The United States was never an isolationist country except in a Pickwickian sense of the term. It went through no period of excluding the outside world, as the Japanese did for two hundred years. On the contrary, the United States, in consequence of its openness to immigration, linked itself, between 1790 and 1920, ever more closely by ties of culture and blood to the various countries of Europe. It engaged in trade with them, allowed and invited their economic support in the task of settling and exploiting the American continent, and sent its upper-class children and its best writers, artists, and scientists on mandatory tours of Europe for the good of their souls. Culturally, ethnically, in its historical affinities, the United States has been perhaps the least isolated of nations.

The people have a long history of being hostile to outsiders, wrote Louis Jaffe, Harvard law professor, about the inhabitants of Boston's South End. As a consultant to the Massachusetts Department of Education Jaffe urged that the impending federal court desegregation ruling exempt “Southie” from any busing plan. Jaffe's warnings went unheeded, and the buses rolled between the overwhelming black Roxbury ghetto and the neighboring, predominantly Irish South End, sparking an onslaught of racial violence one journalist described as “unparalleled in modern Boston history, a day of hatred against outsiders not witnessed here in decades.”

The last twenty-five years or so have seen some fundamental changes in the setting in which the relationship between nationalism and internationalism takes place. Before that time the discussion of that relationship was dominated by the feeble efforts of the League of Nations, the ethical thrust of transnational communities of the Faith—Muslim as well as Christian—and by the claims to international solidarity of the working-class movement (to the point where it degenerated at least in part into an instrument of the cold war). Now what shapes the perspective within which any review of that relationship has to be conducted is the new technology of weapons and communications, the increasing interpenetration in the relations between nation-states, the growing awareness of the finiteness of physical resources and ecology.

We need now to make a structural change in our way of thinking about U.S.-Soviet relations. Our habit since World War II has been to move back and forth between) simplified extremes—to vacillate between overly sanguine expectations in which the inevitable difficulties in relations with the USSR are minimized and overly pessimistic and emotional positions in which the elements of change in the relationship are neglected. It is hard for public opinion in this country, perhaps in any country, to face up to emotionally unsatisfying ambiguities.

For any sizable group of theologians to agree on any statement is a sign of hope that we may be moving beyond the extreme fragmentation of the recent past. Further, the tone and intent of this agreement is clearly Christian and affirmative. Hence my initial reaction to “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation” was positive. Unfortunately, this initial reaction has been superseded by a more negative judgment, and my comments will reflect this phase of my reaction.

The chief weakness of “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation” is that it consists in a series of negations. The assumption is that if only positions that are opposed can be swept aside, powerful new affirmations will rise to take their place; but surely this is a dubious reading of our current situation.

An Appeal for Theological Affirmation has already proved to be an important statement in the contemporary context. Its historical and sociological significance seems assured. But whether the Appeal is theologically all that significant is still an open question. That the individual theological contributions of many of its distinguished signers will merit a secure place in the history of American theology seems sure. But to ask whether this statement itself is theologically accurate is to formulate a question mat, for my part, must be answered negatively.

In commenting on the Hartford Appeal Gregory Baum made some very thoughtful observations on some of my own work. I shall limit myself here to replying to these observations, though, by implication, my reply touches on several points made by other commentators. I would also like to say that I am very grateful to Baum: Few things are as gratifying to an author as having a critic who understands him.

Baum very ably puts his finger on two persisting tensions in my work—the tension between transcendence and humanism on the one hand, and the tension between a radically debunking perspective on society and a distrust of revolutionary ideologies on the other. These tensions, I believe, are not just personal idiosyncractes of mine, but rather are inherent in the phenomena at issue. The same tensions are to be found in the Hartford Appeal.

My comments focus primarily on Harvey Cox's criticisms of the Hartford document, since his comments touch on the major areas in which the document has been criticized. One area has to do wim aesthetic concerns in relation to the style and tone of the affirmation. Cox is especially blunt on these matters, using such words as “flaccid,” “dull,” “bland,” “cliched,” and “provincial.” There is little to say in response to such charges. Professor John Wisdom once suggested mat all philosophical theses are either true and trivial or false and illuminating; perhaps some simitar principle operates in meology.

Except for the diatribe by the panreligious secular citizen Harvey Cox, the critiques of the Hartford Appeal published in the May issue of Worldview seemed to me constructive and tended to move the discussion ahead. Unfortunately, Cox's response appeared simply to be a wild exaggeration. To recall Torquemada, the Index, and the Scopes trial because some people have taken a dim view of the theological mishmash hawked by the mod-theologians and so dramatically exemplified by Cox's The Seduction of the Spirit seems a little extreme. Even a modtheologian should not expect constant adulation. But the other writers seemed to raise some important issues.

An appeal for theological affirmation is precisely what the words indicate: It calls away from the negative trends of much recent religious and theological thought. (The distinction between religion and theology does not seem useful here, though the themes in question are found in both.) Such negations have been: the extreme negation of the death-of-God theology, the reactionary negation of the main insights of Vatican II by Catholic traditionalists, the unbalanced negation of institutional religion in favor of the rights of conscience, the practical negation of Christian social commitments in the name of some vague Jesuistic or Pentecostal charisms, the implicit negation of worship in the urge to celebrate life and nature.

The response to the Hartford Appeal has far exceeded the expectations of those who initiated it and of those who participated in drafting the final document. Whatever its faults, it shows every sign of becoming a point of reference that can enliven the kind of debate both its critics and admirers say, they hoped for.

The two most frequent misunderstandings of the Appeal are: (1) that it is aimed mainly, if not exclusively, against the left; and (2) that it is supposed to be some new kind of ecumenical statement of faith. To the second misunderstanding it should be enough to note that the Hartford group had no intention of saying all we believe about God, nature, the Church, the Christ, and human history. We did intend to say some things we thought needed saying about the current state of theology and religion in America.