The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals online

Seiwert, Hubert

English

What Constitutes the Identity of a Religion?

Horne, James R.

Destiny, Morality and Identity in the Thought of John Henry Newman

McLeod, W.H.

The Khalsa Namit: The Sikh Identity Defined

Habel, Norman C.

End pages

Hayes, Victor C.

General Introduction

A Critique of (Subjective) Religious Explanations of Mythology

Second Book Introduction

Schelling's Version of Pure Rational Philosophy

Retrospect

Introduction: 
Toward Theology in 
an Australian Context 
Victor C. Hayes 
1. Australian Christianity? 
Whatever the assessment of Australian Christianity, the statistics on 
World Christianity are impressive. It embraces some 985,000,000 people 
and is still growing. From the year 1900 to the year 2,000 A.D., Christians. 
will have moved from 28. 7% of the world's population to 31.4%.(Hally: 12). 
More crucial is the fact that by the end of this century most Christians, 
including three-quarters of all Roman Catholics, will live in the Southern 
Hemisphere and in "Third World" countries. The old Northern Hemispheric, 
Mediterranean-European-North American centres of gravity in the Christian 
world will be eclipsed. (Here is one reason we begin this collection on doing 
theology in Australia with contributions from Third World theologians). 
New forms of Christian religious experience and worship, Christian 
theological and artistic expression, Christian accommodation to ethical 
issues and political systems, will be added to the already immense diversity to 
be found in historical and contemporary Christianity. (Whether a religious 
message can pass from one context to another unchanged is felicitously 
discussed below by T. V. Daly, Ch.4). 
To say all this, of course, is simply to say that Christianity is one of the 
Universal religions, that it possesses in fine degree polymorphous versatility, 
that it is "exportable". ("Primal" religions, by contrast, are not for export). 
Struggling forms of British Christianity - products of England's "bleak 
age of religion" - were exported to Australia 200 years ago. Ever since, the 
1 
task of creating an Australian identity in religion - as in culture and politics 
- has bafiled and taunted us. The familiar question and quest persist. Even 
while our La Trobe conference was under way, Australia's most notable 
historian, Manning Clark, was lecturing at Harvard on "The Making of 
Australia", gathering his material around one question: "Must Australia 
always be a colonial or client state, or can it pursue a cultural and political 
identity of its own?" 
There is a powerful concern on the part of many Australians, and not least 
among theologians, to articulate an Australian identity - an "identity" which 
may well be plural, layered, complex and in process. The La Trobe 
Conference gave evidence that there are theologians here open to all forms of 
reflection that can provide insight into depth features of the Australian 
"context", which is to say, the Australian people - their land, institutions, 
world-views, life-styles, self-images. John Eddy (Ch.6) refers to the boom in 
studies which should form the background for any truly contextual reflection 
in an Australian setting: historical, anthropological, and social, as well as 
literary and cultural. Here is homework for Australian Christians intent on 
indigenisation of a Gospel universal in intent. 
2. The General Context for "theologies-in-context" 
This volume is a child of its time. Today, religion and theology are readily 
seen as culturally and communally conditioned - and as rightly so. John 
Mibiti (Ch.2) can speak of the "Gospel" entering and traversing culture, but 
he demands at the same time "a genuine Christianity which is truly made in 
Africa." "Imported Christianity," he declares, "will never, never quench the 
spiritual thirst of African peoples." 
We are well acquainted with ancient claims that religious experience and 
theological dogma are supra-cultural or a-historical or peculiarly individual-
ist. In our time (since the mid-19thC), such contentions have been upheld by 
existentialist, mystic and fundamentalist. But a counter-tradition has estab-
lished itself in Western scholarship over the past two hundred years. An array 
of scholars - heirs to Enlightenment criticism of religion and to Romantic or 
developmental views of history, and themselves victims of "the crisis of 
historical consciousness" - have been documenting the extent to which 
religious activity and theological reflection are historically, socially and 
culturally bound.(Marty: 1971 ). 
For one thing, Historical-Critical study of Western Scriptures challenged 
the view that these sacred books were lead-encased repositories of truth 
untouched by human history. It demonstrated that Hebrew and Christian 
Scriptures not only shaped communities; they were shaped by them. And 
these religious communities were not exempt from the contingencies of 
history. · 
At the same time, the study of world religions was moving onto a positive, 
scientific and comparative base, and inexorably removed religion from 
isolation by locating it in cultural history. 
2 
In addition, the emerging science of Sociology was struggling to understand 
the new context created by urbanization, industrialization and the "complex-
ification" of society after the 18th C. It noted how traditional religious 
experiences and values, uprooted from the cozy context of peasant or village 
life, had to struggle to survive in the new context of factory cities. (The process 
of modernization, however, is a global one of such subtlety and complexity, 
says Thomas Luc'kman in Ch.11, as to confound all simple theories of the 
role of reli_gion in social change.) 
Meanwhile, throughout this whole period, Theology entered ever more 
deeply into its own crisis - and that is part of our special concern in this 
volume. The sometime Queen of the Sciences talked about "God" but, unlike 
modern sciences, could not "produce its object for public scrutiny." "God" 
- to borrow the title of Gordon D. Kaufman's book - became "the 
Problem". At least one author below wonders whether there are any gods 
other than the gods of human conceiving. (In Ch. 5, Gordon Dicker 
intriguingly conceives God as an Aussie Battler. But what is this Divine 
Battler's relation to Benjamin Reist's "God of the Contexts" in Ch. 12?) 
While philosophers in England were wondering about what it meant to "do 
philosophy", theologians were puzzling about what it meant to "do theology". 
How should Theology proceed? 
3. Theology, Anthropology and Religion 
Modern theologians proceeded in a variety of ways but of particular 
interest to us are those who, in one way or another, turned theology into the 
study of man caught in the act of being religious. From Schleiermacher to 
Bultmann (1951:191) and Buber (1965) and Von Balthasar (1967), this 
anthropological note is sounded. F euerbach, Marx and Freud took "theology 
turned anthropology" to mean that human words, images, paradigms and 
projections exhaust what people earlier had spoken of as divine reality. But 
many theologians argued that anthropology is simply the first word in 
theology: one must begin by concentrating on the believing subject before one 
speaks of revelation, metaphysics, speculation or transcendence. 
This volume stands in this latter tradition. It is a product of its time not only 
in its consciousness that religious experience and theological utterance is, and 
must be, context-dependent. Most of its contributors are also concerned that 
their first word in theology be a word about human beings, about the human 
venture, in particular about the Australian experience. At the heart of the La 
Trobe conference were four workshops (Chh. 6-9) on "the Australian 
context" with rich insights thereon coming from historians, sociologists, 
comparative religionists, poets, writers, artists (and their interpreters). What 
is the "religious dimension?" Where is "the sacred" in the Australian reality? 
As children of our time we are prepared at least to consider some unsettling 
propositions: 
(a) that traditional religions have no monopoly on religion. Poets and artists, 
for example, may quest for - and reveal - the sacred in the midst of the 
secular. (Witness the papers by James Tulip and John Henley below). 
3 
(b) theologians have no monopoly on religion. One reason is that there is 
more to religion than theology. Ninian Smart's familiar " six dimensions 
of religion" includ~ myth, ritual, social organization, ethics and exper-
ience, as well as belief and its systematic statement. A second reason is 
that the burgeoning scientific study of religion certainly studies religion, 
but not from within any confessional circle. It does not "do theology" but 
takes the theologies done as further data for its study of man. 
(c) Christian theologians have no monopoly on theology. As Henk Van Der 
Laan 's contribution ( Ch. 10) reminds us "theology cannot be identified 
with Christian Theology." Not only are there many Christiiµi theologies 
(as Van Der Laan relates) but there are any number of theistic religions 
where theological reflection flourishes or has flourished. Theologies 
today come in many colours. 
4. Why Start with Black Theology? 
James H. Cone leads off this collection with a definition of Theology as 
Black Theology. His is one of a number of political theologies which have 
emerged in the last two decades. They share a basically anthropological 
understanding of theology and see the primary problems of contemporary 
theology as privatization and politization. Examples include Richard 
Schaull's Theology of Revelation, Michael Novak's Dionysian Theology ( or 
Theology of Play), the Political Theology of Johannes Baptist Metz, as well 
as the Liberation Theologies of Gustavo Gutierrez and Cone himself. 
A crucial feature of the Liberation Theologies must be noted. Whereas 
Metz, for example, can see his theology as basically continuous with the 
Western tradition of secularization (which began, he claims, at least as far 
back as the anthropocentric theology of Thomas Aquinas), the Theology of 
Liberation sees itself as a theology of the Third World (including Afro-
Americans) which has not shared in but been the victim ofW estern history. It 
is, therefore, not a product of historical continuity but ofradical discontinuity. 
In this context, James Cone has advanced a Theology of Liberation 
between the poles of power (enslavement) and freedom (liberation). He sees 
this almost exclusively in terms of the black community: 
"There is only one principle which guides the thinking and action of Black 
Theology: an unqualified commitment to the black community as that 
community seeks to define its existence in the light of God's liberating 
work in the world."(1970:33) 
To be sure, Cone defines "blackness" as "an ontological symbol for all 
people who participate in the liberation of man from oppression" . It refers, he 
says, to all who are oppressed, whatever their colour. The "black community" 
means the common life of the downtrodden. But it is important to notice, as 
many have pointed out, that this is a secondary reading. 
In the late sixties, when I first heard Jim Cone give this message on a college 
campus in Ohio, I observed and felt the polarizing effect of his words. It may 
4 
still be felt. When liberation is defined by Cone as- "the destruction of 
everything white", and when blackness becomes a criterion for God's chosen 
people, Black Theology may suddenly appear to whites as a reverse version of 
racist political religion. 
For this very reason, and because of its clarity, power, concreteness and 
biblical base, it seemed salutary to begin this collection with such a statement. 
Cone's purpose, as Professor of Theology in an old and prestigious centre of 
white European-American establishment theology, is intimately•connected 
with his mission of forcing whites into new dimensions of awareness. 
5. Omissions and Possibilities 
This anthology is but one moment in a beginning. There are gaps, silences, 
omissions. No voice speaks herein from the Christian Orthodox Churches 
(imported along with hundreds of thousands of "new Australians"), or from 
Feminist Theologians (who have found authentic voice in North America but 
still struggle to be heard here). There are no contributions from Muslim 
theologians ( although upwards of a quarter million persons have recently 
come to Australia from Muslim lands); Nor have we heard from Jewish 
theologians or Hindu Bhakti theologians or Australian aboriginal religion. 
/Cf. Wilson 1979/. 
It is typical of the counter-currents at work in the Christian world that at the 
very moment ANZSTS was sponsoring a Conference on "Doing Theology in 
an Australian Context", the Faculty of Divinity at Harvard was offering a 
Proseminar on "Theology in World Perspective: The Next Move". "In 
human history thus far," they said, "theology (or something like it) has 
appeared in sectors: Christian theology, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc." Now, 
they continue, we plan to consider "the possibility of a global theology, 
continuous with and subsuming the disparate particular traditions of the 
past", and to explore "the historical, academic-rational, and religious 
groundwork on which such a theology must be built." 
When Anthony Kelly (Ch. 3) proposes, in his fine programmatic article, 
that Australian theology should proceed within a' 'framework of collaborative 
creativity", a broad context offruitful interaction, will his words perchance be 
more prophetic than even he intended? 
List of References and Works Consulted 
Buber, M. 
1965 
Bultmann, R. 
The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. New York: 
Harper. ' 
1951 New Testament Theology, Vol. I. New York: Scribners. 
Cone, J. H. 
1969 Black Theology and Black Power. New York: The Seabury 
Press. 
5 
Cone, J . H . 
1970 A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia: J. B. 
Lippincott Co. 
Gutierrez, G. 
1973 A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis 
Books. 
Hally, C. 
1978 
Johns, R. D. 
1976 
Kaufman, G. 
1972 
Marty, M. E. 
"Reading the Signs of the Times" in Mission Review. 
Sydney: Commission for World Mission of the Uniting 
Church of Australia. No. 5. October, 1978. 
Man in the World: The Theology of Johannes Baptist Metz. 
Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press 
God the Problem. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard 
University Press. 
1971 "Religious Development in Historical, Social and Cultural 
Context", in Merton P. Strommen (ed.), Research on 
Religious Development. New York: Hawthorn, pp. 42-77. 
Von Balthasar, H. U. 
1967 A Theological Anthropology. New York: Sheed & Ward. 
Wilson, M. J. 
1979 New, Old and Timeless: Pointers Towards an Aboriginal 
Theology. Nelen Yubu Missiological Series No. l. 
Kensington, N.S.W.: Chevalier Press. 
6 


Introduction

Not a member yet