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
178 J B 0 u h e n h r A e is ours, we are also called to walk in humility, as we seek to do justice together and love mercy together. Yet theological foundations can change, as I have argued, using the history of old Meetinghouse in Needham. It was first built on a stone foundation next to the town burying ground. Sometimes I wish it had stayed there, like the village church in Phillip Larkin’s poem, „Churchgoing”: „a serious house on serious [...] ground [...] if only that so many dead lie round.” But if it had not been moved to the center of town, it might have become as neglected and empty as the English church in the poem. The theological anthropology of the Puritans was pessimistic: many are called, but few are chosen. The theological anthropology of the Universalists and Unitarians who set the Meetinghouse down on its new foundation near the railroad was more optimistic. After 1879 they often affirmed their faith in a five-point formula: „the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation by Character, and the Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever.” But a woman raised in the Unitarian neighborhood of Boston through World War I and the Great Depression once told me, „That last one I never believed, you know.” And I said, „Good for you.” Only in the 1920s was a full basement dug under the Needham Meetinghouse, used for church suppers, plays, civic gatherings, religious education, and daycare. Never properly mortared, it leaked until recently. Certainly as President of the UUA I found that one of our most persistent spiritual needs as a people is to temper our idealism with a harder theological and anthropological realism. Otherwise our expectations of one another, and of the liberal church can have us sitting on a leaky, crumbling foundation. „To expect too much,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, „is to have a sentimental view of life; and this is a softness that ends in bitterness. Charity is hard and endures." But what of the very stones that make up the foundation? They too have changed. Firm insights about the nature of Ultimate Reality were at first quarried from the Bible. Then from human experience, like Samuel Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley's idealism by kicking a stone. But in human experience is infinitely varied, especially in the multi-cultural, multifaith world that we are entering. In most of our local houses of faith, the foundation stones will all come from one quarry, and be fairly uniform in appearance. But in others, especially in the more cosmopolitan parts of our movement, the foundation stones will be no less solid, though quarried from different traditions. To be sure, there will be dangers in this development. Some of our congregations, as I well know in North America, indulge what is only a superfi-
