Pathfinding Protestants

Protestant Christianity throughout the world once looked automatically to Germany for the newest direction in theology. Not so any more, for "the science of things divine" is international in scope, ecumenical in spirit. The giants who still dominate Protestant thinking--Karl Earth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann--all came to prominence in Germany after World War I, but among the most promising of their successors are a number of men under 45 who have been educated in U.S. divinity schools.

Many of them seem to have a common purpose: to consolidate the best historical and cultural learning of igth century "liberal" theology with the most relevant doctrinal insights of 20th century "neo-orthodoxy." Says an impartial but interested observer, Jesuit Theologian Gustave Weigel: "The generation of our day is on principle open-minded, and genuinely scholarly by the revived standards of scholarly investigation." Five of U.S.

Protestantism's most promising theological pathfinders: sbJAROSLAV JAN PELIKAN JR., 38, Professor of historical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, prolific "Jary" Pelikan has written six books (best known: 1959'S The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, which sold 42,000 copies), co-authored six others, produced more than 100 scholarly articles. He also serves as one of the religion editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A graduate of the Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, he won his doctorate at Chicago at the age of 22, has established himself as an ecumenical-minded expert on church history. Pelikan, who styles himself as an "evangelical catholic" and "critical traditionalist," believes that the success of the ecumenical movement depends upon a proper understanding of the Christian past, and is trying to further understanding by writing a comprehensive history of the development of church dogma. "Tradition," he says, "needs to be critically re-examined for its richness and its depth." He has "grave doubts" about the ability of a divided Christianity--already on the defensive everywhere, he feels--to withstand the stresses of the modern world, but expects the emergence of new forms of inter-Christian relationships "beyond our imagination." Pelikan's "catholicity" can shock: he dumfounded many Protestants last March by chastising his fellow Lutherans for failing to give enough devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Next fall, he takes over the Titus Street professorship of ecclesiastical history at Yale.

sbROBERT McArEE BROWN, 41, Auburn professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary. Presbyterian Brown, who will transfer to Stanford this fall, sees himself as a "filter through which the thoughts of the great pass on to the layman, the translator of topflight minds to those who haven't had three years in a seminary." A graduate of Amherst and Union Theological, he served as a Navy chaplain at the end of World War II. One of Brown's first teaching assignments, eleven years ago, took him to Macalester College in Minnesota, where he got to know a young Roman Catholic Democrat named Eugene McCarthy.

Brown helped McCarthy, now Minnesota's junior Senator, win re-election to a seat in Congress, and was appalled at the amount of Protestant bigotry that cropped up around election day. Ever since, he has tried to interpret Catholic problems to his fellow Protestants, as well as Protestant problems to Catholics. A talented writer (he has published some first-rate reminiscences in The New Yorker}, Brown shares with his old teacher Reinhold Niebuhr an interest in trying to make theology relevant to the solution of contemporary social problems. One motive in moving to a secular campus is to help bring theological excitement to the parish and nonseminary world; yet Brown believes that theologians should not take themselves too seriously: "There is something demonic in people who have God under their belt." He also believes that religious thinkers should follow their Christian convictions into action; last July, he spent 24 hours in a Florida jail for taking part in a Freedom Ride.

sbROGER LINCOLN SHINN, 45, Wm. E.

Dodge Jr. professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. Dr.

Shinn, a member of the United Church of Christ, is a theological student of atheism, an adept Christian critic of such contemporary ideological trends as existentialism and linguistic analysis. "Let's welcome the modern world," he says. "Let's look for the good in secularism." Son of a clergyman, Shinn studied English literature at Ohio's Heidelberg College, theology at Union. Refusing a ministerial deferment, he entered the Army in 1941, was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, and ever since has had little patience with theology that is "remote from the affairs of the people." Shinn says: "We hear a lot about dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. I'm more interested in hearing talk between the Protestant and the atheist." He seems to be engaged in that kind of talk himself: one of his works in progress is an analysis of contemporary views of freedom. Shinn has also just finished a book on the problems of Christian education, and is chairman of a committee that is writing a study of race relations for the National Council of Churches. Colleagues, however, predict that his major work will be in the field of Christian ethics.

sbSCHUBERT OGDEN, 34, associate professor of philosophical theology at Southern Methodist University. Born in Cincinnati and a graduate of S.M.U.'s Perkins School of Theology, Ogden is one of the nation's most persuasive interpreters of Rudolf Bultmann's "demythologized" Christianity (TIME, Sept. 24, 1956). Methodist Ogden was denounced as an "antichrist"' by Texas fundamentalists after his Bultmannian study, Christ Without Myth, was published last fall. Ogden insists that he is "a Christian only by being a modern man," and being modern to him means explaining religion in terms that are acceptable to contemporary scientific and technical thought. He believes that the purpose of such Christian dogmas as the Crucifixion and the Resurrection is "to help explain to us what it means to exist as a human being in the world." Because the scriptural wording of such truths makes little sense to modern man, theologians must restate them in a new way.

Like Bultmann, Ogden believes that the language of philosophical existentialism may be the key to a relevant new expression of the faith. Ogden supplies what one theological friend calls "an Anglo-American horse-sense tint" to demythologizing, and colleagues regard his efforts to rid the Christian faith of cliches as intellectually refreshing and sincere rather than heretical. Says Perkins' Dean Joseph Quillian Jr.: "If I had to name the ten or twelve most devout churchmen I know, Schubert would be among them." sbLANGDON GILKEY, 43, professor of theology at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Although his father was a minister, Gilkey came relatively late to a career in theology. He was educated at Harvard and taught English at Yenching University in China before World War II, spent 2 1/2 years as a Japanese prisoner in a mission compound turned prison.

Torn between the ministry and the foreign service, he studied international law and theology at the University of Chicago before entering Union in 1946. Raised as a Baptist, he worships at a church of the Disciples of Christ in Nashville, Tenn. Gilkey is a deductive, philosophical theologian, steeped in church history, who attempts to show how "the experienced characteristics of human existence make sense only when life is looked at, and lived" through the Christian faith. Christianity, he argues, is the one belief that can successfully illuminate the fragmentary nature of finite existence.

This faith must be expressed in understandable language, and Gilkey is particularly interested in the usefulness of linguistic analysis to theology's understanding of its own words and symbols.

His own major work in progress is a study of one of Christianity's oldest concerns--the idea of God as Lord of time and history--in light of questions raised by modern philosophy. Gilkey fears that too much of U.S. religious fervor is theologically uninformed, worries that the gap between the seminaries and the people may prove fatal to the church. "If it is to live," he says, "Christian faith must inform the most intelligent thought and most serious commitment of each of its adult adherents."

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