Theology and Cultural Developments in the West
Theology and Cultural Developments in the West
The rise of the “modern age” created new challenges for Christian theology. As a result of the wars of religion, cultural suspicion of organized religion began to increase, raising questions about its social role and rationality. Perhaps more importantly, René Descartes' (1596–1650) Discourse on Method (1637) and Baruch Spinoza's (1632–77) Ethics (1677) created a philosophical culture which accentuated the role of reason in establishing and validating beliefs. The defining characteristic of modern philosophy is that it tries to establish its beliefs with certitude, without recourse to God, on the basis of the necessary truths of reason. The phrase “the Enlightenment” was introduced during the late nineteenth century to refer to this new cultural mood, emphasizing the foundational role of human reason, which gained the ascendancy in western culture during the eighteenth century.
The Enlightenment was a complex movement, taking different forms in various parts of Europe and America. However, one of its most characteristic features is its emphasis on the ability of human reason to penetrate the mysteries of the world. Humanity is able to think for itself, without the need for any assistance from God. Unaided human reason is able to make sense of the world – including those aspects of the world traditionally reserved for theologians. The phrase “Age of Reason,” often used as a synonym for the Enlightenment, is a little misleading. It implies that reason had been hitherto ignored or marginalized. As we saw in Chapter 2 (pp. 34–5), the Middle Ages can quite legitimately be thought of as an “Age of Reason” in its own terms. Yet the Middle Ages saw reason primarily as a critical tool; the Enlightenment treated it instead as the foundation of reliable knowledge.
So how did this change in cultural mood in the west come about? To answer this, we need to look at the rise of disinterest in religion in western Europe following the wars of religion.
The Wars of Religion and Disinterest in Religion
By 1700, western Europe was exhausted by seemingly endless wars of religion, which caused social disintegration and economic hardship. The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) was both an international religious conflict and a German civil war, involving Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic regions and nations. When the war was finally resolved through the Peace of Westphalia (1648), any remaining enthusiasm for religious warfare had evaporated. People had had enough. A yearning for peace led to a new emphasis on toleration and to growing impatience with religious disputes.
The scene was set for the Enlightenment insistence that religion was to be a matter of private belief rather than state policy. In both intellectual and political circles, religion came to be viewed as a source of international and national conflict, a burden rather than a blessing. A dislike of religious fanaticism emerged, and this was easily transmuted into a dislike of religion itself.
A Letter concerning Toleration (1689), by John Locke (1632–1704), argued for the need to tolerate at least some degree of diversity in religion, as a way of preventing it becoming the basis of social conflict and instability. Locke's ideas resonated with the anti-dogmatic mood of an age that was weary of religious controversies. Locke argued for limited religious toleration on three basic grounds:
The iconic significance of this emphasis upon reason for the eighteenth century is best seen in the frontispiece to Christian Wolff's (1679–1754) Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul (1719). This superb piece of intellectual propaganda shows a beaming, benevolent sun of reason smiling upon the world, removing clouds and shadows of superstition. A new age of reason had dawned! The darkness of earlier generations would vanish, as surely as night gives way to day! It was a powerful vision, which resonated with the hopes and fears of a war-weary Europe. Might an appeal to reason be the way to achieve social, religious, and political stability?
The Rise of the Enlightenment
The movement that has been known in English as “the Enlightenment” since the late nineteenth century is generally understood to refer to the cultural and intellectual phenomenon that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and North America which placed an emphasis on human reason as a means of overcoming the particularism of religious belief. The origins of the Enlightenment lie partly in English Deism, a movement which developed in the late seventeenth century. Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) had argued that the universe was like a vast machine, rationally designed and constructed by an intelligent creator. Deism minimized the supernatural dimensions of faith and presented Christianity essentially as a rational and moral religion, easily harmonized with human reason. God was the creator of the kind of regular, ordered universe that Newtonian mechanics had uncovered. God was the “divine watchmaker,” who had created a wonderful mechanical universe which could regulate itself without further divine attention.
Many English writers began to develop approaches to religion which accepted the notion of a creator God who had implanted reason within the human soul as a basis of judgment and morality. Reason was the light of the human soul, which transcended the specifics of culture. As confidence in the power of unaided human reason began to grow, Enlightenment thinkers believed they were able to dispose of what they regarded as the unnecessary supernatural baggage of the Christian faith. A number of stages in the development of this belief may be discerned.
In the first phase of the Enlightenment, during the late seventeenth century, it was argued that the beliefs of Christianity were rational, and thus capable of standing up to critical examination. This type of approach may be found in John Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and within some philosophical schools of thought in early eighteenth-century Germany. Christianity was a reasonable supplement to natural religion. The notion of divine revelation was thus affirmed, while any idea that it offered exclusive access to the truth was rejected.
In its second phase, it was argued that the basic ideas of Christianity, being rational, could be derived from reason itself. There was no need to invoke the idea of divine revelation. Christianity, according to John Toland (1670–1722) in his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) and Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) in his Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), was essentially the republication of the religion of nature. It did not transcend natural religion but was merely an example of it. All so-called “revealed religion” was actually nothing other than the reconfirmation of what can be known through rational reflection on nature. “Revelation” was simply a rational reaffirmation of moral truths already available to enlightened reason.
In the final phase of this transition, which was essentially complete by the middle of the eighteenth century, leading representatives of the Enlightenment confidently affirmed the ability of reason to judge revelation. Thomas Paine's (1737–1809) Age of Reason, published in three parts between 1794 and 1807, is seen by many as a classic statement of this position. Reason and nature teach us all we need to know; any other claims to revelation or intellectual authority are to be dismissed as fraudulent forgeries.
The Enlightenment Critique of Christian Theology: Some Case Studies
The rational religion of the Enlightenment found itself in conflict with several major areas of traditional Christian theology. The following are especially important.
The Notion of Revelation
The concept of revelation was of central importance to traditional Christian theology. While many Christian theologians (such as Thomas Aquinas, c.1225–74, and John Calvin, 1509–64) recognized the possibility of a natural knowledge of God, they insisted that this required supplementation by supernatural divine revelation, such as that witnessed to in Scripture. The Enlightenment saw the development of an increasingly critical attitude to the very idea of supernatural revelation. In the first place, it was unnecessary. In the second, it lacked the universality of human reason. Everyone had access to reason; only a select few had access to revelation. The phrase “the scandal of particularity” was used by Enlightenment writers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) to express their concerns about the traditional notion of revelation at this point. How could God's revelation be limited in geographical or historical scope – for example, by being linked to the historical person of Jesus Christ?
The Status and Interpretation of the Bible
Within orthodox Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, the Bible was still widely regarded as a divinely inspired source of doctrine and morals, to be differentiated from other types of literature. The Enlightenment saw this assumption called into question, with the rise of the critical approach to Scripture. Developing ideas already current within Deism, the theologians of the German Enlightenment developed the thesis that the Bible was the work of many hands, at times demonstrating internal contradiction, and that it was open to precisely the same method of textual analysis and interpretation as any other piece of literature.
The Identity and Significance of Jesus Christ
A third area in which the Enlightenment made a significant challenge to orthodox Christian belief concerns the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Two particularly important developments may be noted: the origins of the “quest for the historical Jesus” (see pp. 236–41) and the rise of the “moral theory of the atonement” (pp. 266–8).
Both Deism and the German Enlightenment developed the thesis that there was a serious discrepancy between the real Jesus of history and the New Testament interpretation of his significance. Underlying the New Testament portrait of the supernatural redeemer of humanity lurked a simple human figure, a glorified teacher of common sense. While a supernatural redeemer was unacceptable to Enlightenment rationalism, the idea of an enlightened moral teacher was acceptable. Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and others argued that it was possible to go behind the New Testament accounts of Jesus and uncover a simpler, more human Jesus who would be acceptable to the new spirit of the age.
The second aspect of traditional ideas concerning Jesus to be challenged by Enlightenment thinkers concerned the significance of his death (an area of theology often referred to as “theories of the atonement”). Jesus's death on the cross was now reinterpreted in terms of a supreme moral example of self-giving and dedication, intended to inspire similar dedication and self-giving on the part of his followers. Where orthodox Christianity tended to treat Jesus's death (and resurrection) as possessing greater inherent importance than his religious teaching, the Enlightenment marginalized his death and denied his resurrection, in order to emphasize the quality of his moral teaching.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
The doctrine of God as a Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – was widely ridiculed by Enlightenment thinkers, who held it to be logically absurd. How could any rational person accept such mathematical nonsense? Under the pressure of rationalist criticism, many orthodox Christian thinkers de-emphasized the idea, believing that it was impossible to mount an effective defense of the doctrine, given the spirit of the age. It is important to note that the revival of the doctrine of the Trinity dates from the twentieth century, as the influence of the Enlightenment began to wane.
The Critique of Miracles
Much traditional Christian apologetics concerning the identity and significance of Jesus Christ was based upon the “miraculous evidences” of the New Testament, culminating in the resurrection. The new emphasis upon the mechanical regularity and orderliness of the universe, perhaps the most significant intellectual legacy of Newtonianism, raised doubts about the New Testament accounts of miraculous happenings – above all, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Essay on Miracles (1748), by David Hume (1711–76), was widely regarded as demonstrating the evidential impossibility of miracles. Hume emphasized that there were no contemporary analogs of New Testament miracles, such as the resurrection, thus forcing the New Testament reader to rely totally upon human testimony to such miracles. For Hume, it was axiomatic that no human testimony was adequate to establish the occurrence of a miracle, in the absence of a present-day analog. Similarly, the French rationalist writer Denis Diderot (1713–84) declared that, if the entire population of Paris were to assure him that a man had just been raised from the dead, he would not believe a word of it.
The Rejection of Original Sin
The idea that human nature is in some sense flawed or corrupted, expressed in the orthodox doctrine of original sin, was vigorously opposed by the Enlightenment. Leading figures of the French Enlightenment – such as Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) – criticized the doctrine as encouraging pessimism with regard to human abilities, thus impeding human social and political development and encouraging laissez-faire attitudes. German Enlightenment thinkers tended to criticize the doctrine on account of its relatively late historical origins in the thought of Augustine of Hippo (354–430), dating from the fourth and fifth centuries, which they regarded as debarring it from permanent validity and relevance.
The Problem of Evil
The Enlightenment witnessed a fundamental change in attitude toward the existence of evil in the world. For the medieval period, the existence of evil was not regarded as posing a threat to the coherence of Christianity. The Enlightenment saw this situation change radically: the existence of evil was now seen as a challenge to the credibility and coherence of Christian faith itself. Voltaire's novel Candide (1759) was one of many works to highlight the difficulties caused for the Christian worldview by the existence of natural evil (such as the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755). The term “theodicy,” coined by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), derives from this period, and reflects a growing recognition that the existence of evil was assuming a new significance within the Enlightenment critique of religion.
Marxism: An Intellectual Rival to Christianity
Marxism, probably one of the most significant worldviews to emerge during the modern period, had a major impact upon Christian theology during the twentieth century, especially in Latin American liberation theology and certain “theologies of hope,” such as that set out in the 1960s by Jürgen Moltmann (born 1926). It is therefore important to understand something of this movement and its implications for Christian theology.
In his 1844 political and economic manuscripts, Karl Marx (1818–83) developed the idea that religion in general (he did not distinguish between individual religions) is a direct response to social and economic conditions. “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.” Religion is the product of social and economic alienation. It arises from that alienation, and at the same time encourages that alienation by a form of spiritual intoxication which renders the masses incapable of recognizing their situation and doing something about it. Religion is a comfort and enables people to tolerate their economic alienation. If there were no such alienation, there would be no continuing motivation for religious belief or practice.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave Marxism the break it so badly needed. However, although Marxism established itself in a modified form (Marxism–Leninism) within the Soviet Union, it proved unsuccessful elsewhere. Its successes in Eastern Europe after the Second World War can be put down mainly to Soviet military strength and political destabilization in the region. The economic failure and political stagnation which resulted when such countries experimented with Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s soon led to disillusionment with this new philosophy. In Europe, Marxism found itself locked into a spiral of decline. Its chief advocates increasingly became abstract theoreticians, detached from working-class roots and with virtually no political experience. The idea of a socialist revolution gradually lost its appeal and its credibility.
In the United States and Canada, Marxism had little, if any, social appeal in the first place, although its influence upon the academic world was significant from about 1970 to 1990. However, Marx's ideas have found their way, suitably modified, into some discussions in modern Christian theology. Latin American liberation theology can be shown to have drawn appreciatively on Marxist insights, even if the movement cannot really be described as “Marxist.” We shall consider liberation theology in a later section (see pp. 74–5).
Darwinism: A New Theory of Human Origins
In his Origin of Species (1859), the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–82) set out a new account of the origins of biological species which raised fundamental questions about some traditional Christian beliefs, especially as these were expressed in more popular contexts. Where much popular Christianity – such as that found in the writings of William Paley (1743–1805) – held that God had created all things individually in an act of special creation, Darwin proposed a vast, extended period of evolution, in which new species emerged over time.
For Paley, the complexity of nature was evidence of the existence of a designer God. For example, the intricate structure of the human eye clearly pointed to the wisdom of God as both designer and creator. Darwin's theory offered an alternative explanation of this apparent design in nature, and thus severely eroded the credibility of Paley's approach. Others, however, disagreed, arguing that Darwin had simply demonstrated the error of some forms of popular theology. More reflective forms of faith, it was argued, were not affected. For example, the influential writer Charles Kingsley (1819–75) suggested that Darwin had actually given religion a new lease of life. “We knew of old that God was so wise that he could make all things; but, behold, he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves.”
Although Darwin is often presented as having caused a new crisis of faith for Christianity, the historical evidence of this is much weaker than is generally appreciated. Many of the debates with which we are familiar today are more recent developments, arising from religious tensions in the United States. We shall consider some of these discussions later in this work (see pp. 350–3).
Theologically, Darwinism raised three questions of particular importance, which continue to be discussed within academic theology.
The First World War: A Theology of Crisis
The assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, by a Serbian nationalist sparked an international conflict of unparalleled destructiveness. The European Great Powers were linked together by treaty obligations that virtually guaranteed that a declaration of war by one would lead to a Europe-wide conflict. The unparalleled size of the theater of conflict and the damage it inflicted were reflected in the name given to it in English-speaking lands: the “Great War.”
The end of the Great War created considerable disillusionment. Had the vast cost of the war, in terms of both material and human lives, been worth it? The impact of the First World War upon European culture cannot be overstated. The immediate postwar years were widely perceived as witnessing the final collapse of the cultural heritage of the nineteenth century, with shock waves which were felt in every sphere of intellectual and creative activity. One of the most important theological outcomes of the Great War was the “theology of crisis,” particularly associated with the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968). Barth, who had studied theology in Germany, found himself disillusioned with the dominant approach to theology he found within liberal Protestantism. This approach to theology – often dubbed “culture Protestantism” – took its leads from cultural trends. Barth saw the Great War as having destroyed the credibility of such an approach. How could a theology which was grounded in contemporary cultural norms ever presume to criticize such cultural norms?
Barth's approach to theology, which began to develop while he was the Reformed pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil in the aftermath of the Great War, placed an emphasis upon God's discontinuity with culture. There was, he declared, a chasm – a “glacial crevasse” – between God and human culture, which could only be bridged from God's side. Human culture could never become the basis of an authentic knowledge of God.
Picking up on a phrase from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Barth argued that there is an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and human beings. Like an Old Testament prophet, Barth emphasized God's total holiness and remoteness from humanity in general, and from human culture in particular. God “stands over and against humanity and everything human in an infinite qualitative distinction and is never, ever identical with anything which we name, experience, conceive or worship as God.”
Barth adopted a strongly iconoclastic approach to theology, rejecting any attempt to anchor God in the natural world on the one hand or in human culture on the other. God is known only as God chooses to be known – in other words, in God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Others followed Barth, including Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), who delivered a lecture on “the crisis of our culture” in 1920, emphasizing that the crisis of European civilization at that time was to be seen as an “annihilating and creative act of God” which made clear the absolute distinction between God and the world. Theology was poised between an age which had ended and an unknown new age which had yet to arrive. It was like living in an “empty room.” We shall consider some themes of this important movement later in this work (pp. 112–13, 146–7).
Postmodernism: Beyond the Modern Theological Agenda
Since the Second World War, significant cultural shifts have occurred within the west, generally involving a move away from many of the settled assumptions of the Enlightenment. Since about 1980, the term “postmodernism” has come to be widely used to designate this cultural shift. The adoption of this term is widely agreed to reflect the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's (1924–98) Postmodern Condition (1979), the first book to present postmodernity as a distinct intellectual and cultural movement.
So what is postmodernity? And what are its implications for Christian theology? The philosophical foundations of postmodernity can be traced back to Martin Heidegger's (1889–1976) Being and Time (1927), Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1889–1951) Philosophical Investigations (1953), and Hans-Georg Gadamer's (1900–2002) Truth and Method (1960). The common feature of these works is their rejection of the need for an ultimate foundation of human knowledge by recognizing that philosophy rests upon commitments whose truth has to be assumed and cannot be demonstrated. This represented a decisive shift away from the approach of the Enlightenment, and opened up new ways of thinking about the nature of human knowledge. In doing so, it created new opportunities for Christian theology, not least by challenging such “modern” notions as the “scandal of particularity” and the demand that all beliefs had to be capable of rational demonstration.
It is helpful to think of postmodernity as being both a critique of the Enlightenment's notion of rationality and the proposal of alternatives. Lyotard argued that the “postmodern condition” was characterized by an “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” By this, he meant a growing suspicion of any “master story” that claimed to provide a comprehensive explanatory framework for everything else. Lyotard argued that the Enlightement appeal to “narratives which subordinate, organize and account for other narratives” was partly a matter of self-justification. The Enlightenment had tried to legitimate itself by telling a story of how its thinkers overcame ignorance and superstition thanks to their appeal to reason.
These themes are echoed in many recent writings within the postmodern movement. Postmodern philosophers have raised fundamental doubts about the so-called “Enlightenment project,” which appealed to universal human reason as a neutral and disinterested perspective from which to pursue truth and justice. The idea that human reason is absolute and universal was challenged. Metanarratives are merely narratives that have secured influence through power structures. The idea of a “truth” based on some notion of universal rationality is rejected. Reason is to be seen as a contextual and relative affair, defined in relation to the prevailing narratives and power structures of a society or institution. Metanarratives do not lead to liberation; rather, they legitimate and reinforce various forms of totalitarianism.
Linked to this is an approach to the meaning of texts which holds that it is impossible to achieve fixed or absolute meanings. Michel Foucault (1926–84), Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) argued that language was ultimately arbitrary, whimsical, and capricious. It was not grounded in any overarching absolute linguistic laws, and was thus incapable of disclosing meaning. Baudrillard argued that modern society was trapped in an endless network of artificial sign systems which meant nothing and merely perpetuated the belief systems of those who created them.
One aspect of postmodernism which illustrates this trend particularly well, while also indicating its preoccupation with texts and language, is “deconstruction” – the critical method which virtually declares that the identity and intentions of the author of a text are an irrelevance to the interpretation of the text, prior to insisting that, in any case, no fixed meaning can be found in it. Two general principles underlie this postmodern approach to the reading of texts:
So what are the implications of this for Christian theology? Two areas of theology were particularly affected by the “postmodern turn” in the 1980s and 1990s.
Biblical Interpretation
Traditional academic biblical interpretation had been dominated by the historico-critical method. This approach, which developed during the nineteenth century, stressed the importance of the application of critical–historical methods, such as establishing the Sitz im Leben, or “situation in life,” of gospel passages. A number of leading literary critics of the 1980s – such as Frank Kermode (1919–2010) and Harold Bloom (born 1930) – challenged such ideas as “institutionally legitimized” or “scholarly respectable” interpretations of the Bible. The notion that there is a meaning to a biblical text – whether laid down by a church authority or by the academic community – is thus regarded with considerable suspicion within postmodernism. However, the notion of an “interpretive community,” introduced by Stanley Fish (born 1938), has important implications for biblical interpretation. It emphasizes how communities form around specific ways of reading texts.
Systematic Theology
Postmodernism is, by its very nature, hostile to the notion of “systematization” or any claims to have discerned “meaning.” Mark Taylor's (born 1945) study Erring (1984) is an excellent illustration of the impact of postmodernism on systematic theology. The image of “erring” – rather than more traditional approaches to theological system-building – leads Taylor to develop an antisystematic theology which offers polyvalent approaches to questions of truth or meaning. Taylor's study represents an exploration of the consequences of Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) declaration of the “death of God.” On the basis of this, Taylor argues for the elimination of such concepts as self, truth, and meaning. Language does not refer to anything, and truth does not correspond to anything.
Yet more recent reflection on these themes has indicated that Christian theology can operate more effectively within a postmodern context than these early reactions suggested. Where some see postmodernity as an oppressor, others see it as a liberator, breaking the bonds of an imprisoning Enlightenment rationalism. New categories of theological exploration have opened up – such as the rise of narrative theology, and especially the idea of theology as a “theo-drama” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, 1905–88) that locates the human situation within a narrative of God's creative and redemptive activity.
Globalization: World Christianity and World Religions
As the global expansion of Christianity continued in the modern period, Christianity became established in parts of the world in which it had previously been unknown. The spectacular growth of Christianity during the twentieth century in sub-Saharan Africa and Korea illustrates this trend, which runs counter to the western European experience of Christianity. Christianity continues to expand within southeast Asia, including mainland China. In what follows, we shall consider the development of theology in India, in which there has been a Christian theological tradition for some time, and southern Africa, in which such a tradition is still in the process of emerging.
India
Christianity became established in the Indian subcontinent at a relatively early stage. Traditionally, it is believed that the apostle Thomas founded the Indian Mar Thoma church in the first century. Even allowing for a degree of pious exaggeration here, there are excellent reasons for believing that Christianity was an indigenous element of the Indian religious scene by the fourth century. The arrival of European colonizers in India led to a significant new period in Indian Christianity, in which indigenous Christian traditions were supplemented by imported versions of the gospel, each reflecting aspects of its European context. As time went on, Dutch, English, and French settlers moved into India, bringing their own versions of Christianity with them.
Initially, evangelization was seen as peripheral to the more serious business of trading. While missionary societies and individuals were able to operate in India without any major opposition, they nevertheless received no support from the British authorities. The East India Company, for example, was opposed to their activities, on the grounds that they might create ill-will among native Indians and thus threaten the trade upon which it depended. However, the Charter Act (passed by the British parliament on July 13, 1813) gave British missionaries protected status and a limited degree of freedom to carry out evangelistic work on the Indian subcontinent. It was inevitable that religious tensions would develop. In 1830, the Dharma Sabha, a nationalist religious movement, was formed, apparently as a reaction to intrusive forms of westernization in Bengal. The uprising of 1857 (generally referred to as “the Indian Mutiny” by contemporary English writers) is often regarded as the outcome of this growing resentment of westernization.
Concern about the European origins of some forms of Christianity in the region led to the development of indigenous theologies. Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–84) developed an approach to Christian theology which rested upon the assumption that Christ brought to fulfillment all that was best in Indian religion. He argued that, although Brahman – the Ultimate Reality that lies behind the universe and all the gods – was indivisible and indescribable, it could nevertheless be considered in terms of its inner relations of Sat (“being”), Cit (“reason”), and Ananda (“bliss”). These three relations were to be correlated with the Christian understanding of God the Father as “being,” God the Son as “logos,” and God the Holy Spirit as “comforter” or “bringer of joy and love.” A related idea was developed more recently by Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) in his Unknown Christ of Hinduism (1964), in which he argued for the hidden presence of Christ in Hindu practice, especially in relation to matters of justice and compassion.
Africa
Christianity was first brought to sub-Saharan Africa through missionaries, chiefly from England. From the outset, there was a strong association between Christianity and western interests, both commercial and political. In a famous speech at Cambridge in 1857, the British missionary David Livingstone (1818–73) declared his intention to return to Africa to “make an open path for commerce and Christianity.” Most European missionaries had little knowledge of African culture and as a result were often insensitive to the local situation, failing to realize the importance of interacting with local belief systems. As a result, “African theology” was simply European theology carried out on African soil, without any real interaction with the local culture.
As Africa began to emerge from its colonial past in the 1960s and 1970s, there was increasing interest in the reappropriation of African culture and values, which had been suppressed by the European colonial powers. One of the most important developments since the 1970s has been the emergence of indigenous African Christian theologians, such as the Kenyan John Mbiti (born 1931), the Tanzanian Charles Nyamiti (born 1931), and the Ghanaian Kwame Bediako (1945–2008), who are concerned to develop authentically African theological paradigms rather than depend on western theological norms. Nyamiti's Christ as Our Ancestor (1984) is a good example of a Christian theological work which takes traditional African religious views seriously, exploiting their apologetic potential and Christianizing them from within.
The interaction with traditional African culture and religions is thus of foundational importance in southern Africa. Yet, in the recent past, the agenda of Christian theology in southern Africa has tended to be dominated by interaction with an ideology – apartheid (an Afrikaaner word meaning “separateness”) – which enforced racial segregation in South Africa during the period of white domination. For many years, the theological agenda of southern Africa was virtually confined to this single issue, arguing for the total unacceptability of the ideology on theological grounds. This trend was encouraged by western theologians, who were able to understand the theological interaction with apartheid in terms similar to those of liberation theology – that is, the struggle for freedom and justice. Yet, with the ending of apartheid in the early 1990s, Christian theology is now able to return to an engagement with the more traditional task of interacting with local African cultures.
Globalization and western Christian theology
Globalization has had a significant impact on western theology. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Christian theologians gained their experience and understanding of other religions from periods spent in service abroad – such as British colonial administrators and educationalists who worked in India. Some of the most important Christian reflections on the relationship between Christianity and other faiths emerged through theologians from religiously monochrome cultures – such as the United States, Great Britain, and Germany – immersing themselves in non-Christian cultures.
In recent decades, mass migration from Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic nations to the west has led to the erosion of Christianity's religious monopoly in the west and given rise to multicultural communities in which other faiths are a significant living presence in the west. This has raised significant questions for Christian churches in these regions. How should they show hospitality to these communities? It has also given a new force and context for traditional questions of Christian theology. In what way can the Christian faith intellectually accommodate the existence of other faiths? What questions are raised for Christian apologetics and evangelism? One point of importance here is that Christian history makes it clear that theology often develops through an encounter with the “other” – with a worldview or religion that poses a significant challenge. This can be seen in the Christian dialogue with Platonism in the patristic age and with Marxism in the twentieth century. Dialogue with other faiths may well hold the same promise.
A number of examples will illustrate the theological importance of these points. The British theologian John Hick (1922–2012) developed his theology of “religious pluralism” as a result of his experience in the British city of Birmingham, which became home to large numbers of Hindus and Muslims from the Indian subcontinent during the 1970s. Hick's approach attempted to provide a theological framework in which each religion could be seen as a distinct and equally legitimate way of seeing “ultimate reality.” Although the intellectual coherence of this “pluralist” approach has been widely criticized (see p. 424), it became highly influential in liberal religious circles in the final decade of the twentieth century.
Other academics began to realize the importance of meeting believers from across religious divides to read and discuss passages from their sacred texts. The Society for Scriptural Reasoning was founded in 1995 by the Christian theologian David F. Ford (born 1948) and the Jewish scholar Peter Ochs (born 1950). Unlike Hick's homogenizing approach, “scriptural reasoning” recognizes that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam understand the status, authority, and character of their sacred texts in different ways which do not command consensus across the religious traditions. The process leads to deeper understanding, not necessarily to any form of consensus or agreement on the themes being explored.
Other examples could easily be given to illustrate how Christian theology is responding to this changing cultural situation. Pope Francis's (born 1936) Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), a papal exhortation delivered at St. Peter's, Rome, in November 2013, is a good example of a recent theological document which affirms the importance of dialogue between faiths, both as a means of reducing tension between them and as a means of clarifying the distinctiveness of the Christian faith.