Word: theologian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...WHAT is bothering me is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today." So wrote the young Lutheran Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Berlin prison cell in April 1944, one year before he was executed by the SS for complicity in the plots against Hitler's life. It is a question that today-for more complicated reasons-concerns countless thousands of U.S. churchgoers, who see about them a Christianity in the midst of change, confusion and disarray...
Methodist Theologian Van Harvey suggests that the church should not be "a place where men come to be more pious. The church is a place of edification, where one comes to learn to be an honest-to-God person living in dialogue with others." Despite all the yearning for spirituality that may exist in the average American church, it is questionable how many churchgoers can and do live up to this ideal. The stratified irrelevance of the established parish, whether Catholic or Protestant, is a major reason for the growth of what Episcopal Chaplain Malcolm Boyd has dubbed "the underground...
...radicals-such as the young firebrands who dominated the National Council of Churches' Conference on Church and Society in Detroit last fall-argue that the true follower of Jesus is the revolutionary, siding with forces and events that seek to overthrow established disorder. On the other hand, Protestant Theologian Hans-Joachim Margull of Hamburg University points out that it is not always so easy to identify the secular causes that Christians have a clear moral duty to support...
...possible to be a Christian atheist," says Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, who has been accused of being just that by some of his fellow clerics. "You cannot attack the idea of an ultimate and at the same time accept Jesus as an ultimate." Swiss Catholic Theologian Hans Kiing points out that "Jesus had no sense of himself without God. He made it clear that his radical commitment to men presupposed a radical commitment...
Nonetheless, theologians also acknowledge that only God is the final judge of who can rightly be considered a Christian. Austrian Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner, for example, suggests that there is today "an invisible Christianity which does indeed possess the justification of sanctifying grace from God. A man belonging to this invisible Christianity may deny his Christianity or maintain that he does not know whether he is a Christian or not. Yet God may have chosen him in grace." Similarly, the late Protestant theologian Paul Tillich contrasted the "manifest church" of confessed believers with what he called the "latent church," whose...