Quaker Theology #11 -- Spring-Summer 2005

REVIEW

Review Essay: Taking Up Niebuhr’s Irony: Living a Theological Saga -- page 3

Maybe; I have some suspicions. But alas, Dorrien who could connect these dots better than just about anyone else, doesn’t. This is an important omission, if only because the spirit of such projects, though Dorrien seems too polite to say so, is frankly totalitarian; in Catholic history, this spirit gave rise to the Inquisition among other horrors. In the U.S., it first helped bring on the Civil War, and is now kindling something that could turn out to be worse.

Such upheavals are not unknown elsewhere in Dorrien’s corpus. Indeed, as we learn in The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, Karl Barth emerged from the theological crisis of World War One only to have to confront another, in Nazism, twenty years later.

Again he resisted, losing his professorship at Bonn for refusing to sign a Hitlerian loyalty oath. He helped inspire the resistance of the Confessing Church, which, limited as it was, surpassed what most others did. And once more he protested as, with less fanfare than in 1914 and more signs of guilty conscience, one after another of his colleagues, including some very famous theological names, knuckled under to Nazi pressure and were folded into fascist "German Christianity."

The spirit which Barth and Rauschenbush and Niebuhr faced is again loose upon the land. Dorrien’s narrative of evangelical thought continues into the early 1990s, the era of the rise to dominance of Dominionist and neoconservative thought and structures in the movement. Yet its vast impact, as much theological as it is political, hardly registers on his radar screen. Instead, his book focuses on what he sees as the emergence of promising post-fundamentalist and post-conservative trends in evangelical thought – a feminist here, a liberation-minded scripture scholar there, a Christian environ-mentalist in a corner.

Perhaps such trends exist, and if so, I wish them well. But they are clearly marginalized, and all-but underground. By the time I closed The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, it seemed that Dorrien was straining at gnats, and mostly indulging a liberal observer’s wishful thinking. He was fussing over the handful of writers whose work appealed to his liberal concerns, while all but ignoring the 900-pound elephant that is crowding them out. The book misses the other, much more massive remaking of evangelical theology and culture it has brought about.

The echoes of Barth’s experience in our current discourse are evident to any who have ears to hear them. But these books are somehow largely deaf to them.

Still, hope springs eternal, and the many riches here makes one hope even more intensely that the trilogy’s third volume will begin to fill these gaps, which yawn wider with every day that passes.

I’m worried, though, because the elephant is also missing from The Word as True Myth, which presents what appears to be a summary of the larger project. In it Dorrien examines a wide range of recent thinkers, from John Cobb and process thought, to the religious implications of Jungian psychology, Mary Daly’s post-Christian feminism, other liberationists, and the Babel of deconstructionists.

All interesting; yet again, while a field of vision limited to the liberal sectors of the landscape may be instructive, it still seems daily more parochial, obsolete, and unhelpful.

So I’m awaiting Vol. 3 of his history not only because the first two were well-written, informative and insightful; but also because, and most important, it will be his last chance to bring together all this material in a way which can make it armor and ammunition for the trials that lie ahead.

And that’s what it should be. For one thing, Dorrien said (Idealism, p. 5) that volume three will feature, among the others, the Unitarian thinker James Luther Adams. I don’t know much about Adams, but I do know something of one of his more well-known students, reporter Chris Hedges, the recovering war correspondent. Hedges’ book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, has been widely discussed as an eloquent cry against war by a nonpacifist.

That book was not overtly religious; but Hedges has noted how often he saw religion used to add fuel to the fires of the various wars he reported on. Now his attention has turned, with growing alarm, to this rising domestic insurgency and its implications. Given his experience, I believe his is a voice to be heeded.

Last January, for instance, Hedges published a New York Times profile of professor Fritz Stern, who was a youthful exile from Nazi Germany and spent his academic career studying the origins of German fascism. The profile focused on Stern’s explanation of how Nazism co-opted and mobilized religion into a pillar of its regime. (For the full text of the Stern presentation, see Stern.) The parallels to "the rise of the Christian right" were evident to Hedges. (Hedges, January 2005).

Hedges has the theological background to highlight this process. He attended Harvard Divinity School before beginning his journalistic career. There, he writes,

Hedges adds: "But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance." (Hedges, May 2005) He wrote that after a visit this winter to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in California, where, he felt, he saw Adams’s prophecy and Stern’s analysis being amply enacted before his eyes.

This quote reminds me of the old question from the days of the Watergate scandal: What did he know, and when did he know it? James Luther Adams knew something important, and he knew it well before most of the rest of us. And he was a liberal theologian. Tell us this story, Gary.

Which brings me to a final point: Dorrien’s books will be consulted for a long time about the history of liberal theology, and rightly so. As they are, however, I submit that for many future readers, and not just myself, an increasingly important measure of a thinker’s weight will be, not only their view of Ritschl or Schleiermacher, but whether, like Barth and Rauschenbush, their theologizing somehow enabled them to stand against the militarist, triumphalist tide washing over their/our society. And his grand trilogy’s value will be diluted if it does not explain how the current they witnessed against became a tide that battered them.

If Gary Dorrien seeks to be worthy of the Niebuhr chair, and the weight of his own project, he better find and tell us those stories in his aptly-titled, Liberating Theology in Crisis. And the sooner the better.

LIST OF WORKS CITED

Dorrien, Gary. "Imperial Designs: Resisting the Permanent War." Lecture on April 9, 2003.

http://www.kzoo4peace.org/DorrienApr9.html

Fager, Chuck. "Lucretia Mott, Liberal Quaker Theologian," Quaker Theology #10, Spring-Summer 2004.

http://quaker.org/quest/issue-10-mott-CEF-01.htm

Fox, Richard W. Reinhold Niebuhr, A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week622/hedges.html

Hedges, Chris. "PUBLIC LIVES: Warning From a Student of Democracy's Collapse." The New York Times, January 6, 2005. Page B2.

Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force Which Gives us Meaning. New Ork: Anchor, 2002.

McClay, Wilfred M. "The Continuing Irony of American History," First Things, 120, February 2002, pp. 20-25.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0202/articles/mcclay.html

Stern, Fritz. "Acceptance Speech, Delivered Upon Receiving the Leo Baeck Medal, " January 6, 2005. http://www.lbi.org/fritzstern.html

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