Religion in the Secular City
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
(Continued from page 306~ Lest Protestant theologians feel slighted, the reader is told that many other Christian clerics besides the popes have chosen to speak on subjects about which they are...
...I think he might also concede, pace Johannes Metz, that we must take into account the middle class church experience here...
...the ineradicable grass, accidentally introduced by an irresponsible ancestor of the irresponsible Venturas, became their collaborator in destroying the natives' economy and converting them into slaves to work the family gold mines...
...in 1973 we got direct coverage (or uncoverage) from the hot tubs of Esalen in The Seduction of the Spirit...
...Schaeffer's writings are tendentious to an extreme but they do look squarely at modern culture...
...He sees fundamentalism's demand for reason in theology (faith is not a leap but a reasonable choice), its fierce critique of the rootlessness of modernity, and its desire for alternatives to the faceless bureaucracies of both church and state as valid critiques...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham M ANY academic theologians wonder openly (and -- let's be honest here -- jealously) why Harvey Cox gets so much attention from the national media...
...Cox, then, is taking the pulse of the present...
...The campesinos in El Salvador might well disagree...
...Neither does the fact that in countries with surplus labor the opei'ation of free labor markets can prevent workers from appropriating the income generated by gains in their own productivity, as workers in the West are accustomed to do...
...Signs & portents on the edges RELlaiON IN TRE SECULAR CITY TOWARDS A POSTMODERN THEOLOGY Harvey Cox Simon & Schuster, $16.95, 304 pp...
...In my own very middle class university-cum-state-government town Rituals of idleness A ROUSE IN THE COUNTRY Jos~ Donoso I~opf, $16.95, 352 pp...
...They reflect the religious hopes of the people who never had the chance to make their peace with modernity...
...The fundamentalist movement is treated honestly by Cox but not as incisively as Frances FitzGerald's reportage in the New Yorker a few years ago...
...He further sees their demonizing of bureaucracies as setting up straw men since they have no sense of the myriad human communities which coexist in such large structures...
...Inside the lances, society is threetiered: adult Venturas, the children, and an army of servants who hate their masters as both masters and servants hate the naked natives...
...It is these groups (and those like L'Arche, the Catholic Workers, etc...
...What he does do well is prompt his readers to think about what is going on today in this period of religious ferment...
...Indeed, the Asians whose industrial success stories Lord Bauer touts might also like to point out that their success has been preceded and accompanied by land reforms and by fiscal policies for income redistribution...
...Times Book Review...
...The fact that the terms of trade in international markets are consistently biased against the international purchasing power of primary products, the principal exports of most Third World countries, may disturb the clerics, but apparently does not concern Lord Bauer...
...Such phrases, he instructs us, are "bound to provoke envy, or something stronger...
...denial I side the fence of gold-tipped lances which protects its lawns, its lagoon, its roses, peacocks, and rare trees, there is nothing but sighing grasses until the far horizon of blue mountains...
...who may be fleshing out a postmodern theology...
...For those interested in a compendium of Lord Bauer's visceral sentiments about economics, theology, and culture the present volume should prove useful...
...Instead, he piously comments "the presence of landless workers in such areas reflects . . . primarily the lack of ambition, enterprise, and skill...
...We applaud religion for bashing the Bolsh in Poland but are appalled at its use in Iran...
...In 1965 Cox reported from the heady swirl of the urban metropolis in The Secular City...
...Indeed, Lord Bauer assures the popes that' 'lack of natural resources, including land, has little or nothing to do with the poverty of individuals or of societies...
...Once the land was various and fertile, tilled by native farmers...
...Cox analyzes both the Latin American communities (where he has had firsthand experience both as teacher and observer) as well as liberationist movements in Europe and Asia...
...Vastness surrounds it...
...He sees in American fundamentalism (of which Falwell is the synecdoche) one conspicuous counterforce to liberal theological presuppositions but judges that movement deficient as a basis for a new theology...
...Fortunately, the popes and his readers have Lord Bauer to set them straight...
...Base communities in Latin America reflect a homogeneous Catholic experience of some centuries standing while the liberation theology, of Sri Lanka reflects a minority religion and its problems...
...Among crystal and 18 May 1984:309...
...So too is the persistent preoccupation of ignorant clerics with income inequalities between rich nations and poor nations...
...His most vocal critics accuse him of suffering from a kind of intellectual AIDS: a defenseless susceptibility to every trendy virus current in the Zeitgeist...
...Cox uses these two exemplary locations to argue his basic thesis: modern liberal theology is in a terminal state and postmodern theology is suffering its birthpangs...
...The Venturas only spend the summer in the house...
...He also recognizes that the persistence of religion in the postmodern period is a mixed blessing...
...He recognizes that generalizations are dangerous to make because of vast cultural differences...
...Clara Claiborne Park S OSl~, DONOSO is a Chilean, but his house could be in any country where Europeans took over a vast land from its native inhabitants, recreated themselves as an aristocracy, and erected an elaborate superstructure of civilization over exploitation, ignorance, . contempt, and fear...
...In the last analysis, however, Cox thinks that fundamentalism will not provide a .context for postmodern religiousness because the movement seems incapable of bringing a critical spirit to the status quo...
...outthe free hot meals, shelters for the homeless, centers for battered families, the mentally ill a.,,, ,he addicted, the home for families visiting prisoners, the organization to build low-costhousing are all sponsored by ecumenical church efforts or are heavily supported by them...
...in 1969 he theologized amid the flower children and New Left activists (The Feast of Fools...
...Lord Bauer also fails to address the deleterious impact that the proclivity of the very rich in many developing countries to consume luxury imports and to export their savings has on employment for their less favored fellow citizens...
...Lord Bauer's pastoral advice to clerics is that they should be offering compassion, presumably in lieu of saying things that might make the natives restless...
...The basic Christian communities and the liberation theology behind them hold more promise...
...I think that unfair...
...It is now 1984 and Cox tells us what is going on in two strangely paired locations: Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Vatican in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the "basic Christian communities" of Latin America...
...Each autumn the grasses emit a blizzard of thistledown which chokes everything that breathes, but by that time the Venturas' long cavalcade of carriages and wagons has returned to the far capital, carrying this year's supply of gold...
...Cox would agree that liberation theology from Latin America cannot be imported as a whole...
...However, those interested in the complex issues of human development in the third world might, with good neoclassical rationality, prefer to spend their time and money elsewhere...
...Cox is hardly a Paul Tillich but there he is on page one of the Sunday New York...
...Lord Bauer's assault on Christian social teaching is less an essay on justice than a diatribe against interference with free markets and against the distribution of wealth and income according to any norms other than those of the marketplace...
...Paul VI, however, is found guilty of "arguments and allegations [which] reflect unthinking surrender to intellectual fashion and political nostrums...
...His characters are the Venturas -seven middle-aged sisters and brothers, their spouses, their thirty-three children - - and his subject is history...
...This postmodern theology, Cox _,elieves " aerging "from the botCommonweal: 308 tom and at the edges," which is to say from those folks who have figured very little in the discourse of modern theological concerns...
...Cox does well what he set out to do: scan the horizon from his ivory tower in Cambridge and venture forth on some field trips looking for signs and portents...
...What the shape of that theology will be is not yet clear, so Cox is tentative and a bit blurred when it comes to specifics...
...But not, as in the hundred-year solitude of Gabriel Marquez's Buendia farhily, history as dream and life as wonder, but history as nightmare...
...He may just have spotted one or two this time...
...One point Cox makes seems unimpeachable: much of current religious vitality comes from small voluntaristic groups (many under the umbrella of the too easily despised parish) which come together both for a deepened spirituality and a passion for social justice...
...Cannibals, they ca~ them, to justify their exploitation and to frigh ,~n the c . . . . ~n...
...Continued from page 306~ Lest Protestant theologians feel slighted, the reader is told that many other Christian clerics besides the popes have chosen to speak on subjects about which they are ignoran...
...He is much more sanguine about the potential of the liberationist base community movement in Latin America...
...I t is anomalous," he states in an apparent reversal of his earlier condemnation of modernization literature and praise of the rich variety of human experience in the third world, "to insist [as Paul _~I does] that the West should respect Third World cultures and at the same time to urge that the West should pay taxes for the benefit of those who embrace cultures inimical to economic advance...
...Drawing upon his own previously undisclosed theological background, Lord Bauer tells his readers that the letters of Paul VI "are not theological, doctrinal, or philosophical statements reaffirming Christian beliefs . . . . They are political statements supported by bogus arguments, and as such can only confuse believers...
...Cox has two things going for him: He is a very lively writer and he is a master of what I would call the "you are there" style of theological discourse...
...The pope ought not to use the "catch-phrase 'the earth belongs to all,' " which for Lord Bauer epitomizes the central thrust of papal documents...
...What is to be said of all this with respect to North America...
...This latter critique, ironically enough, is the same one used against Cox by Andrew Greeley regarding the reality of the "secular city" and "secular man...
...They remain at the margins, but as they find their religious voice liberal theology remains bemused since it never spoke to this audience...
...he is a sort of Baptist Xavier Rynne...
...If they aren't willing to play by our rules, let them starve...
...Sadly enough he makes no use of the writings of Francis Schaeffer, who is the closest thing fundamentalism has to an intellectual, to buttress his case...
...Certainly clerics like Paul VI should not be offering foreign aid out of Lord Bauer's tax payments...
...In his reflections on social justice Lord Bauer is equallv undisturbed by the fact that the high coucentration of ownership of land and natural resources in many countries of Latin America, often coupled with the protection of militaryauthoritarian governments, precludes effective economic and political participation by vast numbers of human beings...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
