In this recent article,
http://www.thebanner.org/features/2013/05/tomorrow-s-theology
Edwin Walhout advocated his vision of “Tomorrow’s Theology.”
I don’t intend to completely deconstruct Walhout’s article. Mainly I just wanted to show that Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology,” has been advocated as “Tomorrow’s Theology” for at least several decades. My point is to try to take the shine off the idea that there is anything innovative in what Walhout is advocating. In point of fact what Walhout is really offering is “Yesterday’s Theology.” The fact that anybody could see Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology” as novel or futuristic is laughable. As far back as 1925 people were saying the same thing.
“The evolution of man from lower forms of life was in itself a new and startling fact, and one that broke upu the old theology. I and my contemporaries, however, accepted it as fact. The first and most obvious result of this acceptance was that we are compelled to regard the Biblical story of the Fall as not historic, as it had long been believed to be. We were compelled to regard that story as a primitive attempt to account for the presence of sin and evil in the world …. But now, in the light of the fact of evolution, the Fall, as a historic event, already questioned on other grounds, was excluded and denied by science.”
Charles E. Merriam
New Aspects of Politics, 3rd Edition — pp. 59-60
So 88 years after Merriam offered “Tomorrow’s Theology,” Walhout is still insisting that theology from 1925 remains “Tomorrow’s Theology.”
Of course what Rev. Walhout is giving us is just the archaic version of Modernism so aptly advocated for by men like Shailer Matthews in his various books. Like Matthews before him, Walhout’s Christianity is one where his god is the god of the process philosophers. Creation is a process and not an act. (Except possibly as an act that starts off the more important process.) Most commonly then this process philosophy god gives us a word of flux that is determined and regulated by humanistic historicism. Higher Criticism, in “Tomorrow’s Theology” legislated the meaning of Scripture for each “progressing” generation. Naturally, if the Modernist’s god is in process with his creation then so must any legislative word be in process with creation. Next, in the reasoning of “Tomorrow’s Theology,” — or is it “Yesterday’s Theology?” I get so confused on this point — one has to realize that as one has only an immanent god who is working in process with his creation, and who has no absolute legislative law word, therefore ethics are evolving as well. Joseph Fletcher’s “Situational Ethics,” comes to the fore and “right and wrong” are determined by whoever has the biggest and most advanced weaponry.
So, whether Walhout’s theology is “Tomorrow’s Theology” or “Yesterday’s Theology” it remains a Theology that reinterprets the faith once forever delivered to the saints through the anti-supernatural grid of humanistic process theology, where all is becoming (including god), where whirl is King, and where man loses his manishness at the same time as God loses His Godhood.
If you would like to see the consequences of Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology,” — a theology where original sin is denied — the place to look is at the Soviet Gulags, the Cambodian Killing Fields, or the Cuban Psychiatric wards. If man has no original sin then we have no reason to think that man is basically sinful. If man is not basically sinful then man is either basically good, and only needs to discover his goodness, or man is neutral and needs to be socially engineered to achieve Utopian desires. Such has always been the reasoning of those promising to usher in the Kingdom of man. Of course, I say this fully conceding that Rev. Walhout finds all that 20th century ugliness abhorrent. Most people don’t have the capacity to trace out the consequences of their ideas.
So … beat the rush and reject “Tomorrow’s Theology” today.