Theology for Liberal Protestants

God the Creator

Douglas F. Ottati

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467439138
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A two-volume work by Douglas Ottati, Theology for Liberal Protestants presents a comprehensive theology for Christians who are willing to rethink and revise traditional doctrines in face of contemporary challenges. It is Augustinian, claiming that we belong to the God of grace who creates, judges, and renews. It is Protestant, affirming the priority of the Bible and the fallibility of church teaching. It is liberal, recognizing the importance of critical arguments and scientific inquiries, a deeply historical consciousness, and a commitment to social criticism and engagement.This first volume contains sections on method and creation. Ottati's method envisions the world and ourselves in relation to God as Creator, Judge, and Redeemer. The bulk of the book offers an in-depth discussion of God as Creator, the world as creation, and humans as good, capable, and limited creatures.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Point of View

My aim in this book is to present a systematic theology for liberal Protestants. To some, given the current context, this will seem misguided. Today the future of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere appears to be predominantly Pentecostal and charismatic. There has been a (somewhat papally induced) surge of conservative leadership among Roman Catholics. Orthodoxy enjoys new freedoms and influence in Russia. A historically Christian but increasingly secular Western Europe struggles to absorb Muslim immigrants. In the United States, the cultural and political clout of evangelical Protestants remains strong. The more moderate “mainline” churches sustain membership losses as well as contentious divisions and debates, while many of their theologians issue calls to “reclaim the center” — as well as calls for “postliberal theology,” “generous orthodoxy,” and even “radical orthodoxy.” Liberal Protestants often seem irrelevant and beside the point. Why direct one’s theological reflections toward them?

My answer is that there is more to our current context than this, and that liberal Protestantism still has contributions to make to the church in a world where scientific findings and new technologies, as well as complex economies and social systems, exert significant influences. We should recognize, of course, that our present world is very diverse and that these influences are thus hardly uniform. Depending on one’s physical, social, and cultural location, the world of one’s present experience may be described as postmodern or premodern, market-driven or tribal, globally interconnected, ineluctably local, agricultural, industrial, postindustrial, democratic, oligarchic, monarchic, dictatorial, and more. Nevertheless, the current world is a place where, sooner or later, very many people, including Christians of virtually every stripe, will encounter new pluralities, profound scientific and technical advances, powerful markets, and highly structured (often bureaucratic) social systems. Sooner or later these encounters will provoke basic and important questions about meaning as well as about Christian faith and practice. How shall we understand ancient affirmations about Jesus, God, the church, and so on in our contemporary world? What shall we make of the new picture of human beings and the cosmos now emerging from well-attested scientific findings? How shall we come to terms with the many faiths and religious traditions — not only in the world at large but also in our own cultures and (frequently secular) societies? How shall we participate responsibly (i.e., both critically and constructively) in modern nation-states in an age of global markets, electronic communications, political interdependencies, extensive immigration, international assemblies, and proliferating technologies of destruction? This is why liberal Protestants may continue to contribute what — at their best — they have always tried to contribute: faithful ways to restate, rethink, and revise Christian believing in the face of contemporary knowledge and realities.

If I am correct, the danger facing liberal Protestantism is not that it seems unlikely to become the majority Christian movement. (It never really did seem able to become that.) It is not that liberal Protestants, who generally participate in postindustrial, commercial, religiously pluralistic, and secular societies where educational and professional opportunities are comparatively widely distributed, sometimes find themselves at odds with Christians who reside in more traditional societies. That is to be expected, especially when it comes to questions about the place of women in church and society, as well as a variety of other issues concerning sexuality, family, and religion. Nor is it simply the result of conservative turns among Roman Catholics, new possibilities for Russian Orthodoxy, secular defections, evangelical successes, changing patterns of immigration, and even “mainstream Protestant decline.” The true danger — one that really does threaten to render liberal Protestants beside the point — is a loss of theological acuity, a diminishment of their readiness to draw on explicitly theological language, ideas, and symbols as they engage the contemporary world.

This danger is partly the consequence of an exceptional — even laudable — practical energy. At least since the days of the Social Gospel, liberal Protestants have tended to be socially and politically active. Liberal Protestants organize committees, associations, and networks that call attention to injustices, advocate causes, and seek to mitigate ills. They try to “be prophetic,” they protest, and they work for change. Many appear to know almost intuitively where they stand on important issues of the day, for example, Christianity and other religions, gay marriage, the environment, and uses of military power. Too often, however, they seem unable to give strong theological reasons for the stands they take. Indeed, some liberal Protestants appear to regard theological reflection itself as little more than an ancillary “head trip” that detracts from the real business at hand.

Another development sometimes intensifies the danger. For about four generations now, leading theologians in America have been trained in highly specialized university PhD programs where emphasis falls on technical scholarship pursued and written up by academics for other academics. The system furnishes accomplished researchers and professors, but it often leaves educated laypeople, seminarians, and ministers to be addressed by popular writings whose engagements with contemporary knowledge, interpretations of the longer tradition, and constructive reflections lack depth.

In this book I have tried to mitigate the split between scholarly and more accessible theological literature by writing a rigorous yet comparatively uncluttered text that engages piety, ministry, and practice — and that addresses both pastors and professors. To that end, I have placed a number of demanding and detailed scholarly comments in explanatory footnotes. I have tried to enhance the integrity and acuity of a distinctly liberal Christian witness by presenting a systematic theology rather than a history of liberal theology or a series of monographs about discrete themes and figures.¹ My objective has been to present a liberal Protestant posture, disposition, and piety by exploring interrelationships among theological symbols, ideas, and arguments.²

There are, however, different varieties of Protestant Christianity; thus, even if I had wanted to, I could not have pursued these objectives by outlining a generic liberal Protestant theology. Instead, I have tried to present a liberal Protestant posture shaped by the Augustinian sense that we belong to the God of grace. Therefore, my immediate introductory task is to say what I mean by stringing together three terms: Augustinian, Protestant, and liberal.

Augustinian

When I use the term “Augustinian,” I mean following the theological lead of Augustine (354-430 C.E.), the bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa and probably the most influential Christian theologian in the West. Specifically, I mean three related convictions of Augustine: first, God is Creator, and the world is God’s good and gracious gift; second, God is Judge, and all persons, communities, and institutions are fallen, mired in sin’s radical and misorienting constriction; third, God is Redeemer, that is, in Jesus Christ God forgives sinners and also rehabilitates or enlarges their corrupted hearts, loves, and life-orientations by the renewing gifts of grace and the Spirit. In summary, we belong to the God of grace, who creates the world and life as good gifts, who judges wayward sinners, and who reconciles and renews fallen creatures rather than abandoning them to corruption.

The first point is anti-Manichean and anti-Gnostic, and Augustine emphasizes it in a number of writings, including portions of City of God, his treatise The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life, and the final chapter of his Confessions.³ Stated negatively, the one God’s good creation is not a field where coequal good and evil powers are locked in conflict; nor is it a snare that entraps good immaterial spirits or souls. The second point, that sin is deeper than bad habits and cannot be addressed merely by joining the right moral standards with exhortations and incentives, is anti-Pelagian (though it sometimes also comes to expression against Donatist claims that the church is holy because it is morally upright and “without spot or blemish”). The third point, that forgiveness and regeneration depend on grace, assumes that people are in bondage to sin and thus cannot rightwise and reorient themselves by their own efforts.

I anticipate points I will make later when I note that this reading of Augustine is essentially a Protestant one that emphasizes the centrality of his doctrine of grace. A different, classically Catholic appropriation emphasizes his doctrine of the church and his anti-Donatist points. It holds that (1) sanctification and a changed life is a condition for justification or forgiveness; (2) genuine faith is faith in the authoritative teaching of the Catholic church; and (3) saving grace is available only in the sacraments of the true (and visible) Roman Catholic church.⁴

A practical consequence of these convictions is that piety and the life of faith take on certain characteristics. We respond with gratitude to God and God’s gifts at every turn, participating in God’s good world rather than regarding the world as an evil place to be shunned or escaped. We expect persons, groups, and institutions (including ourselves and our own) to be mired in constricted devotions and skewed by corrupt tendencies and interests. We are thus realists who are not surprised at the persistent train of injustice, malice, and destruction in human history, and we know the importance of rough balances of power, compromises, and restraints that help to check chronic abuses. Nevertheless, because we also recognize that renewing grace abounds, we remain hopeful. We refuse to give up. We continue to criticize the shortcomings and injustices even of needed compromises and partial solutions. We look for promising possibilities, and we are willing to take risks in order to pursue them. Relying on the God of grace, we are hopeful realists who participate faithfully in the ambiguities, sorrows, and promises of God’s good, corrupted, and renewed world.⁵

A chief difficulty with Augustinian piety is that, from time to time, this delicate balance of conviction and practical consequence gives way. For example, the emphasis on hope and renewal may overtake the themes of realism and sin. Then there may emerge a naïve Christian idealism that expects injustice, malice, and destruction to be overcome apart from significant tragedy and struggle, and often retreats from worldly taint and ambiguity when (inevitably) this does not happen.⁶ The balance may also be wrecked in the other direction, and that, in fact, is a more typical Augustinian malaise. The sense of sin and emphasis on realism may overwhelm hope and anticipations of renewal. The way is then clear for a Christian pessimism that is consumed with restraining corruption: too willing to compromise with worldly powers that promise to check destructive forces and too timid to take risks in order to make things better.

Protestant

In the hands of Luther and Calvin, Protestant piety meant — as it will also for me — an intensification of the Augustinian theology of sin and grace (sola gratia). It was thus characterized by a radical sense of repentance or remorse as well as a radical acknowledgment of our dependence on God for the gift of renewed life and possibilities. But not all Protestants subscribed to this intense Augustinianism, and here I want to point to some typical convictions concerning the Bible, church, and tradition.

Lutherans, Calvinists, and Baptists shared an emphasis on Scripture (sola scriptura) that signaled an effort to go back behind the accumulated teachings and practices of church traditions to the original sources of Christian faith and believing. This vivifying return to the original sources was something that Protestants also shared with Christian humanists, such as Erasmus.⁷ Among other things, it implied a significant revision in the meaning of church — particularly with regard to authoritative teaching and history. Protestants were ready to criticize the received teachings of church councils and authorities in the light of the Bible and its message. They were ready to revise and reject long-standing ecclesiastical practices. Moreover, they insisted that access to the truth (in Scripture) is not the prerogative of an authoritative ecclesiastical hierarchy and its special graces but a gift of the Spirit to the entire people of God. They also denied infallible authority to any person, group, office, or institution (including themselves).⁸

This critical attitude and the protest it engendered against what the church had become presumed that the church has a history. It also presumed that this history is not the untarnished story of an incarnate ideal; nor is it simply the happy tale of divinely inspired and providentially guaranteed positive achievements. Instead, church history is an actual history, a story of ups and downs, replete with degenerations, ambiguities, wrong turns, and errors that must be recognized, confessed, criticized, and reformed.

Whatever these ideas may have meant in theory, one practical result was the rejection of a single overarching church and its teachings. Protestantism led to multiple interpretations of Scripture and its message by different individuals and movements, and thus it meant an end to the pretension of a universal and generic Christianity. Protestantism meant schism, but even more fundamentally it also meant a plurality of churches, each deciding its own teachings for itself and each remaining subject (in principle, at least) to criticism — as well as to further schisms.⁹

Interestingly, it was with the question of interpretation that many Protestants were willing to acknowledge a revised (if also secondary) role for tradition. Part of the idea was that earlier Christians and their communities were engaged in the same interpretive enterprise that we are. Therefore, we may look to traditional statements and reflections as we try to engage and interpret the classic originals in our own place and time. Indeed, if we do not assume that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Point of View
• Method
• I. Creation
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture References