Word: neuhaus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...graduates face a formidable challenge. Churchgoers today are "theologically illiterate," says Lutheran Minister Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for the Ministry. A lot of things have to be explained rather than taken for granted. (A recent Christianity Today-Gallup survey showed that while 84% of Americans believe the Ten Commandments are still valid, more than half could not even identify five of them.) Preachers have less time in which to do the explaining too. Says Donald Macleod, who has taught homiletics at Princeton for 32 years: "The minds of listeners are geared to TV and the 30-second commercial...
...gift for the short, sharp, descriptive phrase. The Apostle Paul appears as "a deformed wanderer with the label of Tarsus on his baggage." Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus marvels at Taylor's way of playing with a single word: "He whispers it and then he shouts it; he pats, pinches and probes it," each new sentence adding a shade of meaning. Taylor, a veteran community activist and a nationally influential churchman, has been at Concord Baptist for 31 years. He is widely regarded, with justice, as the dean of the nation's black preachers...
...Neuhaus, it is only natural to think of meeting God as an American, since nationality is part of one's identity. In his new book, Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (Seabury; $9.50), he goes well beyond that. He thinks Americans must accept moral responsibility for their citizenship, and if they do, "America may yet prove to be, as the founders hoped, a blessing and not a curse to the nations of the earth." Neuhaus believes "God has a hand in the American experiment." Such thinking in the past has led to cocksure identification...
Belief in God's covenant with America, Neuhaus thinks, leads not to arro gance but to humility, since the nation is continually held accountable to judgment by the Almighty. The covenant idea can also restore the faith in the future that once characterized the U.S. Neuhaus contends that if Americans lose the belief that God is working toward a culmination, history is seen as purposeless. He worries that America's intellectual leaders are so "emancipated" from religion that spiritual questions are cloaked in secular terms like "national purpose." Thus discussion of public policy is "floundering in moral evasiveness...
Besides the secular intellectuals, Neuhaus has little regard for those religious intellectuals who are still "obsequiously accommodating to cultural moods" rather than asserting "religious truth claims." A dramatic protest against such cultural entrapment of theology was fashioned by a group that Neuhaus and his friend, Sociologist Peter Berger, assembled in Hartford, Conn., last winter (TIME, Feb. 10). Neuhaus and his Hartford colleagues last month concluded a second meeting, at which a book of essays was planned to follow up their "Hartford Appeal." As he has done in his current book, Neuhaus will call for a "reconstruction" of American theology, which...