COMPARATIVE RELIGION
It’s too bad none of the mainline churches or the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches ever incorporated the best of modern theology that could have brought them into the 20th and now the 21st century.
The fundagelicals will continue to bite because they need the “certainty” that some people need. There is a group of “Neo-Cat” Catholics who have the same need, different flavor. They are reacting against the liberalization, liturgically and theologically, that took place in the Roman Catholic theology leading up to and after Vatican II and in Protestant theology even earlier.
But theologians of the ilk of Matthew Fox, Peter Kreeft, Edward Schillebeeckx, Bede Griffiths, Piet Schoonenberg, Henri de Lubac, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Bernhard Häring, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Dietrich Bonhöffer, Rudolf Bultmann, Ruolph Otto, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul Tillich, and John MacQuarrie (my shining light) wrote their heads and hearts out.. Virtually all of the Roman Catholic theologians who dared veer off course have been silenced.
Virtually all of these theologians pre-dated Bishop Spong. His theology is largely reliant on their thought and writings.The French would call him《un grand vulgarisateur》but that does not translate to “a great vulgeriser.” No, in French, it’s a compliment. It means a person like John Shelby Spong. What John Spong did was to take all that esoteric, dense, and written-by- theologians-for-theologians writing and translate it into common parlance for ordinary people. He did it very well. What a gift.
But here’s the bad news. The writings of all those modern theologians and the accesibility afforded by writers like Spong have had virtually no effect on the life of either the Roman Catholic, Episcopal, or Protestant churches. Their liturgies, bible studies and sermons continue to use the language, doctrine, and thinking of the 18th century and before. And they are all, some slowly, some lickety-split, dying.
The dilemma is that there are just enough “give-us-the-old-myth” congregants and priests/ministers that au-courant priests and ministers don’t dare challenge the two-century-old paradigm and risk losing their jobs. In fact, most seminaries don’t dig deep enough into actual systematic or scriptural theology to intrigue seminarians to think deeper. In fact, in my own denomination, few applicants go to seminary. They go through an at-home diocese-by-diocese do-it-yourself training program.
Meanwhile, major swaths of the Baby Boomers, about two-thirds of Generation X, and virtually all those in Generations Y, Z and Alpha are gone, lost to the real world and unwilling to prop up the myth any longer.
What is sad is that folks like us have no place to go. I believe most people need community. The Unitarians and some UCC folks are good on community and theology but have no idea of the need for liturgy. Human beings also need silence, with contemporary society doing all it can to keep us talking and running. The non-program Quakers and Zensters have the silence down, but that’s all. I read a piece of light research recently that suggested that many Millenials and post Millenials are attracted to very high-church (smells and bells) liturgies. I’ve checked that out with a couple of Millenials who said that they liked the transcendent atmosphere Anglo-Catholic liturgy creates . . . as long as they don’t listen to the words.
It is time for a new kind of community and a new kind of “worship.” New Age groups and attempted returns to ancient, primitive, mostly pantheistic or ancestor-worshipping cults are, to me, tiresome. And yet I yearn and I suspect I’m not alone.
(Discussion in ‘Christianity‘ started by wil, Feb 20, 2022)
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