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

cial religious eclecticism. But it will not do for us to insist that every house in our movement must rest on similar stones carved from the same quarry. Instead, we should make certain in our theological reflection about the nature of Ultimate Reality that we meet the dialogical challenge of talking together about Reality in such a way that we see one another as all sitting upon the same ground, though perhaps naming it (or not naming it) in different ways. This means that the Rock of Ages, the scientific naturalist's sense of reality, and the Buddhist insight that even the most solid seeming of stones is also transient, must all be brought into relation to one another.

Much of liberal theology began in a Newtonian universe. Newton himself was even a Unitarian in his own private religious thinking. But it is past time that we come to terms with a metaphysics that is adequate to the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. That was the task that Alfred North Whitehead set for process metaphysics. Religious reflection based process thought can help scientists, theists, and Buddhists alike all dialogue about the same Reality. Nor need this discussion remain entirely abstract. Process thinkers from our own Henry Nelson Wieman

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Charles Hartshorne to Rebecca Parker have shown the implications of Reality as Social Process, of creative interchange as the source of human good, to be closely related to practical redemption and liberation.

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The Garden: Our Eschatology

In her earliest iterations of the house metaphor, Dr. Parker related our eschatology to the doors of the church — to the question of where we come and where we are going. Then in collaboration with Rita Nakashima Brock, she wrote Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. They are now completing a second collaboration, called Saving Paradise, which traces the way in which the image of earthly paradise, prominent in early Christianity, gradually vanished in the period following the Crusades, when an atonement theology based on blood sacrifice, rather than on the example of Jesus, also became dominant. Since she has argued, as I would, for the need for a radically realized eschatology, I think she will agree with me that if we want to „get back to the Garden," as they sang at Woodstock, we had better develop some skills for tending and caring for it in the here and now.

All too often our modernist eschatology has been a future-oriented eschatology: where we are headed is simply somewhere better than where we are now. Onward and upward! But if we are going to preserve the planet we share, we are going to have to learn to look about us and see „paradise enow.”