conceive and comprehend it in the terms of that world, and enact it in the politics and the crises of that world. This theme has been the dominating, determining force in the theology of the past half decade. I see, and wish to see, no sign of its early weakening. This turn to the secular appeared in two forms, apparently antithetical to one another' each arising out of a different crisis. Neither crisis is by any means abated, or reveals the slightest sign of such abatement.

(1)The first crisis was theological, and led to the secular theologies, the "office and library radicals" of the mid-60's. They saw with an intense clarity two things which to them spelled the doom of traditional theism, as it had of both metaphysics and the Word of God theologies. The first was that we all existed spiritually in a secular world which we tried to counter theologically. It was there that our sense of reality and truth was reared, and it was there, in its turn, that

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religious experiences were possible or impossible, and so religious language was meaningful or not. The second of their insights was that in terms of that world, that is, in terms of secular self-understanding, experiences of a transcendent reality were rare and evanescent at best, and correspondingly religious words were meaningless. In such a world God had died, and the word "God," like a faithful widow in classical Hindu life, was laid to rest alongside him. These two apprehensions were, I think, largely true. And most of American theology, at least that produced by my generation, has since been grappling with the consequences of those insights.

Granted that we are members of this culture who apprehend and conceive reality and truth in that culture's naturalistic and autonomous terms, how is it possible to exist religiously and to think and speak theologically? This has been, and will remain, the logically fundamental problem for theology. For unless theological language has meaning for our present (which is, whether we like it or not, a secular present), it will not have any meaning, validity, and power for us-even if in that present theology tries to speak only of the future. The way to answer this problem, it seems to me, is to locate in secular experience, in our every day experience of the present, those places where ultimacy, the transcendent, and the sacred appear-negatively and positively. Thus we can find, so to speak, secular meanings for our theological discourse. Only then can that language have meaning and validity for us who spiritually exist in the present and in modernity. I suspect, and hope, that for some time to come theology will be involved in relating theological language to the experiences of present cultural life, lest our theological language, however biblical or eschatological, float unrelated to the persons we really are.

(2)There has been, however, a second crisis, perhaps in its own fashion more profound, which has led in a different way to a secular orientation of theology. This crisis was not so much theological as political and moral, a crisis not in theology or the church but in the culture itself. Thus it has not threatened the foundations of theology so much as it has shifted its center of interest and of concern. I refer, of course, to the evident convulsions which are threatening, or, if you please, promising, to dismember our present social world. This cultural crisis appears in many guises: in the objective political and social problems of Vietnam, in racial conflict, poverty,

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the condition of the cities, and in the pollution of the environment. It appears subjectively in the sense of deep alienation of youth across the globe from the modern civilization which the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries had created with serene confidence in technology, objectivity, scientific knowledge and know-how, and pragmatic social policy. The cultural crisis also appears ideologically in the rejection of our culture's major values, both good and bad: in the rejection of its love of affluence, of comfort and success, in its rejection of freedom and tolerance of opinion, and in its rejection of any patience with the slow, fumbling political modes of democracy. This cultural crisismoral, political, and ideological-has also transformed theology, but in a different way than had the first crisis. It has galvanized the theoretical side of religion into the servant instead of the master of activity. Reflection has now tended to have as its object policy, not truth. Sensing the dissolution and decay of the cultural whole, it has turned eschatological. Something new, it feels, is being born out of this mess. Transcendence is not the depth of the present; it is the shape of our impinging future.

It might seem as if this political, futuristic theology of action would replace the phenomenological, empirical theology groping for theological foundations in a crumbling secular city. Perhaps so. Seemingly the two crises are antithetical: for in the first secularity threatens theology, while in the second a moral and eschatological revolution threatens the secular. Yet these two crises are not actually separated; rather, they intertwine. For the revolutionists, despite their alienation from present culture, remain secular in their fundamental sensibilities. We respond, say they, to Jürgen Moltmann's call for revolution, not to his biblicism and his literal view of the resurrection. Although they tend to scorn my generation's reflective questions about God-talk, still when they talk politics themselves, they find that their "political theologies" have little place or need for reference to deity. In this deep sense, a revolutionary generation is as secular, or humanistic, as was a complacent one. Even in the midst of moral and political breakdown, the problems of modern naturalism and historicism remain.

Thus I suggest that the two dominant theological problems of the next years will remain "secular": first, the problem of theological language and reference in a culture saturated with naturalistic and historicist premises; and second, the problems of justice and peace in our political life, and the problem of technology and dehumani-

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zation in our social life. The ambivalence of human history is well illustrated here. The power of modern know-how threatens the meaning of the language of hope, while the results of modern know-how, in interdependence, crowding, weaponry, and technological despoilation, call piteously for just that sort of language.

(3) The coming theology will be increasingly oriented to the future. I here indicate my debt to Jürgen Moltmann and the other futurists who have successfully reminded us that the future is there looming very large. However, my view that this orientation will increase is in no small part based on other factors than the persuasive character of European biblical eschatology, and none of these factors; I hazard, will diminish in influence.

The interesting thing is that the consciousness of the future that whatever the reality and value of the present, it is massively qualified by the impinging future-is as characteristic of our secular culture on all its levels as it is of current continental theology. To our surprise, the Word of God theologians may, in the name of the prophets, be the real modernizers of our epoch. Vocations are divided and specialized in modernity. While ancient prophets both said the Word of God and predicted future events, now exegetical theologians speak of the divine promises, but it is our secular think tanks that do our predicting for us. Committees, institutions, and volumes devoted to predicting the shape of things to come increasingly proliferate among our economic, our political, and our intellectual é1ite. In business, politics, technological expansion, and especially in social science, many of our best secular minds are busy looking down their extrapolated charts into the murky future. Most of these seers naïvely preface their predictions: "assuming present long-term trends continue." This assumption already answers our main question about the future, namely, Will present long-term trends continue? As Moltmann has seen, the question of the future is the question of whether extrapolation of the present is relevant or not, and it cannot be answered by assuming that extrapolation of present trends will tell us about the future. What would, for example, an extrapolation of long-term Hapsburg trends in the Vienna or the Berlin of 1912 have led to? Or an extrapolation of long-term trends in Atlanta or Natchez in 1856? Ezekiel had more rationale than our secular seers. For at least the basis of his forecasts -the power and the fidelity of God-transcended rather than illustrated the temporal relativity of moving passage into the future. In

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any case, our secular culture stares intensely into the future. If we ask why this is so, we may shed some light on why theology will continue to have this futuristic orientation.

Our modern orientation to the future reflects the same baffling ambivalence or see-saw which was reflected in modernity's attitude to the present. The future is both the center of our ultimate hopes and the object of our most anxious fears. Like the numinous reality it is, it fascinates and it repels us. On the one hand, whatever meaning modern culture may envision lies in the future. The myths that buoy us up are radically futuristic and eschatological in form. Although, we say, the past may be bleak and the present sordid-with regard, for example, to the beneficial results of scientific and technology on our social life in general and war in particular-nevertheless a New Day will dawn when men through science will become the intelligent and virtuous beings they undoubtedly can be, and will take their own destiny into their hands and mold for themselves a new self and a new world. This hope, repeated endlessly among our otherwise nervous scientific community, is still the major source of confidence and stability for the intellectual é1ite of our culture. Its anthropology is so poor and its sense of history so feeble, that it will call forth, I hope, a creative new emphasis in theology on the real character of man's existence in history-a subject on which, as Reinhold Niebuhr used to say, modernity is significantly naive.

This overblown confidence in man as scientific knower, as thereby free to do what he wills, and therefore-here is the infinite gulf-as about to be wise and virtuous (as if freedom and possibility meant virtue), reflects the optimistic or the sunshine side of modernity's vision of the future. But on the other side, the future also terrifies the modern consciousness. An advance in the range of possibility has a sting in the tail, namely, that inevitably it means a decrease in the stability and permanence of actuality. This increment in instability is no cause for terror or for despair if what is being changed is either other people's customs and values, say grandfather's, or if it concerns only the surface form of things and not their basic structure. But time and history-destiny if you will-are more ruthless than that. If the values and the mores of grandfather and of the past are gobbled up in the onrush of passage, so, strange to say, can ours be. Even the values and mores of a Wasp culture can become grist for the mill of the Fates. So too, it may be that our deepest values are problematic in the passage of time, even though no man who

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calls for and welcomes change believes this about his own. Ironically, therefore, a culture that has celebrated growth and development, the appearance of the new out of the old, finds itself scared to the bone when technological, social, and political changes of a radical sort stand in the doorway-and by "radical" I mean here the threat to change the values and structures of our culture. This progressive culture is so frightened that it fairly reels in agony when a new haircut style appears among its young. Seriously, our age has a deep and vivid sense of change. It knows in a visceral way that the future will be very different. Its experiences both of technology and of history-two new experiences in culture-have branded this sense of change deep into our consciousness, more than in any other age. I do not see the slightest evidence that this sense of change, of the new that will arise from the old, and thus of the mystery of the future, will recede in the days to come.

A new and more radical element has recently combined with this sense of inescapable change inherent in the dynamics of our culture itself. This has been what we can only call the revolutionary consciousness so pervasive among minority groups of all sorts and especially among the young. The sense of the decay and disease of the present--of our cities, our racial and class structures, our rampant and lethal nationalism, our Wasp superiority-grows and grows, until, to many, the present is utterly bleak and only the future holds out hope. This sense is a secular counterpart to the eschatological theologies; one reason that these theologies speak to our cultural situation despite their biblicism is that their sense of the present in its devastation parallels the secular mood of the young. Thus our gaze is not only glued to the new technological future; it is also longingly pinned to a new political and spiritual age to come. We know that much of the old must die, and something new be born. And so, again, most of our sense of meaning and of concern is focused on the political future. If theology is to speak to our age, it must speak of justice in history; and that means it must speak clearly of judgment on the present, of confidence in the future, and of the reign of God in the days to come.

II

So our theology will be ecumenical, secular, and future-oriented. Let us now draw out the implications of all this in more specifically

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theological terms. If religious language is to be meaningful to us, it must be related to present, secular, day-to-day experience. To be vital a theology must be fundamentally based on the creative, current presence of God in all facets of our life, personal, cultural, and historical. Logically, therefore, the first attribute of God is his immanence-otherwise there is no relation and nothing to say. This logical requirement-that ultimacy and sacrality be experienced in our present life if anything else about God is to be meaningful-also has its secular parallel, namely, the growing sense of immanence, wonder, celebration, joy, and freedom that continually well up in our counter-culture's life. On the other hand, we must not take this as the sole authentic religious message of our time, as William Hamilton and Tom Driver seek to do. For this sense of joy and celebration is dialectically balanced by the sense of deep alienation, decay, death, and condemnation which also dominates that counter-culture's attitude toward history. These polar elements of celebration and of alienation are both there, and will, I hazard, characterize theology increasingly. Like the present, the future will combine celebration and disgust, a sense of the sacral and of the soulless in life, self-affirmation and act, and alienation and withdrawal.

As the God to come must be the God now apprehended, so present celebration and self-affirmation must balance the alienated yearning for the future. The immanence of God in our present secular existence is a theme that must be expanded in the days to come. Theologically this means, of course, that the doctrine of providence, how God does appear and work in our ordinary life-the lost waif of modern theology-must be re-explored. If we can free ourselves enough, we may experience the sacred depths of love, of sexuality, of earth, of vocation, of community, of political action, and learn to celebrate, adore, and conceive these as the places where God is and shows himself. Then we will develop a theological existence that will be both secular and vital, and one greatly needed in a mechanistic mass culture where little meaning and less rapture are found.

In method, this religion of immanence means that a discerning of providence, and so of the new that God is preparing for our world, must be conceived not only in terms of the biblical symbols, as the Europeans do so well, but that our theology must also be conceived in terms of precisely those factors of technology, political developments, and social movements which Europeans ignore and which

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Americans ought to do well. To talk of the eschatological new, a new that God is to bring in, without talking of the actual processes of change within which God works, and in which we are to work, is to talk only of symbols, symbols whose meaning must come from the way they shape historical actuality. To talk biblically is to talk historically. But to talk historically is to talk of more than the merely biblical. It is to talk as well of technology and its development, of economic structures and their possibilities, of political forces and their shaping. Theology must be secular, immanentist, providential, and related to the social and political sciences. Hence, it may become more "American."

Finally, although it must begin in immanence, in the present, in celebration and apprehension of the divine appearing in our midst, still, I believe, theology must also dialectically point to transcendence if it is to live. For the present is to be deplored as well as celebrated. Our existence, to be sure, has sacrality in it, and our new freedom is the work of God. But both our present existence and our human freedom can become demonic and fill our life, personal and historical, with destruction and despair. If we would be true in our theology to our life as we actually experience it, we must express theologically a sense of alienation from the present as well as celebration of it. So we must point beyond the immediately given, human ground of celebration to transcendence. Thus the secular sense of the absence of God calls for revelation; the secular sense of alienation, injustice, and conflict-and sin, we would say-calls for forgiveness and grace; the widespread sense of impotence and despair calls for the apprehension of hope. Above all, the terrible ambiguity of our social and historical destiny in technology, politics, and social relations calls for confidence in a ground and a goal beyond that ambiguity. The emptiness and condemnation of the present point beyond themselves upward to the transcendent Lord of all destiny, in whose providence we stand, and forward to the goal which his present work intends. If our world is to survive the seventies, it will be not because it believed in providence, for that a symbol cannot do. Rather, it will be because beyond the secular and the historical, and even beyond the intimations of grace which we now know and symbolize in our theologies, there is the Lord who is the master of the future.