(Un)Broken Assertions
Confessions of a Nostalgic Post-Fundamentalist
Dwight P. Davidson
April 1, 1995
It was only after we'd shoved gospel tracts entitled, "Get Ready for the Great White Throne Judgment" into every high school locker that Mr. Hooper, the faculty sponsor of the school's mainline Christian group and a part-time Methodist pastor, approached the two of us in his study hall. "Now I realize that you guys are trying to do what's right," he said, "but
I'm not so sure that you're going about it the right way. ..."
"Ichabod!" I whispered to Mike, my cohort, as Mr. Hooper was walking away. "What do you expect from a Methodist?" Mike replied. That night, we made a special trip back to our Baptist church-the "fastest growing church in Clinton County" as the tracts touted-to load up with some more pamphlets.
In his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich says that a good theologian "cannot join the chorus of those who live in unbroken assertions" because every theological system is at once both healthy and sick-we always have to respond, he claims, with both a "Yes" and a "No." According to that definition, I was not much of a theologian back then-unbroken assertions were all I seemed to know. Mike and I and the others in our church were absolutely sure that we could perfectly differentiate between "righteousness" and "sin," that God loved the former and hated the latter, that the Scriptural message was completely unambiguous, and that our, job was simply to hand over to the world the message of God's salvation regardless of whether or not people happened to like us.
What Makes a Good Theologian?
Psychologist Erik Erikson and those of his ilk, of course, have an explanation for this phenomenon: Mike and I, two teenage Midwesterners, were struggling with the shift from the familial to the social nexus, and we were resolving the tension ...
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