Karl Barth said that theology is addressed primarily to the church, not to the professoriate. I haven’t yet gotten past 1.2 of the Dogmatics, but even I have grasped that much. Barth’s pretty insistent on that point. I agree with him.
I don’t think Barth is exactly making a claim about audience or style here. That is, I don’t think he necessarily means, “Theology should always be immediately accessible to the layperson” or “The primary audience for theology must always be the church.” “Accessibility” is a maddeningly undertheorized concept anyway—any book is accessible if you want it bad enough—and Barth himself writes very differently in the Dogmatics (well, 1.1 anyway) than he does in his sermons. Any writer has many things to say to many publics; the resulting text may end up having much of its life and meaning with publics the writer never imagined and in contexts the writer never intended. Barth’s point, I think, is something like, “Whoever reads us, whoever we write for proximately, we’re ultimately doing all of this for the church.”
What my book has in common with Hanna Reichel’s For Such a Time As This and Mac Loftin’s In the Twilight of the Christian West is that we’re all looking for a language that feels appropriate to the sense of crisis that America’s hopefully partial and temporary descent into fascism creates for (mainly) mainliners and, perhaps especially in my case, deconstructing evangelicals (who often end up as mainliners, when they don’t lose their faith completely). In Loftin’s case, this is not as obviously true, because part of Loftin’s project is to challenge us to imagine living without, to mourn proleptically, the church, or at least the church as we’ve known it. But who is the “us” that Loftin tasks with this responsibility? It’s difficult to come up with an answer that isn’t the, or at least a, church.
For Reichel, that search for an adequate language leads to an overhaul of a traditional form: the book of short devotional meditations of the sort that a person might read during breakfast. While my evangelical mom reads My Utmost For His Highest, I read For Such a Time as This. I don’t mean this as a criticism: I believe in using popular forms for all they’re worth, I believe in writing books that address a general audience as though they’re intelligent and creative, and I believe in seeing how much complexity you can put into a readable, nontechnical style before that style bursts.
And, frankly, I think Reichel’s book is marvelous. I read it in a single sitting and immediately started using it with the college ministry that I led at my own church this year, where it repeatedly sparked incredibly rich discussions. The book met these students—social workers, scientists, theater kids—where they are. I appreciate especially that its politics are not binary. In places, Reichel challenges us to be good stewards of those democratic institutions that still exist; in others, they address us as potential radicals and martyrs, as people who have nothing left to do but prophetically denounce, disrupt, destroy. That’s because some of us are called to one form of action and others are called to the other. Or, some of us are called to be one of these things in one area of our lives but not in other areas. Early on, Reichel quotes a line from Bonhoeffer that I have read before but that had not previously struck me with such force, to the effect that the Christian is called to live in many dimensions of life simultaneously. For Such a Time Is This illustrates that point by simultaneously bringing encouragement to, and posing hard questions to, Christians who wish to do exactly that.
I struggled more with In the Twilight of the Christian West, but I think that it, too, is an intelligent, sincere, and serious book, and thus valuable. Loftin argues that we need to mourn Western Christianity, or Western-Christianity-as-we’ve-known-it (a formulation that doesn’t quite work for me because “we” have known “it” so variously), rather than resenting its decline or, worse, projecting our resentment at its decline onto strangers, onto “the other.” Behind the post-2015 rise in US fascism, he sees a refusal to mourn this thing that is dying. Rather than admit that the Christian West, and perhaps Christianity writ large, is dying, we look to restore a false past through the repristination of patriarchy, white supremacy, an essentialized gender binary, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
It is right here, at the beginning, that I started to argue strenuously with the book, and then couldn’t stop. Maybe it’s the American Baptist in me, but I think there hasn’t been a single “Western Christendom” since at least the Reformation, maybe longer, and so there isn’t a single thing that is dying. American Christian fundamentalism is dying through apostasy and idolatry, which are the things fundamentalists used to accuse mainliners of, when they still thought about us at all.
The mainline is dying demographically, and quickly, though it would not surprise me at all if God were to reverse this trend very suddenly via causes we can’t possibly anticipate. It’s not clear to me that American Catholicism is dying, nor that “the black church”—excuse me for talking about this theologically, ecclesiastically, stylistically varied entity as though it were a monolith—is even in decline. Loftin tries to gather all these (arguable) deaths into one. For example, he likens his grief at the dwindling of the Episcopal Church to the fear that fundamentalists feel of a demographically and politically changing America, and I just don’t think that this likening works. The things likened are not the same, and do not rise and fall together. Loftin’s (justified) affection for the role Episcopalianism has played in his life is not at all like the desire to restore segregation in the churches, and even if Loftin were to cope with his sadness unhealthily, that coping would probably not take such a violent form.
The mainline could die while fundamentalism continues to grow (and to accelerate on its current trajectory toward becoming a Donald Trump mystery religion). Fundamentalism could die, and people could suddenly find themselves curious about Presbyterianism. Anti-immigrant sentiment could suffer a generational discrediting, as free-market economics did after the Depression, if the Democrats could find a second FDR who is willing to make the case aggressively. If this happened, it might well bring millions of new people to American churches of every description—including the right-wing churches. Many immigrants and refugees, to put it mildly, are Christians, or Christianity-curious.
Meanwhile, nativist sentiment and white nationalism might thrive even if we did all the mourning Loftin tasks us with doing. And, by the way, that’s a lot of mourning. At one point he even manages to find a way to make the Resurrection sound depressing, which it isn’t. It’s utterly destabilizing, it’s scary to the maintainers of any order in which the power to inflict death is supposed to constitute the final word—but the one thing it’s not is depressing. I think it happened, and that Christians are the people who try to explain what it means to the world. Whatever ends up happening to the mainline churches, our calling to do that hasn’t changed, and as long as that is true, there’s a church to do theology for.
I’ve been very hard on Loftin here, and I don’t feel good about it, because he’s a thoughtful person whose heart seems in the right place. I’ve said that the book is valuable, and I want to finish by saying why. I think Loftin describes complex arguments and ideas well, in uncluttered language. I think the way that he combines thinkers from far-flung traditions and conversations is so creative that it merits no less an adjective than artful—it’s more like the imagination that allows a novelist to see a clever way from one scene to another, or that gets a DJ to mutate two or three records into a beautifully unrecognizable sound, than it is like the intellectual plodding of a dutiful scholar. To put Adrienne von Speyr into the same few pages with Edouard Glissant, as Loftin does, and to make them seem as though they’ve been having the same conversation from utterly different locations: that’s the scholarly imagination at its best. When theology makes these kinds of moves, it anticipates the Kingdom, where people who never imagined each other will discover that they speak different dialects of the same language.
