353 - Christianity in a Secularized World

Christianity in a Secularized World
By Wolfhart Pannenberg
New York, Crossroad, 1989. 62 pp. $11.95.

Pannenberg's argument in this brief, provocative essay can be summarized as follows: the secularization of modern politics and culture results from the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than from Enlightenment rationalism. It was not autonomous human self-assertion against a controlling God (a la Karl Barth), but rather the century of confessionally-motivated civil warfare following the Reformation that served to replace the medieval view of religion as the source of social cohesion with the modern assumption that religious passion destroys social peace.

Of secularization's many forms, none is more threatening to authentic religious consciousness than the "commercialization of culture" that characterizes the present period. Here the marketing of religion-the need to appeal to consumer tastes-inevitably erodes its power to lay claim on and transform the consumer's presuppositions and life. Consumer-oriented, privatized religion leaves the modern self "homeless," deprived of communal meaning plausible and powerful enough to provide an integrative center that will hold. In earlier stages of secularization, this homelessness seemed positive, an emancipation from traditional dogma and constraint. Now, however, its dark side is painfully evident: in the absence of any clear reason for being, emancipation becomes alienation.

Pannenberg concludes that precisely because of this fundamental human need for spiritual meaning, the religious dimension is not disappearing from secular culture, but rather "being repressed from consciousness." The task of Christian theology in a secular culture (the title of the final chapter) is to make visible and effective this implicitly religious yearning. Unfortunately, however, Pannenberg does not suggest how theology might address this formidable task. Instead, he points (all too briefly, without supporting argument) to ways in which contemporary theology evades this vocation, by assimilating to dominant secular trends. One of these is feminist theology, which too readily abandons the Father as a fundamental symbol for God; another is liberation theology, which confuses spiritual with this-worldly emancipation.

William H. Becker
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pa.