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Styles of Theological Reflection for the Future
By Gregory Baum

It is rare that theological workshops are exciting events, but the Consultation on Styles of Theological Reflection for the Future, sponsored by the United Ministries in Higher Education and the Kansas School of Religion at the University of Kansas, was an exception to the rule. The resource persons invited to the workshop, held between August 1 and 6, were Sam Keen, the author of To a Dancing God and Apology for Wonder, Rubem Alves, author

Gregory Baum, O.S.A. , a member of the Editorial Council of Theology Today, teaches at St Michael's College in the University of Toronto and is the editor of The Ecumenist. The following article is his response to and analysis of the Consultation on Styles of Theological Reflection for the Future, held at the University of Kansas, August 1-6, 1971. The Consultation was sponsored by United Ministries in Higher Education, the Kansas School of Religion at the University of Kansas, and the National Campus Alinistry Association, Regions Three and Four.

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of A Theology of Human Hope, James Cone, author of Black Theology and Black Power, and Black Theology of Liberation, and myself. The participants numbered over one hundred and fifty.

Since I am still under the impact of the exchange and conflict that took place in an unusual atmosphere of trust and candor, I find it difficult to give a balanced report of the Consultation. The presentations did not supply us with answers. On the contrary, what happened throughout the discussion was the deepening of the questions. Yet to be in touch with the crucial questions, however painful they may be, is to be delivered from superficial questions and to move forward toward the truth that saves.

While there was great diversity among the four resource persons, they agreed on one crucial point, a point that set them off from various forms of traditional theology and prevented the discussion from ever reverting to the tedious debate between so-called progressives and conservatives. What was this point of agreement? All the resource persons held that truth cannot be separated from action. Truth is never an abstract and objective statement about reality. Truth is always grounded in a certain kind of involvement in life and history. This also holds for doctrine. Orthodoxy pre-supposes orthopraxis. Truth becomes available only through right action. Talk about God is not objective statement that remains true in the mouth of every person whatever his involvement in life. God-talk is, rather, declaration about the possibilities of human life. In more traditional language, God-talk is about sin and grace.

For Sam Keen the principal model for theological thinking was the psychoanalytic process of human growth. We find ourselves out of touch with reality. Concentrating on thinking alone will not open the way to the real since intellectual effort may largely be an expression of man's personal alienation from life, from sensitivity, from feelings, and from his own body. The intellectual life may become the rationalization of the illness. What counts, therefore, in the quest of wisdom is to regain a greater awareness of our past and our deep feelings. It is this loss of contact that drives us to extremes, to desperate solutions, to absolutes of various kinds. In our panic we create gods. Only as we live out of our own history, come to know who we are, accept our finitude and deal with the present, will absolutes and other fantasies leave us. Then we may be able to deal with reality and build up a more human world.

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The regaining of one's own story is crucial here. Sam Keen asked the large assembly to break up in pairs of their own choice and to tell their personal stories to one another. Unless reflection and intellectual activity is in constant conversation with the emotional life, it may simply serve man's self-alienation. Sam Keen is profoundly convinced that at this time, the entire theological language must be bracketed. It no longer makes sense to speak of God and of Jesus because we have been unwilling to pass through self-examination and detect whether these words are barriers that keep us away from the deepest layers of our own experience and hence from growing toward wholeness, or whether they express the moments in life which actually make us more truly human and enable us to face and deal with reality. The entire theological enterprise has here become problematic unless it is a reflection on the process by which men lay hold of themselves and become free.

Rubem Alves also held that man is alienated from himself and reality and that any talk about God out of this alienation makes no sense and only deepens the human plight. But the model Rubem Alves used to conceptualize this alienation was the Marxist analysis of society in terms of oppressor and oppressed. Since culture, religion, and science are to a large extent the work and expression of the dominant social class, they inevitably contain ideological elements. They are inevitably produced as instruments for the defense of the status quo. Religion in particular is the divine stamp of approval on the existing order. It maintains and promotes present society. Even when religion offers high ideals of love and brotherhood, this preaching is unable to modify the common consciousness. Consciousness can only be changed by modifying the social conditions in which people live. Religion can escape from its conservative role only if it makes people impatient with the present, offers them new dreams, and urges them on to change the material structure of society. Unless man is dedicated to the liberation of the oppressed, he cannot make any valid statement whatever about the divine in human life. Theology is reflection on human liberation.

Rubem Alves believes that in the Scriptures we have a history written out of a perspective of defeat and the longing for freedom. God had mercy on Israel oppressed in Egypt. He destroyed the oppressor and saved his people in the desert. This perspective of liberation was carried forward by the prophetic tradition in Scripture.

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Here the values of "the world" are recognized as so many ways of human oppression. Wisdom is with the downtrodden, the exploited, the weak. The biblical longing is for the future, for the land of promise. The joys of the present are anticipations of the redemption that is to come and hence always have a taste of bitterness mixed with them. The Bible has a revolutionary message since it undermines the false consciousness created by the world and makes people long for the new.

James Cone presented his understanding of black theology. He held with the other speakers that oppression has so deeply marked the present culture that all talk about God has become problematic. God-talk in the mouth of the oppressor will be a subtle justification of the present situation. The black man in America, Jim Cone holds, must regard the white oppression of the black as the principal and unique model for the understanding of the biblical story. The black man in the U.S. is not in a position to speak of several oppressive trends which interlock and pervade present culture with varying degrees of intensity. Because of his historical situation, there is for him one oppression that counts, namely the white man's domination of the black. All other considerations must be set aside. As the people of Israel under the Egyptian yoke were not asked to be in dialogue with the Egyptians, to find a compromise solution for their troubles, to steer the middle course between two extremes, or to search for ways of being reconciled to their oppressors, so the black man today seeks not integration but his separation, his exodus, his peoplehood, his liberation. This is the one perspective from which he may look on life and history.

While many blacks in the black power movement have become impatient with their Christian heritage and turn to atheism or African forms of religion, Jim Cone tried to show that revolutionary potential is built into the scriptural religion the black man has inherited. There is no need for him to turn away from his past. By reinterpreting the religion given to him by the white man, he is able to draw revolutionary power from the roots of his religious past and the memory of his ancestors. The spirituals thus become songs that nourish the hope for liberation and give energy to continue the struggle for justice.

Jim Cone was painful to listen to. For to see ourselves cast completely and without qualification in the role of the Egyptians does

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not correspond with our own self-understanding. Yet the forms of oppression penetrate so deeply into the manner in which the oppressor looks at reality that he is unable to recognize his own involvement in evil. This is false consciousness. Good will alone is not sufficient to overcome it. It is only through confrontation, pain, and conversion that man can discover the destructive games in which he is involved.

In my own presentation, I described the experiences which have come to convince me that the Christian message is not an objective statement about a sacred reality existing in and by itself but, rather, the proclamation of the gracious process by which men are saved. The detailed study of the antisemitism (unconsciously) built into Christian teaching and liturgy convinced me many years ago that destructive games may be contained in religion and culture and that truth becomes available only as these oppressive patterns are disclosed. In later years, my own psychotherapeutic experience convinced me that religion and our manner of talking about it contain many sick-making trends and that in such a situation theological effort may simply be a rationalization of the illness. If men make statements about reality out of their alienated situation, then these statements must be false. Truth becomes available only as we submit our life to a critique-to God's Word, as I would say in theological language-as we are willing to acknowledge our false consciousness, discern the destructive games in which we are unconsciously involved, and engage ourselves in the struggle for liberation and wholeness. A Marxian critique discovers the ideological component in Christian teaching, and a Freudian critique reveals the subtle justification of schizophrenia and paranoia in the Christian religion. The critique of Jesus Christ saves us from the reductionism contained in any system. For it is possible, from fear or resentment, to repress the spiritual dimension of life and thus to be cut off from the transcendent horizon which summons and energizes us to grow, to move into the future, and to transform the world.

The discussions among the resource persons and the participants clarified many issues. It was never dull, often significant, and sometimes quite vehement. What emerged was a profound dichotomy between those who assign the principal cause of alienation to man's personal life (to his illness, his estrangement from his feelings, his body, his sources of vitality) and those who see the principal cause in

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the material structure of society (in the various institutionalized forms of oppression by which men protect their privileges). Between these two positions, no synthesis was possible. The more the issue was discussed, the more vehement became the affirmation of the difference.

There was at the Consultation no single conservative theologian who might have objected that we take life and history too seriously, that while there is indeed sin and alienation in the world, the Christian message brings us in communication with another world, the world of God, and as we trust the saving message of the Lord we move safely through this valley of tears toward the kingdom of glory. No one at the Consultation used language about the divine to release us from the pressure of history and thus trivialize the sin and the agony in which man is presently involved. Unless divine liberation implies the transformation of life on this earth, its proclamation would only deepen man's estrangement from himself.

But the dichotomy remained. It is my view (which sounded Hegelian to my interceptors) that we must not try to reconcile this dichotomy but live it out in history. Some Christians will carry the stress on personal growth to its extreme consequence and others the stress on political liberation. Out of this contrasting emphasis, out of this tearing, this painful conflict, this never to be disguised dichotomy, may emerge in the future a new direction which includes both opposites.

No one remained unmoved at this Consultation. If theology is not simply an exercise in truth but a reflection on conversion, then the Consultation provided a model for the manner in which theology should be done and communicated to others.