Towards A World Theology
Strenski, Ivan
Thrilling project, old-fashioned account TOWARDS A WORLD THEOLOGY Wilfred Cantwell Smith Westminster Press, $18.95, 206 pp. Ivan Strenski ASIDE from their forays into the mission field,...
...Yet how true to history is Smith's picture of the way we "have all along been participants in the world history of religion...
...Steven philip Kramer teaches history at the University of New Mexico...
...but pretty marginal as far as serious participations in world history go...
...Not much - at least if Havana, Caracas, Mexico City, and Tokyo have anything to say about it...
...One too many Victorian lampshades gathers dust in this book: "fond dreams...
...With so much narrow and cultish, jerry-built falderal fouling the electro-theological atmosphere, Smith's generous cosmopolitanism lets in the fresh air of liberal civility...
...but just who is going to get cut...
...Still, maybe these feeble precedents are better than none at all...
...Thus "theology" really ought to be read "Christian theology...
...I am uneasy because this book is in many ways doggedly, yes, even radically old-fashioned...
...King connection...
...in its present state, "theology" is just about as much theology-in-general - world theology - as the World Series is a world series...
...Smith wants to liven up things in the study of world religions: instead of the static-sounding "religion," we ought to speak of certain historical "processes...
...Not a bad thing in itself...
...The prospect is thrilling - at least on the surface...
...growth surges forth...
...On the surface, this may look fine, again, but up close Smith seems to draw dangerously close to a tradition partly responsible for the present parochial malaise...
...But at least the effort seems to be in a noble cause...
...comes to mind on page 181...
...Well, yes, true enough...
...It is small wonder then that Smith lectures us that we "must" recognize that "all human knowledge is self-consciousness" and that it is flatly "immoral" not to accept this...
...The life of "faith" requires creative participation in the history of a "community in motion...
...So when Wilfred Cantwell Smith, director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions and both theologian and historian of religion, urges readers to consider the task of a " world theology," some Christians will perk up their ears to this timely program...
...I simply doubt - these days at any rate - that we can achieve this by well-meant appeals to personal faith...
...Freud merits one line in Towards a World Theology - and then he has to share it with Darwin and Marx...
...Indeed, when he says "the Muslim has been saved by Muslim faith...
...No small achievement, even if we have much less than a finished theology here, but rather certain steps taken toward one...
...Towards a World Theology is written for churchfolk...
...Ivan Strenski ASIDE from their forays into the mission field, theologians have primarily busied themselves with issues internal to their own communities - abortion, birth control, christology, etc...
...IVAN STRENSKI is chairman of the religious studies department at Connecticut College...
...Smith, like many other religious people and scholars, makes a fetish of personal experience and faith...
...How can a book presume to address critical issues on the world scene without, for instance, giving serious attention to the critiques (of experience as a ground of authority, in this case) of Freud and Marx, to mention only two figures of this sort...
...Smith speaks from an unselfconsciously and confessedly pious Christian heart about his own faith to others of like hearts and minds...
...But we have had more than enough of this sort of retreat into the private world...
...Mobility reigns...
...It is there to see every Sunday morning beamed in from Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Lynchburg, Virginia...
...the study of that historical life requires just as much determination to apply the right method of study...
...England has a funny way of doing things to American - here Canadian - intellectuals...
...For Smith these processes are irreducibly made up of other people, working out the dictates of their personal faith...
...But even if we may not really have been so seriously involved with the religious histories of other folk, we can at least applaud Smith's attack on abstract language and objectivist methods of studying what he insists are deeply human things...
...A double-edged sword, perhaps...
...How Smith's approach will get us out of that dead-end, we never learn in this volume...
...When things get ecumenical they tend to stray no farther than Jerusalem or Istanbul, leaving Benares, Kyoto, Mecca, Moscow, or Qum for the history of religions...
...For him, public objects, like "religion" are invariably squalid, while private objects, like "personal faith" are wonderfully splendid...
...Now I do not sneer at Smith's efforts here to generate some of that liberal tolerance and civility so badly needed in certain quarters...
...The history of religions stands in the midst of a confluence of "processes...
...More fetishes from the feeling hearts of the faithful...
...Then you will see how our various religious "processes" have intersected to the mutual benefit of one and all...
...Follow the common threads in the Tolstoy-Gandhi-Martin Luther MICHAEL Harrington's most recent book is The Next America (Holt Rhinehart...
...carry them back to the story of the bodhisattva, later transformed into the Orthodox Christian legend of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat...
...In fact, it was spoken for churchfolk as the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, thus perhaps accounting for the mannered, chatty, senior common-room style in which it is written...
...Trace the diffusion of the rosary across Asia from India to Japan and from the Middle East to Europe and the Americas, Smith urges...
...Resist abstract language and brutal categorization...
...This writer struggles at the end of his persuasive tether, beating us into guilty submission to a warmed-over, question-begging humanism...
...Whatever the final outcome of Smith's encounter with Freud, Marx, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, and all the others, all bets are off on Smith until he comes to public terms with these makers of twentieth-century thinking...
...although we did not know it...
...the Buddhist by Buddhist faith, the Jew by Jewish," he invites Tulsa and Lynchburg to put in their claims...
...If Smith wants to encourage real red-blooded participation in the religious history of humanity in the present day, we well need some precedents - even if they may seem a trifle pale...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 3
