One of my favorite theologians, Douglas John Hall, reflects on his long and fruitful life as a Christian theologian in Bound and Free: A Theologian's Journey. He describes the unique challenge of apprehending and communicating the Christian message: "At best, I could only stand under it, hoping for glimpses and intimations of a Truth that I could neither possess nor skillfully articulate" (xi).

A Theologian's Courage

To Hall, a Christian teacher is both "bound and free." On of the one hand, a theologian is "bound" and accountable to a tradition he or she did not devise, while on the other hand, "responsible for a present and future testimony to the faith that cannot and must not be a mere repetition of any received tradition" (14).

This calls for what Hall labels, "theological courage." Charged with the responsibility to interpret the ancient faith in the here and now, the theologian dares to think he or she has "really heard and understood the Christian message" while simultaneously daring to think he understands his or her own time period - what it means to live in the here and now. Both are daring ventures.

And this is merely the beginning. One must then have the courage to "live with and seek to articulate Truth--living Truth that only rarely can even be glimpsed and never, ever fully captured in concepts and words" (24). Hall humorously (yet seriously) teaches his students: "In theology one has to keep talking, because otherwise somebody will believe your last sentence" (24). The "theological courage" needed is the courage to be "a 'fool for Christ,' a courage that darkly suspects, however, that most of the time it is just playing the fool" (24).

Hall gives thanks for the people who have influenced him throughout his life. He sees these people as a means of divine grace: "I owe such happiness as I have had to one Source--namely, the sheer grace of God as it is mediated through the lives of other people" (29-30).

Over time, the theologian grows and changes. Hall offers the 19th century Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge as an example of what not to do: Hodge "once boasted that he had not changed his mind in all of his long career. What an appalling confession ... All thinking persons change their minds. Even to think the same thing, you have to think differently, constantly adjusting your thought and your words to ever-changing circumstances, including the assumptions and the language of your time and place" (52).

Hall's Center - The Cross

One big theme for Hall is the continued significance of the cross. If we allow Easter to eclipse the cross, rendering it a thing of the past, "the cross [is] unconnected with the real pain and alienation that people experience" (58). Later, he writes, "The cross that is at the center of the Christian confession of faith in God has long been co-opted, in our Anglo-Saxon milieu, by our cultural triumphalism, which, by exploiting (and distorting) the resurrection, has effectively emptied the cross of its significance as a point of reference for human suffering and hope" (72).

Remembering the cross is not a morbid, joyless endeavor. "I wouldn't have felt empathy for the victims of sickness and death and sorrow and all the rest had I not felt just as strongly life's beauty, promise, and potential for joy. 'The grandeur and the misery' (Pascal) go together. Those who are unmoved by the joy of life seldom are moved by the pain of life either" (77).

The End of Christendom

As he looks ahead toward the future, Hall invites us to recognize that "Christendom--Christianity as the official and majority religion of a society, as the cult officially recognized by the governing powers--is largely a thing of the past. It lasted in an important but restricted area of the globe from the fourth until about the seventeenth century. Since then, it has been in various forms and degrees of decline" (84). He suggests that we not lament this, but take advantage of this new opportunity: "I see the end of Christendom not as a tragedy, not as loss, not as something to mourn, but as opportunity. There are opportunities for genuine Christian witness that can be embraced only by a church that knows its existence is no longer guaranteed by convention, custom, or law, a church that is no longer part of the establishment. Disestablishment is not a fate that must be accepted; it is an opportunity that can be joyfully embraced" (85-86).

The church must learn to embrace and work from the margins, and not from the center. After all, this is how Christianity began, and it is where it works best, for it can then represent the whole. "From the edges, from the sidelines, it is possible for the once-mainline church to exercise a prophetic ministry, a public witness that it could not easily bring off and seldom did bring off when it was still an unquestioned part of the Establishment" (121).

Ecumenical Dialogue

He invites us to pursue ecumenical dialogue rooted in the humble realization that "[a]s Christians, we do not possess the Truth. The Truth to which faith orients us cannot be possessed" (88). We must recognize that all Christian theology is, in the words of Karl Barth, "the most modest science." "If we start with that realization, we can never approach others as if we had what they do not and could not have. Jesus' Truth is not have-able!" (88) Thus, he rejects exclusivism.

He also rejects a soft and fuzzy inclusivism: "It can be a very lazy attitude, a general openness everyone and everything--very magnanimous, very nice, but finally not as loving as it would like to think itself. It welcomes difference but too often without noticing what is different about it--and without allowing it to be different" (89).

Finally, he has complaints with pluralism. Though it "finds truths in all positions... the pluralist remains rather condescendingly above all specific religions--above their messy particularity and concreteness, above their petty squabbles" (89).

As an alternative, he invites us to the practice of hospitality: "Unlike pluralism, hospitality does assume a particular faith commitment, whether Christian or other. Unlike liberal inclusivism, it does not include blindly or simply on principle, but it invites dialogue; it wants really to get to know the other, to discover points of convergence and points of divergence. Above all, it wants to find ways in which all sincere religions can work together for the well-being of the world (and there are many such ways)" (90).

In ecumenical dialogue, Hall warns the church not to lose "the scandal of particularity." Particularity is necessary: "Certainly, Jesus stands at the very center of Christian faith. Our faith is Christocentric. One can only claim Christianity for a confession of faith if Jesus Christ is at its center" (91). The truth is that this "scandal" is not unique to Christianity: "Is there any faith that does not have its particular entrée to the ultimate?" (91)

In short, the truth is surely that any faith, or indeed any philosophy that wants to have some access to the Ultimate, can have it only by passing through the lens of some particular mediator, some special mediating experience, some specific set of circumstances or ideas or texts. There is, in fact, no way of moving directly to the Absolute, for we ourselves are particular, finite, historical creatures. The universal is always approached through the particular.

So when Christians picture God and all things eternal by reference to the particular being named Jesus, they are not doing something unusual. In principle, they are doing just what everybody else does who wishes to feel some proximity to the eternal: namely, they perceive the eternal through special attention to some illuminating temporal reality. (92)

A Thinking Faith

Ultimately, Hall is concerned that our journey into the future includes "the necessity of our becoming and being a thinking faith. The corrective to certitude is a thinking faith that embraces the importance of doubt in the life of faith. Absolute certainty with respect to one's cause leads to tragedies like 9/11. "Fundamentalism, whatever the origins of the term, has come to mean a position of such exactness and certitude that those embracing it--or, more accurately, those embraced by it--feel themselves delivered from all the relativities, uncertainties, indefiniteness, and transience of human existence" (100).

We can understand the longing for certitude, but biblical religion does not offer certitude. Any kind of finality is nothing but a lie. "God offers us an alternative to certitude. It is called trust" (101).

Now, faith is a living thing--it is a category of the present. It is not a once-for-all accomplishment. It is not a possession, like a Visa card, that some have and others don't. It is an ongoing response to God, to the world, to life. It is therefore a matter of decision--taken not once, but over and over again, and in the presence of much evidence to the contrary.

Because faith involves decision, and indeed is decision (the decision to trust), it necessarily involves its antithesis, doubt. (102)

We must recapture the "learned ignorance" of the medieval thinker Nicholas of Cusa as described by Barbara Brown Taylor: "In Nicholas's scheme, the dumbest people in the world are those who think they know. Their certainty about what is true not only pits them against each other; it also prevents them from learning anything new. This is truly dangerous knowledge. For they do not know that they do not know, and their unlearned ignorance keeps them in the dark about most things that matter" (104)

In contrast to rationalism and irrationalism, we need to recover Anselm of Canterburys' fides quaerens intellectum, that is, faith seeking understanding. "But the word seeks doesn't do justice to what is meant. Anselm's quaerens does not mean polite inquiry or having a mild interest in theology! Commenting on this phrase from Anselm's Proslogion, Karl Barth writes of "faith's voracious desire for understanding." Faith, if it is really faith and not just spiritual froth, is driven to understanding--to the point that the absence of any quest for understanding must seem to this tradition to be evidence enough that faith isn't really present" (113). Faith is subject to the "difficulties with which all trust, to be trust, must struggle" (117).

Conclusion

Hall provides a touching, provocative, and prescient memoir that will allow present and future theologians to learn from his experience, and - even more importantly - model his passion, humility, and faith.

Quotes excerpted from Bound And Free: A Theologian's Journey by Douglas John Hall

© Richard J. Vincent, 2008