Editorials
EDITORIALS: THEOLOGY: CREATING OUT OF CHAOS I AMES JOYCE is supposed to have remarked once to an aspiring young author, "Young man, you have not enough chaos in you to create a world." At a time...
...Such anti-intellectualism does not obtain now to the same degree, but the theologian's communication problem is intensified today by the very fact that his field has become increasingly interdisciplinary, a crossroads where all methods of cultural interpretation meet and bear on the result...
...And so does any authority in an oral-aural culture know that the transistor radio and the Western businessman in greyflannel and attache case are covert agents of Western ideas, missionaries -only more disguised ones--no less than Francis Xavier...
...Not surprisingly, we've got a whole new generation, raised on wraparound stereophonic sound and TV, that's closer to the mindset of primitive animists than anything we've heard of since before the Guttenberg revolution...
...Haig...
...We do not agree with their premises, but it's probably a healthy sign that champions of American capitalism like George Gilder and the people at the American Enterprise Institute are finally coming out of the woodwork and saying out loud what the "theology" behind the selling of America really is...
...in fact, most of the professional theologians we spoke with at the meeting had never even heard of him...
...he knows in his bones that technology isn't neutral-and so do the ayatollahs of Iran...
...Yet, if you listen to these professors talk personally about what drew them to the field of religious studies, they testify that here they were able to ask, and seek answers to, all those urgent big questions that haunt the nighttime mind, and that seem to slip outside the enforced margins of other, narrower disciplines...
...Or take the issue of the transfer of technology to the third world...
...At a time full of pining for old securities, Joyce's hard saying deserves meditating on, especially for those who would try to figure what's going on in the world of contemporary theology...
...The impression is oneiric, that of dream-simultaneity, like entering one of E.M...
...theologians, called to clarify issues, must beware of obfuscation no less than bureaucrats or Mr...
...As Father Walter Ong pointed out in his 1964 Terry Lectures (The Presence of the Word, reissued by University of Minnesota Press, 1981), electronic communications portend a psychic revolution that changes the way the world appears...
...For as Robert Bellah pointed out some years ago in a landmark essay titled "The Evolution of Religion," since the Reformation the Western religious impulse of service has distributed itself throughout all the institutions of society...
...The point is the theologian is one of us, called to help us understand a common dilemma and hope...
...Down in numbers from previous years due to budget cuts and the inconvenient pre-Christmas timing, the meeting still drew several thousand, with 840 papers delivered on subjects ranging from Nag Hammadi gnosticism to Khomeini's theology...
...One of the things missing, of course, is a vigorous comparative-religions perspective applied to our public life and foreign policy...
...Innocents abroad, we commonly assume this can be done on crudely pragmatic principles, scrubbed clean of the very notions of God, cosmos, material world, and self that triggered the science and technology we would export...
...unless you're an electronic age polymath - like Father David Tracy perhaps - the One in the Many here, the narrative line, is difficult to discover...
...To expect , however, more than this is to delude ourselves that the theologian swims in some privileged cultural current immune from the splits of mind and heart that afflict us...
...But it's just this passion to get at the roots of a soul's and a culture's remaking which links these ivory-tower academics to the tacit metaphysician and theologian in us all - the one whose night or early dawn wondering pushes hard against the cultural prisons we make for ourselves...
...Take the current youth culture...
...Forster's Hindu caves...
...consciously or not, the church gave away its monopoly over the gospel spirit, secreted it in the very fabric of secular society...
...At least a history-of-religions perspective would help us understand and use the new human potential released by this dramatic psychological shift...
...Yet frustrating - to bishops, social activists, and the rest of us in our city trenches...
...Are we glad about what we do...
...Is this promising...
...Given this complexity, the wonder may be that theologians can speak at all, much less with one voice - but that specialized languages are needed to take account of so much is understandable, at least at this stage...
...If there are links, though, between professionals and laypersons, there are also gaps...
...collectively, these two professional groups represent the broad ecumenical conversation partners for Catholic theologians in this country...
...doing theology today is thus singularly complex, reflecting as perhaps no other discipline does the multiple interweave of our world - a world paradoxically high-tech and high-touch at one and the same time...
...But observe, as is frequently the case, any high-caste Hindu plant manager refusing to get his hands dirty to maintain imported Western machinery...
...And so, whether we feel impelled by some real and shared victory of the spirit to gather (in a place called 'church') to shout alleluia has everything to do with whether, in industry, commerce, science, the arts, and politics, there is anything to shout about, or a " we " to shout it...
...Helena, gives off a lot of smoke...
...The knowledge explosion, erupting like Mt...
...What's going on is nearly everything, and by the measure of chaos, or to an outsider apparent chaos, plenty of new world-ing ought to be in store...
...Thus far, however, the promising public debate here is largely a monologue: there were no theological papers at San Francisco addressing the questions raised by George Gilder...
...from Targumic studies to North American Indian religion, music and art in religion, computer-assisted research, Eastern Christianity, the histories of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Ugaritic studies, and women in religion, East and West and South - just about everything religious or quasi-religious (like Marxism) under sun and moon...
...Item: the annual joint conventions just before Christmas of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco...
...Behind the academic cool lies the great passion, the romance really, of understanding the primal poesis or making, the heartland sources not only of one's own soul and culture but of others...
...At a time when, despite Stockmanesque illusions of knowing "how the world works," so many traditional forms of culture and commerce no longer do work, it seems no coincidence that so many should choose to investigate the archeology of the human mind at its mythic beginning and transition points...
...As double-agents, translating between their own community and the wider culture, Catholic theologians, especially in America, have often been met with suspicious scrutiny from their fellow-Catholics...
...No theologian can substitute for that - though, with some word akin to Walker Percy's "ontological lapsometer" (Love in the Ruins), a theologian might well divine what's missing...
...Our guess is there's no stopping it...
...The whole thing, and giving thanks for it, hinges on the quality of our work and play, and what we do or do not put into them...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
