Introduction

Rachel Muers and Ashley Cocksworth

In the epilogue to the second edition of The Modern Theologians, published in 1996, David Ford referred to the “global upsurge” of diverse theological voices in the twentieth century and proposed that this diversity should be read as “testimony to the polyphonic abundance of God.” Three decades later, this new edition captures some of the multiple voices of Christian theology, in a diverse and intensely interconnected world – and again invites readers to find a testimony to “polyphonic abundance” in this multiplicity. Our introduction seeks to draw out connections and resonances between the theologies presented here, and to point to the common enterprise in which they are engaged.

Why “Modern” Theologians?

In titling this book “The Modern Theologians,” we foreground modernity as the determining context for Christian theology since 1918 – and theology in this era has indeed been shaped by ongoing debates about the legacy of modernity. To quote the introduction to an earlier edition of this volume:

Theologians have been members of societies, churches, and academic institutions through this innovative, traumatic period, and their theology has inevitably been influenced by it. That is how, in a minimal sense, their theology is modern: by taking account of such developments, even if sometimes in order to dismiss, criticize, resist, or try to reverse them.1

Modernity, of course, has its origins long before the period discussed in this book – perhaps with the Renaissance, with the Enlightenment, with industrialization, with the beginning of Western European colonial movements, with scientific and political revolutions, or with one of the many other large‐scale transformations of social conditions and contexts since the late 1400s.2 This list of possible points of origin already indicates that we should be cautious about taking “modernity” as the sole frame for theology since 1918. Modernity generally refers to social and intellectual developments originating from Europe, and its global impact and implications are bound up with European power and influence.

Thus, although all the theologians considered in this volume are affected by modernity, it is still the case that allowing a narrow concept of modernity to set the agenda for theology risks allowing that agenda to be dominated by European elite perspectives. We can say that all these theologians are engaging to differing extents with the challenges of modernity – but we should be careful about telling too simple a story of what those challenges are; we may need, in Christian theology as elsewhere, to think in terms of multiple modernities.3 More than this, recognizing modernity’s complexity also enables us to take a fresh look at the history of modern theology – rereading twentieth‐century classics (such as, in this volume, Karl Barth or the Niebuhrs) in relation to a new set of questions.

Engaging Modernity Theologically

What features of “modernity” remain significant for understanding Christian theology since 1918? Among the key intellectual moves characteristic of modernity that appear across this volume in many different ways are the turn to the subject, the turn to history, and the turn to suspicion.

First, modernity – from the Renaissance onwards – is often associated with a new focus on the human subject as knower and agent. Theologically, this modern turn is associated with questions about knowledge of God in relation to knowledge more generally, and about the practical and moral import of Christian faith in relation to morality more generally – and is represented, at least in theologies influenced by Western European modernity, by the long and ongoing history of theological responses to Kant. When we look at the broader picture of Christian theology since 1918, however, we also see an extended and many‐faceted theological interrogation of the very idea of the human subject. What does it mean to speak of, and as, humanity in relation to God when humanity is irreducibly plural? Who has been included in, and who excluded from, the normative vision of humanity, and how can Christian theology name and challenge the exclusions? How does the figure of Jesus Christ confront and transform the various understandings of humanity – implicit or explicit, theoretical or practical – that operate in modernity? Thus, for example, theologies of liberation (for example, the chapters on Gustavo Gutiérrez and on Latin America), theologies engaging directly with human embodiment (for example, the chapter on queer theology), and theologies considering humanity’s place among other creatures (for example, the chapter on the environmental crisis) all deepen and complexify the modern turn to the human subject.

Furthermore, the essays in this volume show Christian theology engaging with multiple ways of knowing. There are obvious reasons – going back much further than the modern era – to see Christian theology as having particularly close connections with philosophy (see Chapter 29). However, knowledge in modernity is most obviously dominated, not by philosophy but by the sciences – and theologians have responded critically and constructively both to scientific paradigms of knowledge and to the ever‐changing understandings of the world that emerge from scientific research (see Chapters 38 and 39). Meanwhile, theology’s inextricable links to the life and practice of Christian communities opens up engagement with ways of knowing that were sometimes neglected in the modern academy – for example, knowledge connected with spirituality, liturgy, and practice in general (Chapters 28, 31, and 32). Theological engagements with the arts and with culture, besides pointing to still more ways of knowing to which theology can attend, are of particular interest in modernity because they often raise questions about the boundary between the religious and the secular – as well as about what kinds of intellectual production can count as theology. As Chapters 33–37 demonstrate in different ways, the arts and culture often enable engagement with theological issues – with or without the explicit recognition of theological frameworks or concepts.

The very naming of “modernity” points to the emergence of historical consciousness and the foregrounding of questions of continuity, change, and the relationship to the past. Christian theology, by its nature, cannot escape questions of meaning in history – as Ford puts it, “Christianity … cannot do without the authority of the past in some form.”4 This also means that Christian theology is of necessity a hermeneutical enterprise. Since the emergence of modern biblical criticism, engagement with biblical scholarship has been one of the contexts in which Christian theology has wrestled with questions of meaning in history (see Chapter 30) – and, as with the other academic disciplines with which theology engages, it is important to recognize that biblical scholarship as a practice of engagement itself is self‐critical and ever changing.

To recognize theologies as shaped by distinctive contexts – as this volume does, by locating individual theologians in geographical regions, in translocal movements and in ecclesial contexts – is already to locate oneself in the modern turn to history. Beyond this, key strands of Christian theology since 1918 have been decisively shaped by new engagements with history and tradition, both methodologically and substantively. The Second Vatican Council (see Chapter 18), with its emphases on both aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”) and ressourcement (recovery of living tradition), represents a clear turning point in the middle of the period covered by this volume, opening up new approaches to history and historicity in Roman Catholic theology. Another crucial turning point for modern theologies of history – as well as modern theology more generally – occurred just before the period of this volume, at the origins of Pentecostalism. The Pentecostal emphasis on the present activity of the Holy Spirit, bringing about a new thing in history, provokes new questions about how to interpret and respond to this historical moment – and how to relate present experience of the Spirit to scripture and tradition (see Chapter 19). More broadly, however, all of theology’s ecclesial contexts invite theologians to engage with specific strands of Christian history (see, for example, Chapter 22 on Anglican theology and Chapter 21 on evangelical theology).

Saying that Christian theology raises questions of meaning in history and involves hermeneutical work, however, also points to Christian theology’s encounter in modernity with the hermeneutics of suspicion. Notoriously, in the work of the nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century “masters of suspicion,” Christian theology is read in ways that call into question, or claim to debunk, its claims to knowledge.5 Relatedly but differently, from both within and outside the Christian community, Christian theology is read in ways that interrogate its character as ideology and its implication in structures of power, including oppressive or unjust power. In many of the contexts and movements covered in this book,...