Though the organizing committee of the Transforming Theology conversation "are not optimistic that the conservative Evangelical groups will be highly responsive," I've quite enjoyed the first half of John Cobb's Reclaiming the Church. I could not agree more with Cobb's call for the church to be more personally engaged in theological construction and reflection rather than letting the "professionals" carry all the weight (although, one has to see the irony in Cobb, who himself is not only a "professional", but one whose writings on pluralism and process theology are some of the toughest reads out there, unlike this book).
Cobb's calling out of the Mainliner's loss of shared conviction will certainly ruffle some feathers, but not mine. One, I'm not a member of the tradition. And two, I think he's more right than wrong. The thing I can't help but ask though is the role more pluralistic theologies like Cobb's have played in this loss of joint conviction. It's hard to imagine a lot of Christians becoming passionately engaged in the task of theology and the shared life of the Church when the question of "what we can believe" and still be "in" is so up in the air. From what I've read (which is not a lot), I know Cobb's thoughts to be highly Christocentric, while at the same time leaning towards an open pluralism, and you can hear echoes of this even in his opening words about "shared conviction." But what convictions are we sharing? Cobb says that convictions must be "Christian," but just what this means seems to be so open to debate, one wonders if any cohesion could ever take place.
For instance, Cobb himself doesn't believe prosperity theology to be "biblically or traditionally Christian," but if another community does believe it to be so and holds onto it, vitality can occur. The question then becomes how we define "vitality," and for Cobb, it seems that "passionate" sums it up. The problem is that we can be passsionately wrong and even passionately evil. I'm just having a hard time seeing how having such loose standards [not just cognitive, but moral and practical as well] of what is and what is not "Christian" conviction can lead to significant vitality. I hope I'm wrong about this, though. Later, Cobb mentions that "Christian feminists" are "Christians first, and feminists second." But if I take his intro to heart, this statement means very little, because "Christian" isn't defined in any meaningful way.
Second, it's not surprising that Cobb's a big fan of the 19th and early 20th century "social gospel." I can respect that. Addressing social concerns such as poverty, labor issues, sex trafficking, racism, and violence has a place in Christianity -- a large place I would say. I'm a fan of a lot of what Rauschenbusch and others were trying to accomplish in their day and age. Even my denomination was formed around social concerns, particularly women's rights and the abolitionist movement.
But Cobb gives the social gospel a free pass on its bad theology [post-millenialism, underestimation of the presence of sin and its effects, etc...] and goes after Neo-Orthodoxy. It is true that Neo-Orthodoxy was a particularly rigorous and required a grasp of theological language that many found daunting. But to describe the theology of Barth, Brunner, and the Niebuhr's (not to mention Bonhoeffer) as "faith against culture" is unfair. . The bottom line is that Cobb wants to chuck N.O. out the window because it called out the theology of liberal Protestantism as lacking. Rather than being "against culture," men like Barth attempted to pick up the optimistic pieces of the social gospel after World War I. To think that these theologians were establishing a theology not to speak to their current culture but against it is ridiculous. They were trying to "transform" the church in their day and age in the same way that Cobb urges Mainliners to do at the end of this chapter.
Lastly, Cobb's two models approach is helpful. I appreciate Cobb's insistence on holding the two models in tension, realizing that "the excesses of each call for the other" (p. 51). But the correlation model, which is essentially what the "transformation" model is (thinking theologically by going back and forth between new understandings and Scripture) raises one big question: How do we define "what we cannot learn from the Bible?" In some cases, the Bible makes very few claims on us, such as the specifics of creation. and so we can feel free to adapt our theology to new scientific discoveries of evolution or carbon dating (not saying we must, but that its much easier to do). But on other topics (such as sexuality, a topic Cobb seems to be itching to dive into) the Bible is not as silent and leaves less room for negotiation. So does our new knowledge "trump" the old? What does it mean to "take the new insights seriously?" (p. 44) That's the question we have to ask in a correlation model like the one being proposed, and I'm anxious to see if Cobb touches it. My guess is that he assumes the answer and never goes there.
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