When modernity sows the seeds

...And in fact, much of what he says has been said before...

...But theologians in earlier ages assumed that inquiry within that framework would yield a meaningful version of the creed for the inquirer and the church...

...Theology inevitably begins with humans' problems in understanding, accepting, and interpreting the statements of the creed...

...How can it be filled out...

...His solution to the loss of traditional Christian identity is to speed it up...

...The basis is an epistemological monism that assumes historical analysis to be the relativ izer of all ultimate claims...

...With the myopia common among those whose major contacts with Christianity are through theologians and other academic religionists, they do not perceive the recent remarkable recrudescence of orthodox Christianity as anything more than a mulish resistance to the inevitable collapse of traditional religion under the pressures of modernity, a survival of what Meagher calls "smalltown religion...

...Such is the natural and helpful way in which, by the grace of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Christianity grows into the future and, it is to be hoped, a more truthful expression of God's will...

...Throughout the book, Bowden shows special animosity toward the "utterly fantastic" cult of Mary, and states that when the brave new world of Christianity shaped by enlightened males and females arrives "it is hard to see how...it can allow the persons of either Jesus or Mary to continue to play some of the roles they at present have in Christianity...

...Its function is not to secure the past but to enable the future...

...It is surprising, by the way, to find scholars shaped by the Catholic/Anglican traditions (as these authors are) actually basing their critique of Christology on the problems of historicity in the Gospels...

...Given the entire direction of Bowden's book, this would appear to include the parts of the tradition concerning Jesus...

...The only criteria for measuring the adequacy of any future form of Christianity cannot be doctrinal but only ethical—although on this as on so many points, Bowden shows himself to be amazingly imprecise as to what such ethical standards should be, beyond a fairly fuzzy humanism...

...he is only reporting, after all, and "questioning...

...What does Bowden recommend to his reader...

...he tends to report on "tendencies" in theology to which he modestly subscribes...

...The second part of the book therefore takes up the question, "Are Christianities True...

...b) Is one "truly Christian" (in the sense that one's life realizes Christian identity...

...If Bowden's criterion for the Christian future was a portmanteau notion of ethics, Meagher's criterion appears to be a personal standard of aesthetics...

...Another meaning of "faith" is fidelity...

...The reader therefore expects—and finds—Meagher trying to develop a "vision of the future" of Christianity that relativizes the place of traditional Christian belief...

...30: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...

...Or perhaps he does, for he spends a major portion of the book trying to suggest that this "paramount symbol" is really what stands in the way of the changes he would like to see...

...To put it bluntly, the authors no longer quite believe what Christianity claims...

...It is startling to fnnd persons calling themselves Christian theologians beginning (and ending) not with a wholehearted commitment to the community's tradition but rather with an unquestioning acceptance of the most hostile perceptions of criticism even while avowing allegiance to the tradition they are dismantling...

...The major portion of his argument is understandably taken up with the first and final questions: is Christianity "true" and "does it true...

...And apart from some cautionary words concerning the adequacy of liberation theology, there is little else in the stew of modernity to which he takes exception...

...The fundamental difficulty shared by these books, however, is one also increasingly identifned with liberalism, which is a sort of carelessness...

...Although Bowden considers much of Christianity to be incredible, for example, he apparently finds Judaism to be in great shape, as well as being a lot more humorous...

...What is most painful in this is that a Christian tradition subject to systematic and fundamental savaging by its disaffected adherents necessarily becomes defensive for the sake of its survival, with the result that it does grow increasingly inflexible and crippled in its ability to perform its function of enabling the future...

...Meagher begins his reflections with a distinction between belief and faith which is critical to the rest of his argument...

...These are obviously more accessible for analysis, and the answer to the questions concerning personal appropriation and validation depend on them: if Christianity fails to "be" or "make" true, then one adheres to it at risk of self-distortion...

...Why must these particular "illusions," that have meant so much to so many, and have managed to transform the lives of so many for centuries, be summarily abandoned...

...But to be true it must also be loyal...

...Rather than simply abandon the religion, they have written books explaining their difficulties and suggesting ways in which the religion could improve itself if only it would adopt perspectives closer to their own...

...These authors' apparent unawareness of or unconcern for the fragility of all tradition, and their willingness to jettison huge chunks of it without suggesting anything remotely equivalent in its place suggests that their stated allegiance to Christianity is largely sentimental, and unfortunately provides further solid evidence why liberalism is not trusted by those who could benefit from it...

...Tradition—which is given expression by creed and ritual and institution—is a human construction, and therefore extraordinarily vulnerable...

...Their books are certainly not written for such undereducated believers...

...in short, half-truths which have tended illegitimately to postpone change...

...Bowden's introduction gathers together a number of reminiscences and propositions that go to suggest (a) the book has more of a coherent argument than may at fnrst appear, and (b) there are any number of intellectual and moral reasons why Christianity's credibility is in trouble, and (c) the critical knowledge long held by university people but inexplicably kept from people in the church is now being made available through the efforts of the author, though not without anguish...

...When he surveys scholarship on the figure of Jesus, for example, he is not content with showing the difficulties of locating what is historical in the Gospels...

...Yet, his liberalism is not entirely formless, nor lacking in its own doctrinal bias...

...I have called each of these books "liberal" in orientation...

...he is out to ask how the "paramount symbol" of Christianity, the person of Jesus, "stands up to modern questioning," which is an inquiry of quite a different order, though Bowden does not appear to recognize that...

...He considers our society to be one that has "improved the potential quality of our lives out of all recognition" and in the process has taken on the authoritative statements of the churches and "proved them to be unsound...

...the intended readership is rather assumed already to share the sensibilities of the authors...

...He is a theologian working in the context of the university (of Toronto...

...Indeed, if we return to the paragraph immediately preceding the one calling for an end to authoritarianism in the name of openness and muddling through, Bowden states directly, "There are parts of the tradition which need to be ruthlessly discarded or repudiated" (italics added...

...The philosopher Gabriel Marcel has reminded us that fidelity, to be true, must be creative...

...Is there after all an air of fascism in this "correct thinking" that may be at odds with a completely "open church...

...c) Is one "Christian truly" (in the sense that one is sincerely what one claims, or "true to oneself' in those claims...

...What is required of those truly committed to the truth is an invigorating plunge into modernity...

...In fact these books reveal an orientation that we associate with the best of what is termed liberalism: They are governed by perceptions shaped by a Christian humanism—especially in matter pertaining to the realization of human potential and equality—and concern themselves with the future even more than the past...

...His tone is careful and circumspect, even worried...

...Meagher's book has a number of stylistic irritants, including its oh-so-oblique narrative prologue and epilogue, its penchant for neologisms, its idiosyncratic and selfindulgent system of notation, and its incessant self-referentiality...

...Since the public creed of the church has been systematically discredited, Meagher gives faith substance by his own "anamnetic creed" (which, of course, he is not imposing on anyone), a set of statements so inclusive and banal that it could pass as prayer at a major divinity school chapel...

...After liberating faith from belief—or at least the public beliefs expressed in the Christian creed—Meagher discovers that "faith" is a surprisingly vague thing, particularly if even something as fundamental as "faith in God" is negotiable...

...This section most resembles Bowden's book, as Meagher also sets out to deconstruct the assumption of Christian superiority to other religions, the basis of Christian apologetics, the Bible as the basis for belief, and finally the adequacy of Jesus considered as the Christ...

...In his second chapter, "Truth and Some Consequences," he discusses various ways in which "truth" can be understood, and on that basis develops a fourfold question for those within the Christian tradition: (a) Is Christianity true (in the sense that its claims are factual or internally consistent...

...Both authors explicitly state their conviction that Christianity is at a critical juncture, is in fact still young, and must equip itself for an indefinite future...

...Meagher's perspective, however, is by no means as positivistic as Bowden's...

...The people they talk to and read resemble them in their discontent with the inherited tradition and discomfort at the ways in which less well-read people seem actually to believe and live by the myths which, by all rights, should long ago have disappeared...

...Having subjected the various possibilities for asserting the "Finality of Christ" to historical critical analysis and finding them wanting, Bowden gazes upon the wreck of traditional Christianity and finds it good, if somewhat belated...

...Did he really say "allow...

...In brief, he asserts the primacy of faith as an open, trusting, creative, imaginative personal response to reality over belief, which is always a partial and sometime distorting attempt to articulate that existential response in conceptual terms...

...One of the strangest features of these books is the odd way in which not the tradition but the assumptions of modernity are assumed to be valid and set the agenda for the discussion...

...He begins bravely and with some fine observations on the positive functions of illusions, and on the many ways in which people personalize truth...

...Since when has "the historical Jesus" been the basis of Christology for these traditions...

...Bowden's project of subjecting Christian claims to historical analysis in order to purge them of "half-truths," however, turns out to be more radical than it appears, for his notion of history 28: 31 January 1992 Commonweal is positivistic in the extreme...

...John Bowden, an Anglican, is an important British theologian and publisher (SCM Press), and shows himself to be a surveyor as well as purveyor of many books...

...And in its transitus through each generation's appropriation, transmutation, and communication, its symbols are dependent on a wholehearted love and allegiance simply to get from one generation to the next...

...I am not using that designation as a red flag...

...d) Does Christianity "true" (in the sense that it renders human life more authentic and more fully human...

...Bowden and Meagher both acknowledge that individuals and communities alike constantly reshape, invigorate, transmute the symbols a community uses to defnne itself...

...This ambiguity makes Meagher's turn to "the truing of Christianity" problematic...

...He insists that the future Christianity cannot have any "authoritarianism in matters of belief...

...Such concern is to be appreciated and respected...

...Only much later does Bowden make clear the basis of his critique, or the benefits offered by it...

...His book is less reportage and more a lively thinking through of the author's self-assigned problem of trying to shape a future of a religion to which he is emotionally attached but whose basis he can no longer take too seriously...

...Each is written in a self-consciously personal and confessional mode by a man of a certain age who views himself as liberal in "vision" (to borrow from Meagher's subtitle), and who after a long attachment to Christianity confesses an inability to affirm its traditional creedal structure...

...not a little of the book's clumsiness comes from the stringing together of authorities from the publishing list: in particular, readers of Honest to God and The Myth of God Incarnate will fnnd the perspectives familiar, enriched mainly by Bowden's pious affirmation of religious ecumenism and cultural pluralism...

...On the other hand, his book is less pedestrian than Bowden's, contains some really fine individual patches of analysis, and at least engages—if it also often enrages—the reader...

...John C. Meagher offers more mirthful reading...

...In sharp contrast to Bowden, however, Meagher then turns to the task of "making Christianity true [as a verb]," an enterprise he terms "reconstructive Christianity," by which he means trying to find a way of maintaining Christian "faith" while no longer subscribing to the traditional pattern of Christian "belief...

...Openness to the future and to change...

...Here it shows itself in the failure to understand either the fragility or the function of tradition...

...The benefits are the liberalization of Christianity by making it more open to "those of different faiths" and by freeing us from "half-truths which have been used to dominate and control, to instill fear and endorse the acceptance of social injustice, inequality of the treatment of the sexes, and the perpetuation of institutions which have outlived their day...

...But in reading his excellent argument, I was led to wonder: if other sorts of illusions can be healthful, and if individuals can legitimately approximate "truths" according to their own tailoring—as Meagher correctly notes—why can't Commonweal 31 January 1992: 29 the same positive functions apply to the traditional creed of Christianity as well...