The Christian Century has a set of essays on How My Mind Has Changed. Many of the essays require a subscription, but the especially interesting essay by Douglas John Hall does not. The essay emphasizes the theology of the cross as opposed to the theology of glory. As he says, "I had always mistrusted the exaggerated and overconfident religious declarations of the dominant forms of Christianity and the moral smugness that invariably accompanied them. I had detested the bourgeois triumphalism that manifested itself in the 'successful' churches of the 1950s. And on the positive side, I had always felt at home with strange figures scarcely known to the WASPish Christianity of my context—Luther (certainly, among us, the least familiar of the Reformers), Kierkegaard, Kafka and Bonhoeffer (whose The Cost of Discipleship had been the first explicitly theological work I'd ever read). In fact, what I liked about Barth, I realized now, was the distinct hint of that same thin tradition still present in his early works, before the "triumph of the Third Day" took over."
As Hall sees it, "When we turn the story of Jesus into a success story, we both cheat ourselves out of its depth and effectively banish from our purview all those (and they are billions now) whose actuality precludes their giving themselves eagerly to stories with happy endings. The gospel of the cross is not about rescuing us from our finitude; it's about a compassionate God's solidarity with us in our (yes, perhaps impossible) creaturehood and the slow grace of divine suffering-love which, without pretending finality, effects its social and personal transformations from within."
Hall argues that mainline Protestant churches should stop lamenting their decline in societal importance and recognize that their responsibility is to abandon pretensions of power and instead to witness to "God's love and justice from the edges of empire."
The essay is thick with ideas placed in theological context that I have not summarized here. Well worth reading.
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