to rob Eastern and other peoples of their birthright, and thus foment hostilities.
No, we may not, I think, prescribe what Christianity is and must always be. Even if we could do that, theoretically, it would be a disastrous project, adding untold weight to an already chaotic and potentially lethal religious situation. It would also, of course, be completely impracticable, even absurd. But what we may and can and ought to do, I shall argue here, is to hold up to one another in the churches and to those who care in the world at large some of the ways in which Christianity is being misrepresented and made part of the world’s problem, not its redemption, by groups and movements and causes that identify this faith with some of its parts and elements and associations writ too large. Perhaps we may no longer speak clearly of the essence of Christianity, as did nineteenth-century theologians and historians like Adolf von Harnack; but surely—humbly, more tentatively, yet with a certain confidence born of faith and historical necessity—we may still have a sufficiently shared sense of the “kerygmatic core” or “heart” of this faith—its Innerlichkeit—to be able, in the face of these dangerous misrepresentations of it, to say what it is not.9
3. Richard Dawkins, copied from an article on Dawkins in Wikipedia.
4. See in this connection the conclusion and afterword of this study.
5. Sermo 52, 16: PL 38, 360. I was delighted to see this phrase quoted in the Christmas 2005 encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI titled Deus caritas est [God Is Love] (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 53.
For a fuller examination of the thought of Augustine on this subject, see the complete translation of Sermon 52 by the Rev. R. G. MacMullen on the Internet at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf106.vii.iv.html/. The pertinent passage reads: “What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if thou hast been able to comprehend what thou wouldest say, it is not God; if thou has been able to comprehend it, thou has comprehended something else instead of God. If thou has been able to comprehend Him as thou thinkest, by so thinking thou hast deceived thyself. This then is not God, if thou has comprehended it; but if it be God, thou hast not comprehended it. How therefore wouldest thou speak of that which thou canst not comprehend?”
6. What Luther means by theologia gloriae is in fact nothing more nor less than a heightened expression of affirmative theology—theology that answers everything, explains everything, leaves nothing to mystery and the unfolding of the future.
7. See in this connection Reintegrating God’s Creation: A Paper for Discussion. Church and Society Document 3 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987). This booklet (62 pages) is the documentary remains of one of the most interesting ecumenical meetings in which I have ever participated. It was part of that seven-year process undertaken by the World Council at its sixth assembly (in Vancouver in 1983) and known by the phrase, “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.”
In May of 1987 I was one of a small group of ten or twelve persons—scientists, theologians, journalists—who were called together by the WCC to meet for several days in a small Franciscan convent in Amsterdam. One of the other senior participants was a scientist of whom, at the time, I had never heard. His name was James Lovelock, and he had just made public what at the suggestion of his friend William Golding, the English novelist, he had named the Gaia Theory. In its briefest form, the Gaia Theory states that the planet Earth is a living reality, and not merely a collective of inanimate substances and processes; and that therefore our human attitude toward and relationship with the planet needs to avoid the kind of objectification or “thingification” that has in fact characterized the whole modern scientific approach to nature.
Perhaps because we were the two eldest participants in the group, James Lovelock and I quickly recognized a certain commonality in our approaches to the world—though his was of course scientific and mine theological—and we found ourselves being turned to by the others for some procedural guidance; for it was a rather amorphous group, without previous acquaintance, and we had had no briefing by the organizers.
From the start, I found Lovelock’s thinking both compatible and stimulating, as, e.g., Rosemary Radford Ruether has done since: see Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). To look upon the planet as though it were alive, even if one had to use that term somewhat metaphorically, seemed an important breakthrough in the human attempt to find a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it. Yet I wondered how such a bold thesis would fare under the gaze of the more objective or hard sciences.
As it happened, our little conference was occurring at the same time as a large professional gathering of scientists under the auspices of the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Free University of Amsterdam; and one day it was arranged that our group should visit that consultation. I was astonished at the respect and interest with which James Lovelock was received by the international scientists on that occasion. I believe that his Gaia Theory is still regarded with some skepticism among scientists, but that is not so significant as is the fact that it has stimulated the thinking of many within the scientific community as well as a great many others who reflect deeply on the future of the planet under the impact of human demand, neglect, and contempt.
The above-named booklet did not achieve a wide circulation, but it deserves to be studied at least for its exemplification of profitable dialogue between science and theology today.
8. See, e.g., Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9. Reluctantly I find myself in some disagreement with what my colleague and friend of many years, the Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, has recently written on this subject:
“Let me first say a few words about the internal pluralism of religious traditions. At one time, scholars believed that it was possible to gain a deep insight into a religion and define its essential characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack, the famous Protestant theologian and historian, published The Essence of Christianity; Leo Beck, the learned German rabbi, published The Essence of Judaism. Today scholars no longer suppose that religions have an essence. What is recognized today is that religions are produced by communities of interpretation whose faith is based on sacred texts or sacred persons, sources that summon them to worship and guide them in their daily life. Religions are constituted by faith communities that read and reread their sacred texts in the ever-changing circumstances of history. In the search for fidelity to the originating texts or persons, the hermeneutic communities are involved in internal debates and in conversation with the culture in which they dwell. Religions thus have no permanent essence: their identity is created by their effort to remain faithful to the sacred texts. Religions are therefore inevitably marked by an internal pluralism. Each religion has many faces.” (Baum, Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice[Toronto: Novalis, 2007], 20–21.)
This may be true enough as a description of the religious situation, but apart from its reference to “sacred texts,” it does not address the knotty question of authenticity, nor does it leave us with any criteria for recognizing great distortions of given religious traditions. One can readily agree that the concept of an essence of a religion evokes the language of another time; nevertheless, the basic inquiry in which Harnack and Beck and others of that age were involved is hardly one that can be abandoned by serious faith and theology. Whether we call it the ongoing quest for the core or kernel or inwardness
