Szabó Árpád (szerk.): Isten és ember szolgálatában. Erdő János emlékezete (Kolozsvár, 2007)
John A. Buehrens: A House for Hope. Liberal Theology and the Challenges of the 21st Century
Our Theological House 172 J B 0 u h e n h r A e Direct experience of the religious life is not to be disparaged. But a more humble approach to our shared religious life might also notice that even in liberalism is a theological house standing that is there even before we enter it, must less begin to propose repairs, renovations, and expansions. And the enduring questions of theology in our tradition - or perhaps any other — can be analogized to various dimensions of that house — with a roof, a framework, a foundation, with doors, windows, an interior atmosphere, surroundings, etc. Dr. Parker first used this metaphor in an address to a group of religious educators. She has since developed it in a course on liberal theologies offered both at Starr King and online. The house metaphor struck me as so apt that I proposed that we collaborate on a book in which each of those themes might be given two chapters, with us alternating roles: one chapter laying out some of the main themes of the liberal tradition on that theological issue, the other suggesting some of the theological challenges that lie before us in that area as we enter the postmodern, post-colonial era of multi-cultural and multi-religious encounter, in which our Enlightenment tradition is often challenged, quite appropriately, as a form of „false universalism,” in so far as it tends to erase the experience of the marginalized. Because all theological reflection is contextual, let me remind you where we are meeting, and when, and who we are. Cluj, called Kolozsvár in Hungarian, Klausenburg in German, was Castrum Clusus in Latin — a military base at the edge of empire, enclosed by hills. It has long been a crossroads of empires and their religions. Our approach to faith, declared heretical when the emperor appropriated the church at Nicea in 325 AD, took Reformation root here when another empire, that of the Ottoman Turks, upheld toleration. We are in a house that has been most recently renovated after the revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet empire. The church, said John Calvin, is a house always under construction, semper reformanda. I came here from Geneva, where he said that, just outside the margins of empire. Were gathered when the currently dominant world empire is the United States. At a time when, after the events of September 11, 2001, its dominant elite is engaged in distracting the citizenry from growing global economic, environmental, social, political, and spiritual problems, by pandering internally to regressive forms of religion while replacing communism with militant Islam as the new external enemy. Conservative Muslims, of course, play into this, but also dividing the world in Manichean fashion into the dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, and the dar al-Harb, or House of War.
