NEOORTHODOXY

influential 20th-century Protestant theological movement in Europe and America; it was known in Europe as crisis theology and dialectical theology. The name crisis theology referred to the crisis of Christendom that occurred after World War I. The phrase dialectical theology referred to the apparently contradictory statements made in the interests of truth by theologians in order to point out both the majesty of human life and the limits of human thought. The theologians in the movement were called Neoorthodox because they spoke the traditional language of the Christian Church as found in the Bible, the creeds, and the main line of orthodox Protestant theology. They wrote of the Trinity, the Creator, the Fall of man and original sin, Jesus Christ the Lord and Saviour, justification, reconciliation, and the Kingdom of God. The Neoorthodox theologians were involved in active social Christianity. They found the language of classic Reformation Protestantism more adequate for coping with social realities than the language of the theological liberalism in which they had been trained. None of these theologians liked the term Neoorthodoxy, given them by others, for they repudiated the literalism of orthodoxy. They were modernists in that they accepted modern critical methods of interpreting the Bible and thus knew that it contained much that is not literally true. The miracle of the Christian faith for them was Jesus Christ and his gospel proclaimed in the church for the salvation of the world. In Europe the outstanding theologian of the movement was Karl Barth, and in the United States it is generally held that the works of Reinhold Niebuhr constituted the most important Neoorthodox writing. Other important Neoorthodox theologians included Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Nikolay Berdyayev, and Paul Tillich. According to Neoorthodox theology God as the sovereign Other is the Person who places man under an inviolable responsibility, the source of which is neither in man nor in his world. God speaks his Word to man, and in this personal act he lays his claim upon man and obligates him to respond and thus to exist as a human being. Jesus Christ is the Word become flesh for our salvation. God reveals himself in the freedom and love of Jesus and in his forgiveness. But forgiveness reveals man's sin. Therefore, man knows God and knows himself as a sinner; without such knowledge he knows neither God nor himself. The knowledge of sin leads to an acknowledgment of both man's misery and his grandeur and is the antidote both to despair and to pride and to the degradation of human culture that follows these twin evils. Sin for Neoorthodoxy is the violation of persons as seen in contrast to the love of God in Jesus for sinners. It is man's rebellion against his limited life and powers that comes both before and after his repudiation of responsibility, which in turn is the sign of death both for the individual and for the community. From sin come dehumanization and the consequent evils of egotism, stupidity, and guilt, as well as the loneliness, the loss of meaning, anxiety, enmity, and cruelty that plague human life. The Neoorthodox defend such a view of sin as biblical and in line with a realistic knowledge of the condition of man. Neoorthodox criticism of modern culture led to an examination of political and economic institutions with a new awareness of their significance for responsible human existence. These theologians argued, from their various individual perspectives, that religion, ethics, economics, and politics are aspects of a larger whole that is the culture of a society and that these aspects cannot be understood and dealt with separately. Therefore, the theologians concerned themselves with social institutions and problems and attempted to understand the controversial issues of the day, such as Communism, race relations, and nuclear weapons, from a Christian viewpoint.