New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America

Six: Epilogue: Broadening the Conversation

SIX Epilogue In the previous four chapters I have tried to provide the opportunity for six new religious movements to make their voices heard in theological conversation in as authentic a manner as possible. I have attempted to get at the heart of what these movements have to say about four topics that are vital to the theological enterprise in both Western and American culture. I have wanted, simply, to provide some answers in the cases of six new religious movements to the question articulated earlier: What is going on here, theologically speaking? It has also been my concern to demonstrate through these theological conversations that new religious movements are not outsiders to the work of theological reflection, and that the theological imagination-that capacity and inclination to order the universe in theological rather than psychological, biological, sociological or physical questions and concepts (and yet to take the psychological, biological, etc., into consideration)--does not confine its inspirations to the theologically educated members of the established religious traditions. Nor does the theological imagination withhold its insights from those who are theologically uneducated. The insights into the nature of reality as they were revealed to or discovered by Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Helena P. Blavatsky, L. Ron Hubbard, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and many interpreters of New Age thought (Matthew Fox and David Toolan are two exceptions) have emerged not from the rigors of an academically oriented theological education. Instead these founders of new religious movements were stimulated by their failure to find adequate answers to the universal questions, outlined in the previous chapters, in either the established traditions or the secular culture. This failure, they said, was due to inherent deficiencies in the theological formulations of the established traditions. As the new religions understood the situation, the established traditions were lacking in their abilities to hold together traditional theological tensions in ways that responded to human experience or even acknowledged common sense-the inconsistencies of a God depicted as both loving and angry or the lack of a reasonably articulated relationship between human effort and the achievement of salvation or enlightenment. The established religions were likewise judged wanting in their responses to contemporary intellectual currents in the culture-the rise in prestige 128 NEW RELIGIONS AND THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION IN AMERICA of the sciences, for example, or psychology. And they were assessed as particularly unable to formulate doctrines of human nature that acknowledge the reality of sin without insisting on the moral helplessness of humankind . As lacking as the established traditions have been, according to the new religions, the secular culture has not done any better. It offers answers to the questions of human existence without acknowledging the reality of that which all the new religions affirm: the fundamental, ongoing, spiritual identity of the human person. It is apparent from the previous chapters that the basic insight of the founder of a new movement, one that has its beginnings in the experience of one person and may have originated as a kind of folk religion peculiar to one region of the country (or of another country in the case of Unificationism), has the potential to elicit what might be called an imaginative response on the part of others-from believers, who perceive in the new revelation the potential for making sense of human existence. Such a response calls for an elaboration of the original insight, an expansion of its implications for answering the universal questions. If the new religion is to survive and to prosper, it must be able to put together a coherent theological system. Such systematizing may not always be accomplished by the founder; it may be left for subsequent interpreters. There is a pattern in the religions under consideration of a withdrawing on the part of the founder to think about and study the implications of the pivotal insight. The First Vision in Mormonism occurred in 1820; this was followed by other visions, and the finding and translating of the golden tablets. The Book of Mormon was first advertised for sale in 1830. Eddy fell on the ice and discovered Christian Science in 1866, but the first edition of Science and Health was not published until 1875. Moon spent nine years after his first spiritual vision in 1936 receiving further revelations and articulating their implications. His followers wrote down these revelations. The first version of Divine Principle was not published until 1957, and the movement continues to describe itself as putting forth an emerging theology...