NEW RELIGIONS AND THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION IN AMERICA
Mary Farrell Bednarowski
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989
175 pp., $25.00
The vitality and creativity of the theological imagination are impressively demonstrated in Mary Farrel Bednarowski's New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America. Few scholars have had the courage to enter the theological territory of the "new religions," which have been so reviled in the religious establishments, scoffed at by academic theologians, and demeaned by the secular cultural elites. Bednarowski has discovered in a largely unknown terrain (despite media portraits of "cults") a theological conversation that reveals the primordial quest "to order the universe in theological rather than psychological, biological, sociological, or physical questions and concepts."
Earlier scholarly studies of new religions focused on particular groups and were undertaken either by sociologists of religion, for example, Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology, and Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie, or historians such as Stephen Gottshalk, The Emergency of Christian Science in American Religious Life, and Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. These studies have given us solid sociological and historical analyses but tend to pay less attention to theological aspects. However, Bednarowski, a professor of religious studies at the United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, places the new religions in the context of ongoing theological traditions and of American culture. She also compares them with one another in terms of such questions as the nature of God, human nature, death and afterlife, and the kinds of lives we should live.
These are, of course, perennial questions asked by generation after generation, and there is no lack of answers to these questions. We can find answers within the established religious traditions, in the writings of philosophers, in the discussions of scholars, and within the lives of cultures. But those questions are also asked again in the new religious movements, and the answers generated are often at odds with those prevailing in more established institutions.
Are they thereby unworthy of attention? Bednarowski thinks not. She has undertaken an analysis and exposition of the theological ideas expressed may strike the reader as odd - for example, when Christian Science denies the "reality" of the "body" or Theosophy speaks of "charkas" - but few will remain unimpressed by the vitality of the conversation the author creates.
Who's who?
Some of the movements on which Bednarowski focuses her attention are not very new anymore, as they emerged in the nineteenth century. Nor do all the movements considered have their origin in the United States. Moreover, some would be somewhat uneasy in the "new religions" category, as they consider theirs a philosophical or spiritual rather than religious movement. We encounter the Mormons and their founder Joseph Smith (1805-1844), Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy (1812-1910), and Theosophy and Helen Blavatsky (1831-1891). These three nineteenth-century movements are presented along with three
...
Read Full Article
|
