I wonder if this AA 12 Step perspective of liberal and fundamentalism history would add anything to our understanding of this history? (And maybe give an understanding as to why it works for the sincere, whereas Christianitys various forms arent working that great?) hindsfoot.org/protlib.html ... As the Neo-Orthodox movement developed, it began growing more and more radical, particularly among theologians who mixed these ideas with existentialist philosophy. Some of the most important European existentialist philosophers had been atheists, for example Martin Heidegger, author of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, author of LEtre et le Neant (Being and Nothingness, 1943). The most important Christian Neo-Orthodox existentialist theologians were NOT atheists, but conservative Christians sometimes felt that it was hard to tell the difference! ... By the 1960s, at an increasing number of American Protestant seminaries, the impact of the Neo-Orthodox and existentialist theologians meant that classical Protestant liberals were ridiculed and laughed at. This was certainly true at the Methodist seminary which I attended from 1961 to 1965, and it was, in my feeling, very sad and unfortunate. I am not sure that there are any classical Protestant liberals left at all now -- there was still one teaching at Boston School of Theology when I taught there one year as Visiting Professor of Theology during the 1980s, but I think even he partially realized that he was kind of the last dinosaur, which can be a pretty lonely position to be in. At best the only survivors still around today (if there are any) are like the spotted owl or the California condor or some other nearly extinct species, managing to exist barely in a kind of marginal way in a few isolated localities. But they were good people. On the other hand, it is perfectly true that the classical Protestant liberals often had no deep conception of grace. The Oxford Group Fortunately, the influence of the Oxford Group, which was a strongly evangelical movement, meant that A.A. combined its Protestant liberal perspective with a strong doctrine of salvation sola gratia (by grace alone), thereby producing a spiritual discipline with extraordinary power. The Oxford Group had kept alive many of the original insights of Augustine, the great African saint, and the sixteenth century Protestant reformer Martin Luther, and John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, the two great formative theoreticians during the 1740s in the founding period of the modern evangelical movement. They made sure that A.A. understood the essential nature of the Gospel message that we are justified by faith alone and not by works of the law (as the Apostle Paul put it in his letters to the Romans and the Galatians). And the Oxford Group contributed many other vital pieces of the A.A. program. The First Step, seen as surrender to God, owed a good deal to them in the way A.A.s came to understand it. Certainly the need to confess our defects and wrongdoings to another human being, which is the essential nature of the Fifth Step, came straight from the Oxford Group (it is conceived of in a different way from the Roman Catholic ritual of confession). And in particular, the Eighth and Ninth Steps -- the amends steps -- went straight to the founding experience which turned Frank Buchmans life around. I do not know any other major Christian spiritual tradition which places such a major emphasis on the need to make amends for all our past wrongdoings. (Although the Jewish understanding of the Day of Atonement means that there is a traditional understanding within Judaism of the necessity for making amends for our wrongs to other people.) ...
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 05:10:18 +0000
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