Prophet of the Future God

Secularization -- the historical process by which man increasingly controls the universe, thereby seeming to diminish God's dominion -- sounds by definition like a threat to Christianity; in fact, it is a divine gift to man that has its roots in Biblical revelation. Such is the in sight of one of the century's greatest and least known Protestant thinkers:

Friedrich Gogarten, 80, professor emeritus of systematic theology at Goettingen University in West Germany and currently visiting professor at the Methodists' Perkins School of Theology in Dallas.

To those who have mastered his convoluted German prose, Gogarten is regarded as a pioneering, creative theologian to rank with Karl Earth, Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. After World War I, when Earth published his monumental commentary on Romans, Gogarten was taking the same line in an equally slashing attack on theological liberalism called "Between the Times" -- a title that Barth, Gogarten and other like-minded thinkers later used for a new theological journal in which they expounded the ideas of what came to be called neo-Orthodoxy. Even before Buber published his classic and Thou, Gogarten had worked out his own "Thou-I" theory of personal encounter. Gogarten was also one of the first German theologians to appreciate and defend Bultmann's proposal that the church must "demythologize" its message to man.

Revolt & Relation. What most interests U.S. theologians in Gogarten's work is his ap proach to history and secularization -- a theme he took up during the Nazi years, about the same time that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also exploring the consequence for Christianity of what he called the "world come of age" with out God. Unlike Bonhoeffer, whose fragmentary thinking is contained in a handful of pris on letters, Gogarten worked out a full and coherent the ology of secularization in half a dozen postwar books, five of which are being translated into English. Just published in the U.S. is the first major critical study of Gogarten's the ology, The Secularization of History (Abingdon; $5), by Dr. Larry Shiner of Iowa's Cornell College.

Theologian, Gogarten sees in secularization two separate but related processes. One is a revolt against organized religion, in which ideas and in stitutions that once were Christian have been transformed into totally profane and human phenomena. Education, for example, was once considered an exclusively religious responsibility, and in the Middle Ages, the state was thought to be subject to the church. The deeper meaning of secularization is the transformation of man's relationship to the universe from that of a hapless prisoner of cosmic fate to that of free, responsible custodian of the world and everything in it.

Expectably enough, Gogarten attributes the revolt against churchly control of modern life to science and the industrial revolution. But this revolt could not have been achieved, he argues, without the broader aspect of secularization, which has its origins in the prophetic message of Judaism and Christianity. In ancient times, says Gogarten, man envisioned himself as a creature entwined with and contained by a divinized cosmos. The uniqueness of Judaism, and more especially of Christianity, was that it challenged this narrow and self-limited view of life, and proclaimed man's freedom under God within the world. As St. Paul told the Galatians: "During our minority we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe, but . . . God sent his own Son . . . to purchase freedom for the subjects of the law."

Open to Encounter. Gogarten concedes that the churches through history have been sorely tempted to ignore this insight, and names Luther as the first Christian thinker to work out its implications. The meaning of the message, Gogarten argues, is that Christianity has nothing to fear from secularization, since it is the fulfillment of Jesus' instruction for man to take responsibility for life. What Christianity --and man in general--needs to worry about is secularism, by which he means a closed attitude to life that shuts out all possibility of transcendence and dogmatically declares that this world is all there is. By absolutizing the universe in this way, secularism in effect "resacralizes" earthly institutions, such as science or the state, in much the same way that ancient cosmic man did.

Responsibility for the world, Gogarten argues, requires that man be open toward the mystery of being and the unknowable possibilities of the future--something that secularism refuses to do. And by remaining open to the future, man, in effect, becomes open to the encounter with God. For Gogarten, God is not a static, distant Creator of past aeons; instead, he is the "Coming One," a hidden God who seeks man in the reality in which he lives. Thus, God is not behind history or apart from it, but ahead of it; and what points to his presence is the unfathomable mystery of the future.

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