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
A House for Hope No wonder I say that what is needed is a House for Hope! It cannot be us alone. We are a mixed group of the privileged and the marginalized. Yet even the privileged groups among us, I would argue, developed at the margins of empire: in Britain, among dissenters during its rise to empire. In New England, among marginalized dissenters; and then in Cape Town, Madras, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. That was where Needham was, certainly, in 1711; at the margins of the British empire. Cape Town, Madras, Australia, New Zealand, later, likewise; not to mention Hajóm Kissor Singh at the margins of the British raj in India, or Toribio Quimada at the post-World War II margins of the American empire; or the brief florescence of our faith in Poland and Prague between empires there, as well as its troubled history here. Now there is also the electronic and still democratic virtual empire known as the worldwide web, woven by our own Sir Tim Berners-Lee, opening up new awareness of our approach to faith to people from Latvia to Sri Lanka, from Tierra del Fuego to Iceland. Hope. Among the three spiritual graces classically cited by Paul, faith has been made suspect even to those who have not become cynics; love is all too easily reduced to sentimental, privatized forms, and a house for the mediating term, hope, seems to represent the deepest, most widely shared yearning. Humanists like Vaclav Havel have testified to its importance no less than liberation theologians and revolutionaries. This is the spirit that is most needed within our theological house: not sentiment; not certainty of faith; but hope. It is what the world most needs at this time, I sense. Traditional theological reflection often begins with faith, asserting that the foundation and cornerstone of the theological house is faith, in Christ, „the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow." [Heb. 13:8] But my experience tells me that foundations can change, despite such assertions. Certainly Christology has. Or we would not be here. 173 A L t t i h h H b e e o e u r C 2 $ a h 1 e I a $ rene o g n H l e t 0 o s u p g r e y o y f a n d The Changing of the Foundations Take the story of the classic old New England meetinghouse where I now preach. The first one in Needham was raised in 1711. It took them nine years to attract a minister to serve there. In 1773, it burned. The next year, a second meetinghouse was raised on the foundations of the old one. By 1836, they had outgrown both the meetinghouse and the old Puritan theology. They used the timbers from the second meetinghouse to frame the third one. But then in 1879, when the coming of railways made West Needham into
