This came to mind as a colleague left the new Journal of the American Academy of Religion in my office yesterday and I sneaked a peak at it. It had the presidential address from the 2008 meetingby a Yale Divinity School faculty. It’s embeddeness within a leftist American civil religion is remarkable – and uncritical as she attempts to build a rationale for the study of “religion” in a world void truth, beauty, or goodness and thus balances on the edge of nihilism.

The address reads as a homily on a text from a 1934 by an author from the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston. The president exhorts the scholars of religion to “walk across the rim bones of nothingness” which means “we take all that we have learned, all that we hope to say, research, and teach, and place it in a space of the ultimate unknown where the immensity of our world drops from our scholarly teeth into a global creation where we recognize that our scholarship, our form of the conversion vision, can be up to good use in the fiercely mundane as in the fastidiously erudite.” The essay continues to develop a little more thickness in describing about walking the rimbones of nothing: “our scholarship should also help map out strategies for creating a more just and free society and world.” Enlightenment notions of scholarship no longer prevail as "objective"; "subjectivity" now rules. Passion precedes reason and reason must produce passion to free individuals to create their own values: “It is increasingly imperative that we engage religious discourses in the public realm—both in the United States and in international contexts, because we live in an increasingly polarized world in which religion matters as beliefs and practices and is a key element in identity formation and meaning making and sometimes nations-building for people.” The practical, activist, personal visions ultimately drive scholarship: "we can do relevant scholarship, excellent teaching, learning and activism with dancing minds that point to that vital triumvirate of love, justice and hope. We are then moving from concepts in hermeneuctical, historical, pastoral, theoethical, discourses to tools that demystify and deconstruct that help build and enlighten.” The Kantian background rules without intervention. The Pauline, faith, hope, and love becomes transformed into the “triumvirate of love, justice, and hope”; the theoethicial has replaced the theological. The liberal nation-state rules and scholars of religion serve this idol from a scholarly activism of the left. Scholarship of religion finds its pay-off in the “conversion” of the world: “To drop, no, to be committed to scholarship that is rigorous, accessible, and can be used as tools for insight, knowledge, and wisdom to build a more just world within worlds – this is truly a conversion vision.” Christian language again receives its parody by being secularized and absorbed into the play within immanence so that we may, by human activity, “build a more just world within worlds.” Religion plays its role to support civil society to sustain and advise the state in order to build a just society. All we need to do is strike up the organ and replace “Just as I am” with “We shall overcome” and the revivalist call would be complete.

What strikes me about this is how deeply American the address is – and how deeply it seems to fit an academic society that originated in 1964 – when the American Academy of Religion was founded (although it claims on its website a much deeper history); it was not recognized by the American Council of Learned Societies until 1979. What I find more fascinating is that this address is by a member of Yale Divinity Schools faculty – and represents the deep changes that have occurred from the formation of the American Academy of Religion. Seminaries have become more interested in study of “religion” to build a more “just” nation-state system rather than to initiate students into the Christian tradition for the upbuilding of the church.

Such discourses are deeply embedded in 20th century mainline Christian academic discourse. Dietrich Bonhoeffer while in his fellowship at Union Seminary described the “theological scene” in the United States, a description that well described the address on “walking on the rimbones of nothingness,” except that contemporary address has been stripped even more of its Christian language though the liberal Protestant/revivalist Protestant structures still lie behind it.

Bonhoeffer had to write a report on his first semester of study to the German Church Federation Office, recently published in his works, volume 10: Barcelona, Berlin, New York 1928-1931. The young Bonhoeffer wrote, “Being introduced to the ecclesiastical and theological circumstances of the United States as a fellowship recipient at Union Theological Seminary in New York has all the advantages and disadvantages that emerge for foreigners insofar as they get to know a foreign country from the location of the most incisive critique. The critique from the bulwark of Union Theological Seminary is as notorious as it is venerated and is directed as much at political, social, and economic circumstances as toward theological and ecclesiastical conservativism. It is in part radically and passionately open, and in part a slow but steady process of decline, which leads to the seeping of pragmatic philosophy into Christian theology. The seminary is a place of free expression between all members, which is made possible by the civil courage unique to Americans and by the lack of professional constraint in personal contacts” (pp. 305-6).

Bonhoeffer divides his observations into several sections. Concerning the students he wrote, “The unreserved nature of living together prompts one person to be open to another; and in the conflict between a resolve for truth with all its consequenes and the will to community, the latter wins. This characterizes all American thinking, something I observed especially with regard to theology and the church; they do not see the radical claim of truth on the way one structures one’s life. Community is thus based less on truth than on the spirit of fairness” [i.e., justice]. One does not say anything unfavorable about a fellow dormitory resident as long as he is still a good fellow. This characteristic and pedagogical spirit—and anyone who has sensed it can say a great deal about this—leads to a certain leveling of intellectual standards and accomplishments. . . . Hence there is a little intellectual competition and little intellectual ambition, as a result of which seminars, lectures, and discussions tend to assume a rather harmless character. It is more a cordial exchange of opinions than an undertaking on behalf of knowledge” (pp. 306-7). Concerning the faculty, Bonhoeffer recognizes the absence of even the ability to understand theological dogmatics. He notes, “the theological spirit at Union Theological Seminary is accelerating the process of secularization of Christianity. Its criticism is directed essentially at fundamentalism and to a certain extend also at the eadical humanists in Chicago; such criticism is healthy and necessary. But the foundation on which one might rebuild after tearing down is not able to support the weight. The collapse destroys it as well” (p. 309).

Bonhoeffer perceptively noted the uncritical rule of pragmaticism in the theological discourses. In the pragmaticists, and “especially James, I also found the key to the modern theological language and concedptual forms of liberal enlightened Americans. The destruction of philosophy as the question of truth, and its recasting as a positive individual discipline with practical goals . . . alters the heart of the concept of schoalrship, and truth as the absolute norm of all thinking is restricted to what proves to be ‘useful in the long run.’ Thinking is essentially teleological, aimed at serving life. . . . Truth is not ‘valid,’ but rather ‘works.’ And that is its criterion. Thinking and living take place visibly here in very close proximity. . . . . God, too, is not valid truth, but rather ‘effective’truth, that is, he is either active in the processes of human life or he ‘is’ not at all . . . . Whereas James himself still wants to leave space outside human beings for the real existence of God, especially in Chicago the pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of Dewey have been developed further into radical immanent ethical humanism” (p. 311).

Concerning the church and preaching, Bonhoeffer notes that “In America one wants to preach to the present and identifies a sermon to the present as a political-social and apologetic sermon. . . . One is initially astonished to find that such sermons can be heard in almost the same form in community church—which is not a ‘Christian‘ church – as well as in a synagogue . . . as well as in a Methodist or Baptist church. .. . The enlightened American, rather than viewing all this with skepticism, instead welcomes it as an example of progress” (p. 313).

Bonhoeffer’s observations are fascinating – how even then he notes the deficiency in the way the United States had distorted the church into a “left” and a “right”, “mainline” and “fundamentalist” wings, and how the academy justified itself through its criticism of the “right” with a myopic view of its own presuppositions in its emptying the Christian tradition of claims of truth in order to join the social experiment that had become the “United States.” To read the latest AAR presidential address shows how deeply embedded this tradition has become in Christian education institutions that themselves produce, as Bonhoeffer says, “the theological spirit” that “is accelerating the process of secularization of Christianity.”