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

those who suffer, who may have no adequate roof over their heads at all, often have a sounder soteriology. Toni Morrison captures it well in her novel Sula when she writes:

„What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness, or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal - for them, none had ever done so. They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was askew — only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as »natural«

as

springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine, and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide - it was beneath them.”

Or let us at least listen to Reinhold Niebuhr, reminding us that ultimate source of salvation is not our own righteousness, but rather forgiveness. And „forgiving love is a possibility only for those who know that they are not good, who feel themselves in need of divine mercy, who live in a dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves as well as their fellow men [sic] convicted of sin by a holy God and know that the differences between the good man and the bad man are insignificant in his sight. When life is lived in this dimension the chasms which divide men are bridged not directly, not by resolving the conflicts on the historical levels, but by the sense of an ultimate unity in, and common dependence upon, the realm of transcendence. For this reason the religious ideal of forgiveness is more profound and more difficult than the rational virtue of tolerance.”

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Foundational Issues:

Theological Anthopology and Ultimate Reality

The foundation of religious life and reflection can never be laid directly on the „Ground of All Being” as Paul Tillich referred to God. Ultimate Reality, bedrock, is never entirely accessible except in parts and pieces. Instead it is laid upon those sold stones and cornerstones that have been pried loose by the ages and mortared together by human effort. And in the liberal tradition what most foundationally binds together our lives and our differing apprehensions of reality is our shared mortality. As my one-time colleague Forrest Church puts it, „religion is our response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing that we will have to die.” As he points out, the words human and humane come from the same root as humus, the earth from which we are born and to which we all return in death, and which, in the time that