By Michael A. Milton
Michael A. Milton is President and Professor of Practical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC
The decisive spiritual warfare that Reinhold Niebuhr foresaw in “The Christian Church in a Secular Age”
[5] has broadened onto new fronts in these dawning years of the twenty-first century. His “five types” in
Christianity and Culture[6] are ripe for reinterpretation, as the cultural challenge itself has metastasized. John Howard Yoder, in his critique in 1958, and later Hauerwas and Willimon, in
Resident Aliens, seek to do just that.
[7]Old models of coping with plurality are no longer helpful, as Glenn Lucke writes on his Blog,
Common Grounds Online: “The 1950s ‘tripartite settlement’ described in Will Herberg’s
Protestant-Catholic-Jew no longer obtains as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists have swelled in numbers in recent decades.”
[8]Writers like Robert Wuthnow in
America and the Challenge of Religious Diversity, who welcomes the challenge, and Peter Wood in
Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, who distrusts the claims, seem to be talking about our new identity but are less sure about how to live it out.
[9] Maybe none of us really are sure yet. We are just in the middle of it. We are just seeing it, to paraphrase Hans Urs von Balthasar, not really seeing through it.
[10] But to be sure, things have changed. It is not just “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” It is more accurately “Toto,
Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore.”