By this time, the Hartford Affirmations -- or Heresies, depending on how you read them -- will have been viewed with alarm or thanksgiving by most theologians in the country. Some will see them lamentably backsliding from social activism. Others will see them as a desperately needed dispelling of theological smog. As one of the signers, I see them in the latter way.
Readers of Post American may be interested in the background of the Hartford document. It was born in the heart of sociologist Peter Berger and preacher-journalist Richard Neuhaus. So they originated with non-professional, but very intelligent, theologians. Berger, I think, was the catalyst. As anyone who has read Berger knows, he has long had a distaste for theologies that reduce God to a stream of historical process, or power of being, or personal depths. In short, Berger was agitated about divine transcendence and its loss to theology, and hence to the church. So he and his friend Neuhaus invited a group of people, theologian and philosopher types mainly, to get together for a weekend to see if they could hammer out some theological affirmations that would reassert to the priority of God for the life and thought of the Christian community. Berger and Neuhaus drew up a provisional list of statements which the group then worked over, revised, and finally signed and gave to the press.
The form of the statement was purposely set in an antithesis-thesis style. We wanted to point, briefly and pointedly, to some contemporary theological notions that have become slogans among certain groups, things that in our judgment were simply wrong and harmful. But we wanted, as well, to counter the denials with affirmations that, while admitting some validity to the intent of the heresies, contradicted them by affirming the very real existence and authority of a transcendent God.
They are, I think, all about God. They suggest that the theological issue of our time is, simply, God. The question is whether we are living out our history under and with a very real transcendent being called God or whether we are part of the same process out of which God is gradually emerging. If there is a God who confronts and commands us, it follows that talk about him means to be talk about him and not about our deepest selves. And it likewise follows that our task in life is to listen for his will and accept the hope he offers in Christ.
If the Affirmations had sprung from some conservative church or seminary, they would have died on their parochial vine. But when Peter Berger gets a group of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, and Baptist people together, and includes among them a famous Yale chaplain-activist and a conservative philosopher from Calvin College, and then when this group issues a set of stinging rebuttals of modern theological trends, people were likely to sit up and notice. And this is what has happened. I have not collected many of the reactions, but Commonweal described it as “one of the more interesting, remarkable, and historically significant religious statements since the effulgence of popular theology that accompanied the crest of Vatican II.” Whatever else the statement does, those who are responsible for it will be gratified if it clears the theological air and opens a debate on the central issue of our time. We are, in short, weary of fuzzy, avant-garde theologies that rob God of his being and transcendence, and we are eager to focus on some of the crucial terms of debate.
Post American readers may speculate on how the Hartford manifesto touches on the evangelical Chicago declaration on social concern. It is an interesting coincidence that, within a couple of years, two such differently focused documents should make news. On one hand, you have evangelicals (for whom the priority of God and his revelation carried with it a minimizing of horizontal concerns) breaking through the individual salvation barrier and proclaiming the importance of Christian social action. On the other hand, you have theologians of mainline traditions affirming the need for transcendence and divine normativity.
It would be a gross mistake to assume that the people at Hartford were minimizing social concern and action, as though they were, in a fit of reaction against the '60s, retreating into an academic theology of transcendence. This would be as mistaken as a notion that Chicago signaled a turn by evangelicals toward the old social gospel. Hartford was not a shift toward fundamentalism; Chicago was not a repudiation of salvation by grace. What Hartford was about was the priority of God. When it said that history was not ultimately normative for the church’s program, it did not deny that the church has a social mandate. It only insisted that the mandate came from its apprehension of the will of God rather than from the political analysis of historical situations.
As one person -- along with Richard Mouw -- who was present at both Chicago and Hartford, I feel the urgency and relevance of both documents. I feel no tension between them at all and, in fact, rejoice in both. I want a clear theology of God’s priority and a clear theology of Christian involvement in history. I want, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, to keep both the ultimate and the penultimate issues together. Hartford said the penultimate had to be read in the light of the ultimate. Chicago said that the ultimate should not he sliced away from the penultimate. That it was the evangelicals who said the latter and the mainliners who said the former is very significant. It is significant because it means that members of the two traditions have an eye for cleaning the air and restating the issues in their own households.
Lewis Smedes was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary when this article appeared.
The Heresies
1. Modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.
2. Religious statements are totally independent of reasonable discourse.
3. Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity’s noblest creation.
4. Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.
5. All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal preference or lifestyle.
6. To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.
7. Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential.
8. The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.
9. Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.
10. The world must set the agenda for the Church. Social, political, and economic programs to improve the quality of life are ultimately normative for the Church’s mission in the world.
11. An emphasis on God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.
12. The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the Kingdom of God.
13. The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment.
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