c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Theologians always come to the latest intellectual fads a little late and a little breathless _ and enthusiastically convinced that the fad they have just discovered is the way the real world is. Thirty years ago they loudly embraced the”God-is-dead”fad. Now they eagerly proclaim that they are part of the”post-modernist”wave announced some years ago by French literary critics.

Post-modernism is an elitist fad holding that modernism _ trust in reason and science _ is dead and that the new era is one of profound distrust of science and reason. This change is not based on changing attitudes among ordinary people. They don’t get to vote when academics decide there is a new fashion.

Rather the change comes from reading French writers and talking to one’s colleagues in faculty office buildings. You see, if perspectives are changing in the faculty office buildings, it follows that they are changing in the rest of the world, too.

Oddly, the Catholic Church, having for a couple of centuries expressed reservations about unaided human reason, now finds itself in the odd position of having to defend reason and science against the new romantic irrationalists.

The truth is that neither modernity nor post-modernity exists in the real world. Even the self-proclaimed post modernists are, like the rest of us, pre-modernists when it comes to ordinary life outside of the faculty lunch room, a blend of the local and the cosmopolitan, the rational and the non-rational, the particular and the universal.

To be fair, not all theologians play the game of equating the latest fashionable cant with worldwide change. Some are engaged in serious dialogue with science _ which isn’t likely to go away just because theological faddists have dismissed it.

Thus the recent joint publications of the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Religion and the Natural Sciences on such subjects as quantum mechanics and chaos theory are major and important intellectual efforts.

However, such studies involve very difficult work. It is much easier to fall back on the current fashion and take ideological stances. Thus in the name of post-modernism, many theologians (especially, it is to be feared, Catholic ones) jumped eagerly on the bandwagons of”feminist theology”and”liberation theology.”Their assumption was that”feminist”theologians speak for women and”liberation”theologians speak for the poor.

Their second assumption was that those theologians who claim these constituencies for themselves are capable of improving the lot of women and of the poor.

It is comic to claim that just because she is female a theologian has any authority at all to speak for women. She is certainly within her rights to claim that she is speaking out of her personal experience as a woman, but it does not follow that she is a spokeswoman for any one besides herself and her friends. Moreover the very thought that a tenured academic”liberationist”is capable of causing revolutionary change beyond the faculty office building is utterly hilarious.

Theologians are entitled to play their games if they want to, especially if these games gain them promotion, pay increases and some notoriety at meetings of professional associations. Yet articles read by a couple hundred people and books read by a thousand or two are unlikely to change human history, especially when such writing is often innocent of both modesty and intelligence. Moreover, the traditional tasks of theologians to speak of God and of problems of religious faith easily get lost in the midst of the game playing.

One of my friends who is a theologian and does not play these games has offered a model for dealing with academic theologians: imagine that they are isolated in a barbed wire enclosure where public authority permits them to shout at each other all they want. Walk around the fence for an hour every week or so and listen to what they say. You may learn something every once in awhile that’s useful for dealing with people. But never succumb to the temptation to go inside.

IR END GREELEY