In academic circles and the mass media, Martin E. Marty is recognized as the principal interpreter of the American religious scene. It is rare, when a major religious news story breaks, not to find him quoted in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, or U.S. News and World Report. In an increasingly pluralistic, secular society, the authority of theological systems in public life is virtually nonexistent, but religion, now mostly "privatized," is still important in contemporary America. We still need scholarly and understandable interpreters of the shapes and moods of American religion who can tell us where we have been and where we are likely to go. Foremost among these commentators is Martin E. Marty.
The context of Marty's rise
The death of Paul Tillich in the mid-1960s marked the end of an era in American theology. Tillich had tried to make God relevant to a modern world in which science and the rational methods of scientific investigation had rendered traditional theological metaphysics largely irrelevant. Tillich attempted to accommodate the God of classical Christian tradition to modern thought by defining God as "the ground of being," or "being itself." Bringing a transcendent God "down to earth" and making God "immanent" in human affairs and history had been attempted before but never in such a definitive way.
After Tillich, theology centered on human experience. Much contemporary theology arises from reflection on the reality of the human condition in its various historical and social contexts, rather than on God as first principle. Thus, in recent years we have seen a plethora of works dealing with ethnic theology, women's theology, ecological theology, and the like. These theologies stress God as a potential liberator from social and economic oppression much more than as the traditional creator or redeemer from sin. When not politicized, modern theology has been psychologized, focusing on human problems and personal well-being, rather than "God's will for the world."
Today the mass media are not interested in covering the latest developments in theology except when they seem to influence the political and social order. So, TV evangelists (as leaders of the so-called New Christian Right) are of concern to the media because they may contribute to the growth of political and economic conservatism in America and elsewhere in the world. "Liberation theology" - with its Marxist and other leftist connections in Latin America - can be an appropriate subject of concern for a front page article in the Wall Street Journal. These are times of increasing pluralism and the collapse of universal norms, a time in which the once-satisfactory breakdown of America into "Protestant, Catholic, or Jew" as a statement of the whole will no longer suffice. What's going on today? Just ask Marty.
The path to Chicago
Born in 1928 in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, Martin Emil Marty was raised in the American heartland in the conservative Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. He is the classic small-town boy who made good. Marty's call to the Christian ministry came early, he asserts, when he was "a four year old awed by the dark theocratic gloom...that emanated from a Nebraska pulpit under which I sat." Later, he "did a lot of internal rebelling" against the closed, legalistic religious environment in which he
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