It Ain’t New
I'm making my coffee and scrolling through the news as I'm oft to do. The theological discussions on forgiveness - and absolution and reconciliation and I wish we'd figure out what we really mean before we speak - are playing in my head in the background.
It's curious to me. We can draw the political-historical connections between this current age and, say, 1930s Germany but are unwilling?unable? to draw the theological-historical connections between this current age and, say, 1930s Germany.
I don't have a whole helluva lot of religious scholars on this page (in truth, only the ones I actually know and like are here. The rest are over there) but I wonder how the tendencies in religious scholarship left us ill-prepared to have the theological framework to discuss what we're seeing.
Let me speak more clearly. We spent "generations" rejecting the entirety of European theology. Cool. It was necessary to do so, right, because we can't get free with European Jesus. But that also meant rejecting the - this word is so over-used - nuances therein. We rejected the theologies that undergirded Nazi Germany alongside the theologies of resistance. We posit Barth, Brunner, and Tillich alongside Schleiermacher and throw em all away and, therefore, fail to see how the former built a theolanguage for the Church to resist white supremacy. And then we find ourselves fighting against theological white supremacy in high places and struggling to re-invent the wheel we rejected.
If we can acknowledge that this moment in history resembles previous moments then we should also be able and willing to acknowledge that previous moments hold within them valuable tools. We gotta reclaim them, is what I'm saying. Because we cannot fight evangelical theology if we do not understand its roots in early protestantism and how neo-orthodox theologians squared up on it. And. won.
And. Won.
We threw out Barth. We threw out Tillich. We threw out Brunner. We threw out the winners ... without realizing we never even knew the names of the hundreds of losers who signed on and supported the Nazis and I just ... we owe the world better.
We gotta stop theologizing like we're in a vacuum and just happened to come upon this idea that existed for the first time ever when we saw it. We gotta stop walking around like we don't have an already recorded and printed and distributed battle plan to wage war on white supremacist churches and the governments they support. We gotta be honest and actually know our own theological roots well enough to use them to win.
