livingness, its organic and always-moving nature—then one is likely to be less than absolute in one’s descriptions and depictions of it; one will find oneself drawn to the way of negation because one realizes how little trust one can put in one’s feeble attempts to do justice to “the livingness of things.”
One of the (relatively few!) developments that gives one hope today is the manner in which the public perception of the world—of nature, certainly, but also of human life—seems to be moving away from the wholly materialistic, objectifying mentality of the technological society to a more organic, more fluid, more animate conception of reality. Not that the technocratic, managerial mentality has disappeared—far from it! But more of us today than was the case even two or three decades ago, I think, have em-braced a worldview that looks with a certain awe upon the natural order, including ourselves within that order. Partly because we have experienced great and abiding threats to nature and all life, we have learned to look upon the world with different eyes. Trees are not just lumber, and polar bears are not just cute big fuzzy creatures for zoos, and the Precambrian shield is not just a barren place for mining, and the oceans are not just for fishing, and people are not just statistics! James Lovelock, instigator of the so-called Gaia Theory, believes that the planet itself is a kind of living organism, and not just a rather amazing ball of substances and processes that we may get to understand and use as we please!7
This new public awareness, so far as it is able to conquer or at least counter the materialistic, technological approach to reality, is where I think religious faith must turn for human dialogue today. For faith—certainly Christian faith—shares with this mentality, even when it is driven by nontheistic or secular impulses, a sense of the great mystery of all reality as the good creation of an omniscient God. And wherever that sense of mystery is entertained among men and women, there is an opening for dialogue with faith.
That faith, however, must itself be true to the depths of mystery that it confesses. That faith must not devolve into sight, into brave religious pronouncements, into propositions and doctrines and dogmas and ironclad fundamentals. When it does that, it betrays the very Source of wonder to which it is supposed to be bearing witness.
This means that theological modesty is required today, not only where our statements about God—our theologies in the narrower sense—are concerned, but in all things. And the way of negation, at bottom, is nothing more or less than a manner of honoring the mystery of God and the things of God—all the things of God: that is, the heavens and earth and “all creatures great and small,” including our own strange and perhaps impossible species.
The Intention of this Study
My intention in the chapters that follow, then, is simply to apply that way of negation to the question about Christianity itself. At a time when definitive statements about a religion—any and every religion—are bound to occasion immediate dispute and rejection, may we nevertheless preserve something of the integrity of the Christian faith by trying to identify what it is not?
Recently I attended in our university an interesting doctoral oral examination. The basic question of the dissertation being examined was whether the eschatology of Augustine, as presented in his magnum opus, The City of God, could have any relevance for feminist theology. It was a good thesis, but an extremely difficult one—more so, I think, than appeared on the surface. As a result, the examiners found themselves frustrated and floundering at many points. Could one, they wondered, legitimately compare a theology developed in the context of fourth-century Rome (already in a state of decay) with theologies emerging out of contemporary Western societies more than a millennium and a half later?
In the final moments of the long examination, the chair or pro-dean of the examining committee, himself a Muslim, was moved to ask, “Are there not perhaps many Christianities?”
That was a very perceptive question, and the one that had been begged throughout the discussion. It is also the question that we must ask ourselves here. With a modicum of knowledge of church history, one realizes that Christianity has indeed shown up throughout these twenty-plus centuries in many different forms and guises. And when one encounters Christians from other parts of the world today, one is often struck more by differences than by similarities—differences of spirituality; differences of moral concerns; differences in attitudes toward the Scriptures, church authority, tradition, politics, sexuality, and so forth. Whole Christian denominations are torn apart by such differences. Meetings of ecumenical bodies are often bedeviled by them. Globalization has only increased our knowledge of the bewildering variety of Christian communities and types. Some suggest that the present-day split between Christians of the northern and the southern hemispheres, in this respect, is fraught with more ecclesiastical grief than the Great Schism of East and West in the eleventh century, traditionally dated 1054 CE.8 Right here on our own continent are diverse and—at least in some cases—wholly incompatible expressions of this ancient faith, all insisting that they are bodying forth Christianity. It is tempting, therefore, as it was for the examiners of that thesis, to conclude that there are simply many Christianities.
But that, it seems to me, is a too-easy way out of what is certainly a dilemma. I am tempted to say that it is in fact an evasion of the problem. Where it is not the product of sheer weariness or indifference (a mood that was certainly observable in the aforementioned doctoral examination!), it courts a numbing relativism and leaves serious Christians in the lurch. Are we to say, simply, that there are all these sorts of Christianity, one as legitimate as the next, so take your pick? Are we ready to give up on the biblical and traditional mark of Christian unity—simply to leave out the word “one” when we repeat marks of the church in the Nicene Creed and elsewhere, and opt for this smorgasbord of Christianities that characterizes the worldwide religious scene today?
I do not wish to imply that Christian unity translates into uniformity. It never has and never will. Indeed, it never should! Nor do I wish to suggest that we should, or can, aim for some immutable, permanently true definition of what authentic Christianity is. It seems obvious to me that in the twenty-first century we cannot and should not even attempt to construct binding definitions, in whatever form, of what constitutes true Christianity. Of course many would like to do that, provided their own definitions were the ones accepted! But surely we have learned enough from history to realize that, besides not resolving anything, such regulatory definitions would only add to the estrangement, suspicion, and violence that already exists among Christians and churches. Few of us are ready for the kinds of excommunications, denunciations, damnations, and burnings at the stake (well, yes—probably that too!) that would prove the logical course of such a procedure.
But neither, on the other hand, can we settle for the status quo, with its plethora of churches and sects and causes and creeds and moralities all claiming to be expressions of Christianity. We cannot rest easy with that existing situation, however we may tolerate it in the meantime, because some of these alleged Christianities are dynamite. They are brimful of potentiality for chaos and violence, overflowing with the very stuff out of which “religion kills.” Perhaps in an earlier, less volatile age than ours, there was room for the kind of laissez faire that simply left in abeyance the question of truth or legitimacy or authenticity. But we know now that this is not our present situation. In today’s world (the world after 9/11, if you wish), what Christians think and do, and do not think or do, matters not only to other Christians but to the whole species—affects indeed the future of the planet. We Christians, who in our heyday as Christendom thought we could control everything, in our humiliated and reduced state are apt to underestimate our own responsibility for the preservation of life. We have become very concerned, many of us, about the Islamic faith, which we feel threatens the planetary future because so much of it seems to have fallen into extremism. Where are the moderate Muslims?, many Christians ask. But Muslims might just as legitimately ask, Where are the moderate and responsible Christians? For in large areas of the Muslim world the Christians, when they do not show up as plain proselytizers, seem the chief
