Theology Today

“It must be insisted that this absence or death of God is no mere cynicism or loss of faith to be reproved as moral irresponsibility, or dismissed as a failure correctly to read the evidence. This is a mood of our time to which Christian theology must speak intelligibly. … It may not represent everybody, but it does represent a large segment, of young people in particular, to whom the traditional language and institutional forms of Christianity seem very empty. However, this theology is more than a diagnosis. It is also a prescription, and a prescription which offers the disease as the cure.”

“The causal model emphasizes priority in respect to efficacy, but that is by no means the only kind of priority God exhibits. The elusive priority of the self in relation to its action, as well as the priority of persons in relation to one another, is also important and characteristic of religious apprehension of God in some of its modes anyway. On the other hand, the two more personal models, Schleiermacher's and Barth's, include a feature that is conspicuously lacking in the causal model, yet equally important to religious experience, the aspect of immediacy. So there may be good reason for preferring one model to another, while not excluding one or another. It is, after all, with a model that we have to do, and not with the thing itself. The relation of God and the world is unique and mysterious. It is not surprising that several different models have been used to interpret it.”

“If the protagonist of the book can be said to be our own culture (and this does not seem so far fetched, as Kansas is in many ways at the cultural as well as geographical heart of the nation), we see still another characteristic of Greek drama—the nobility of the hero, his pride, and his tragic flaw. The Clutter family clearly embody the culture at its self-identified best, self-made, hard working, civic minded, helpful to others. And the murderers clearly show us the flaw.”

“Students on the whole did not seek to go beyond the conventional and accepted channels of campus organization until they discovered that organization could not bring itself into position of involvement with the issue of revolution, revolt, or protest. It was then that the younger generation, its ranks already swollen by the non-organization antagonists, began to seek more indigenous ways by which to effect social change.

“It is to be noted that the religious leader (chaplain) differs from his faculty colleague in that when a crisis involving justice and equality is upon him or within the college environs, he must act. Failure to act is immoral. The religious leader or chaplain must seek to proclaim justice and equality even at the risk of rejection and persecution.”

“Schaff's judgment, that Calvin's eucharistic teaching ‘must be regarded as the orthodox Reformed doctrine,’ oversimplifies the evidence. In actual fact, Zwingli's view continued to find its way into the confessions even after Calvin's emergence as foremost leader of the Reformed Church. Moreover, Bullinger's Second Helvetic Confession (1561/3) exhibits a third eucharistic type. There seem to be, then, three doctrines of the Eucharist in the Reformed confessions, which we may label ‘symbolic memorialism,’ ‘symbolic parallelism,’ and ‘symbolic instrumentalism.’”

“The Christian man, and every man, lives between the times of the fallen creation and the redemption of the whole creation. His problem in trying to tell what he should do falls within the dialectic between the here and now of fallen existence and the there and then of a restored human reality. At his peril he ignores either of these dimensions, by failing to take responsibility for the preservation of real political order in the world, or by failing to take responsibility for introducing radical changes into the existing world political system. … Yet all action that has in view the actual transformation of the world political system must be located in this world and not some other. A man must take care that his zeal and idealism is not a matter of high-minded rebellion against the governor and preserver of the existing world. This means that a political order is worth something only if it is real, and not merely ideal.”