Christian Theology

Religion and Change.
by David L. Edwards.
Harper & Row. 383 pp. $8.00.

Alienation, Atheism, and the Religious Crisis.
by Thomas F. O’Dea.
Sheed & Ward. 192 pp. $4.95.

The many-sidedness of theological study is nowadays taken for granted; likewise, the increasing difficulty, if not the impossibility, of producing an adequate theological synthesis. The days of a Summa are over. Yet the need to attempt a synthesis remains, and the hope of accomplishing one beckons constantly.

In Religion and Change, David L. Edwards looks “to consider the challenges to religion which have resulted from changes in the 20th century.” Contemporary theologian that he is, he shuttles briskly between the sacred and the secular, between faith and the social sciences. His dexterity has produced a book of impressive scope, one which touches upon such various subjects as Freudianism and the multiplicity of theological scholarship, and which contains sociological analyses of Russia, China, France, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States, as well as evaluations of Islamic and Far Eastern religions.

The effort, however, is not altogether without strain. This is perhaps most evident in Edwards’s un-realistically favorable analysis and evaluation of organized American religion; here one wishes that the particular critical faculties of the theologian had been brought to bear on the more conventional powers of the sociologist. Edwards erects his hopeful edifice on the high number of churchgoers in the U.S., a sociological datum he translates into evidence of the hardiness of American religion, past, present,, and future. To be sure, he is not unaware of prevalent hypocrisies and conformist mechanisms, but so bemused is he by the statistics and so eager to detail the workings of the various churches that he quite overlooks the justified collapse of interest among the young in organized religion and its institutions.

Related to this misjudgment is Edwards’s commitment, in itself proper enough, to the centrality of prayer in religious life. One of the crises of religion in our day has been the decline of prayer among many who still maintain they are believers; even seminary students are often notoriously hard to lure to services. Edwards naturally assumes that prayer is concomitant with faith, but although this may have been true in the past, faith without prayer has become an increasingly frequent phenomenon, an example in itself of the confused state of religious consciousness today.

Efforts to establish the correct relationship between Christian ethics and the Christian religion have been similarly plagued by confusion. Here Edwards is more on the mark: “Only a new life will lead to a new understanding of God.” To elaborate, the sense of transcendence and ultimate meaning, which religion is supposed to yield, is achieved not by a metaphysical noetic process alone but also by a living out of the ethic imposed by religion. Thus the concern of modern religious reformers for ethics as opposed to metaphysics is not born of a liberal pragmatism but of the conviction that religious man does not live by metaphysics alone. The decline of an experience of a true transcendence and ultimacy is as much the result of the gross defection of the churches from the ethical demands of the Gospel as it is the result of the speedy development of modern science and philosophy. There can be no transcendence or ultimacy without a thorough ethical commitment.

Edwards, however, seems to have grasped all this only dimly. In his rather tut-tut treatment of radicalism, he contents himself with criticizing as unrealistic and naively utopian those who sever themselves in disgust from their churches. He fails to see in this aspect of radicalism a search for transcendence that has been denied and impeded by the churches. More-over, Edwards does not deal with the fact that the objective structure of the churches—and, indeed, much of the value system sustaining it—strikes no responsive chord among today’s youth. He offers no analysis of radical youth movements and their possible relevance to religion.

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Some incompleteness is to be expected in an effort of this type, and it may seem niggling to dwell on the omissions at the expense of the many excellences. Among the latter are Edwards’s discussions of Eastern religions. Happily, Edwards is not among those who believe that a wholesale importation of Oriental beliefs will cure Western man’s spiritual ills. His treatment, which stresses the often unnoticed or unreported similarities of Eastern religious thought with that of the West as well as the differences, is especially valuable for its realistic analysis of the process of secularization, the most powerful religious force today. The East has not yet fully experienced the secularizing effect of widespread industrialization and automation. What will happen when, inevitably, the manipulative ideology of the West permeates Eastern society with its religions of detachment? Edwards is convinced that the religious pessimism he sees underlying Hinduism and Buddhism will not be able to withstand the optimism of Western religion, which has refused to accept the inevitability of human suffering and has undergirded material progress in the West.

Here again Edwards touches the ethical nerve in religious consciousness. However, he does not attempt to articulate more exactly how the themes of material progress and alleviation of suffering relate to those of transcendence and ultimacy. A few bland words about “subduing the earth” are not sufficient in a world which, for the first time, may actually possess the technological means to overcome poverty and create a foundation for a fully human life. What we need is a theory of religious knowledge which will show that the practical task of securing a humane existence for all is actually a way of achieving transcendence. This task can no longer be dismissed with a lukewarm blessing as merely consonant with Christianity or even as its necessary consequent. It must be acknowledged as an integral part of the Christian experience. Ethic and meta-physic form one experience, one human way of knowing and relating to the divine.

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If David L. Edwards is a theologian who finds sociology necessary and relevant, Thomas F. O’Dea is a sociologist who returns the favor for religion. In Alienation, Atheism, and the Religious Crisis, O’Dea argues that Western man’s historical experience has asked questions of religion which religion cannot answer, for in its other-worldly concerns religion has been able to accord man’s scientific and political acomplishments only the most hesitant and penultimate value. Nor, O’Dea adds, does any other value system exist as an adequate substitute for religion in this respect. In his growing capacity to make his world, and in his equally increasing need to decide what is truly valuable for humanity, man remains unsure. He experiences crisis, for “the past has inadequately prepared him to handle a future which is all but upon him.” Under pressure man has turned to surrogates—calling them this does not bring into question their validity or independence—for guidance and relief.

O’Dea shows by brief but careful analysis that each of the would-be substitutes man has chosen is undergoing a crisis analogous to that of religion: 1) the humanities are succumbing to a pseudo-scientific spirit of narrow research and extreme specialization; 2) scientific technology provides efficient techniques to achieve desired goals, but does not decide on the desirability of such goals and thus remains an ambiguous phenomenon; 3) the university, home and seed-bed of both the humanities and of science, steadily becomes less and less a center of independent thought as it is sucked into the industry-government combine. The question thus arises: in the face of the regnant confusion, who is to establish the goals of our society? How is man to attain the intellectual transcendence necessary to set those goals?

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From his discussion of the dilemma, O’Dea turns to “a modest attempt at prescription concerning the current religious crisis.” He sees in the decline of religion a loss of transcendence and the resultant advent of a nihilism issuing in “a loss of any ascendency and leverage making critical and rational choice possible with respect to the confusing array of human possibilities.” He further states:

Religion in the West with its sense of transcendence has traditionally been concerned with relation, celebration, and cultivation. It asserted that man is related to his world in other ways than by manipulation and control. It affirmed that he seeks an internal resonance with the structures and rhythms of his surroundings and through them with a transcendent beyond.

Unfortunately, O’Dea does not advert to the fact that for the common believer this relation to the transcendent God became articulated almost exclusively in the temporal mode. Salvation, the perfected state of this relation, meant an eternal existence with God after death. Hence the importance of the doctrines of Heaven and Hell; hence also the other-worldly character of Western religion so justly lamented by O’Dea himself. O’Dea rightly points out that there are other ways of articulating this relation, but they all involve removing it from the temporal mode, and few believers would, I suspect, understand or appreciate a temporary relation with the transcendent destined to end, like all lesser relations, with death.

Nevertheless, O’Dea is correct in seeing the loss of transcendence as the most serious effect of the lapse of religion, a loss for which our present secularized culture seems unable to compensate. And if religion is to have any future, even the fragmented and numerically insignificant one foreseen by some, it must lie in the direction he indicates: in a refusal to accept the consequences of secularism as normative or binding, and in a resolute effort to reinstate the value of transcendence as a necessary part of the larger quest for truly humane goals.

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