The Biggest Theological Changes I’ve Seen in My Lifetime

Perhaps this needs to be seven posts rather than one, but at this point I am just listing and briefly describing what I consider to be the biggest theological changes I have seen in my lifetime—and these are not my personal shifts but what I’ve observed in the broad spectrum of Christianity. 

#1 – Widespread rejection of Hell. I list this first because of its impact on the following changes. Emphasis on Hell was not only long the emphasis of Protestantism but of Roman Catholicism as well.

One of the most well-known Protestant sermons was Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.” And early in the 19^th century, revivalist preachers in the U.S. became known for their “fire and brimstone” sermons. That was still quite common when I was a boy/youth.

The Roman Catholic Church also taught for centuries that everyone who was not baptized as a Catholic was bound to go to Hell when they died. That position was drastically changed by the Second Vatican Council (1962~65).

And while emphasis on Hell is still much a part of conservative evangelicalism, in Protestant Christianity at large that emphasis has been quite widely rejected, or at least conspicuously ignored.

#2 – Growing de-emphasis on Heaven. For far different reasons, but related to the above, is what seems to me to be a significant decrease in the emphasis on Heaven in 21^st century Christianity. Heaven isn’t particularly denied, it just isn’t talked about nearly as much as it used to be.

The Great Awakenings and evangelical preaching of the 18^th~20^th centuries was about being “saved” from Hell in order to go to Heaven after death. In the early decades of my life the “afterlife” was of primary concern in most of Christianity, but that no longer seems to be the case.  

#3 – Drastic decrease in world mission activity. Although it was never just for that purpose, the desire to save people from Hell in order that they could go to Heaven was long a major motivation for world mission activity of most Christian denominations.

When I went to Japan as a Baptist missionary in 1966, there were not only conservative missionaries of various denominations, many of which were more conservative than Southern Baptists then, but also many from the more “liberal” Protestant denominations as well as Roman Catholics.

Some of the most prominent Christian schools in Japan were founded by Catholic, Anglican, and “mainstream” Protestant missionaries. But by the time I left Japan in 2004, there were hardly any Christian missionaries left other than Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals.

#4 – Emphasis on life in the here and now. Closely related to #2 above is the growing emphasis on the importance of life in this world now. Even the understanding of the Kingdom of God has broadly changed from being focused upon the world to come to a feature of the world we live in now.

Contemporary Christianity seems to have increasingly embraced the traditional Jewish position of “salvation” not being “about going to heaven after death but about the flourishing of life in the present.”*

For example, emphasis on flourishing in the present has for many years now been a part of the reflections of two popular theological thinkers I greatly respect, “emergent” Protestant public theologian and author Brian McLaren and Catholic (Franciscan) priest Richard Rohr.

5) De-emphasis and even rejection of substitutionary atonement. Since the blog post I made six years ago today was about that doctrinal belief (see here), I won’t elaborate on this point more now.

6) Change in views related to sexual ethics. Because of the perceived clear positions of the Bible and the teachings of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic Christianity long-held negative judgments against divorce, cohabitation, and homosexuality.

While there were always many “deviations,” Christianity long held to a strong belief in the sanctity of marriage, which meant lifetime monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with no intimate sexual relations condoned outside of such a marriage.

In spite of strong emphasis on the traditional position by some Christians, broadly speaking, to a large extent Christianity now seems no longer to speak out against divorce or pre-marital sexual relations, and there continues to be greater acceptance of the rights of LGBTQ people.

  7) Growth in ecumenical relations, including deep ecumenism. There is a long history of Christian ecumenism—but an even longer history of Christian denominational “tribalism,” which is what I mostly saw in my younger years.

But during my lifetime there has been not only an ever-increasing move toward Christian denominations working together, a movement from exclusivity to inclusivity, but also an increase in what is sometimes called “deep ecumenism,” Christianity working with other religious traditions.**

What would you readers add or subtract from this list? And which of these do I need to write more about?

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* These words are from Jeorg Rieger in his book Theology in the Capitalocene (2022), which I plan to introduce more fully in the last blog post planned for this month.

** According to Chat GPT, “deep ecumenism” is a term coined by Wayne Teasdale (1945~2004), a Catholic lay monk. His book The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (1999) “is considered a seminal work in the field of deep ecumenism.” (I think I heard that term before 1999, though.)

Matthew Fox, former Catholic and now Episcopal priest, posted a “daily meditation” entitled “What Is Deep Ecumenism? Why Now?” on Oct. 18, 2021. 

A Remarkable Man, a Remarkable Church: Howard Thurman and Fellowship Church

Howard Thurman was a remarkable man and 75 years ago he founded a remarkable church. This article is about him, the church he founded, and a remarkable co-pastor of that church today.  

The Remarkable Howard Thurman

Howard Washington Thurman was born in Florida 120 years ago this month, on November 18, 1899 (although some sources say he was born in 1900) and died in 1981. Ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925, he has been characterized as “a spiritual genius who mentored MLK, Jr., and carried Gandhi’s teaching to America.”

Thurman was a part of a Student Christian Movement-sponsored four-person “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to South Asia in 1935-36. That experience, including personal conversations with Gandhi, influenced Thurman greatly—and later reverberated throughout the civil rights movement in the U.S.

In 1953, Thurman became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), the first African American to hold such a position at a majority-white university. At that time, MLK, Jr., was a graduate student at BU.

According to BU’s alumni magazine (see here), “King not only attended sermons [at Marsh Chapel] but also turned to Thurman as his mentor and spiritual advisor. Among the lessons that inspired him most were Thurman’s accounts of a visit to Mohandas Gandhi in India years earlier.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

The Remarkable “Fellowship Church”

In the fall of 1943, Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian clergyman, had the vision of starting a church that would welcome people of all races and creeds. Thurman, who had served as Dean of the Howard University Chapel since 1932, was asked to recommend a young black minister who might be interested in helping start such a church.

Thurman decided to volunteer himself and requested a year’s leave of absence from Howard beginning July 1, 1944. Thus, Thurman was the main one responsible for starting a new church in San Francisco with a remarkable name: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. For short, it is often just called Fellowship Church.

On October 8 of that year, Fellowship Church held its first public meeting—and last month it celebrated its 75^th Jubilee Anniversary.

Fellowship Church was unmistakably based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with that basic affirmation, though, the second of the three-paragraph “commitment” agreed to by Fellowship Church members says,

I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and credal heritage united in a religious fellowship.

In 1959, Thurman wrote a book titled Footprints of a Dream: The Story of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reissued 2009). I finished reading it last week, and it was a fascinating read.

The Remarkable Current Co-pastor of Fellowship Church

Since 1994, Dr. Dorsey O. Blake has been co-pastor of Fellowship Church. (Currently, the other co-pastor is a white woman.) This past June, I had the opportunity of hearing/meeting Dr. Blake, for he was the speaker at the local Juneteenth banquet.   

Dr. Blake was born in 1946, and before he was a year old his father became pastor of First Baptist Church here in Liberty, a predominantly African American church from its beginning until the present. His first six years in school were at the segregated Garrison School in Liberty, established for Black students in 1877.

Fellowship Church in San Francisco, literally seeking to be a place of fellowship for all peoples, continues to thrive under the leadership of a remarkable man whose early life was spent as a Baptist PK (preacher’s kid) in the small town of Liberty, Missouri.

Reflections on Vatican II

The first chapter of American Catholics in Transition is titled “The Legacy of Pre-Vatican II Catholics” and the authors refer to Catholics born in 1940 and earlier as “the pre-Vatican II generation.”

 They go on to say, “Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Catholics were known for their willingness "to kneel, pray, pay, and obey.”

 Although I was not a Catholic, that is the age bracket I am in and that was the Catholic Church I grew up knowing only a little bit about.

 I finished my undergraduate theology degree in 1962. Since it was a Baptist seminary I attended, there was not a lot of study about Catholics. But of course there was some—and much of what I learned was very soon out of date.

As indicated above, the Second Vatican Council, often called Vatican II, began in 1962 and ended fifty years ago this week, on December 8, 1965.

Many significant changes were made in the Catholic Church at that Council. Consequently, much of what I had learned by 1962 about contemporary Catholic faith and practice was out of date by 1965.

Vatican II was the 21^st so-called Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, and the first one since Vatican I in 1869-70. It was called by John XXIII, the remarkable Pope who was canonized in April of last year. Already 76 years old when he was elected Pope in October 1958, he surprised most people, who expected him to be nothing more than a “caretaker pope.”

One of the most significant changes made at Vatican II was the position of the Catholic Church’s relationship to non-Catholic Christians as well as its relationships with other religious faiths. The “Decree on Ecumenism” was passed in late 1964, more than a year after Pope John had died (in June 1963), but it was very much in keeping with his stated desire.

That Decree declared that other Christians were “separated brethren,” a remarkable shift from prior church teaching that regarded them (us Protestants) as “heretics.”

Vatican II also greatly changed the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. The “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions” was passed in October 1965, about six weeks before the close of Vatican II.

The fourth part of that Declaration speaks of the bond that ties the people of the “New Covenant”' (Christians) to Abraham’s stock (Jews).

It states that even though some Jewish authorities and those who followed them called for Jesus’s death, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of all those Jews present at that time, nor can the Jews in our time be held as guilty.

Accordingly, the Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”

The Declaration also decries all displays of antisemitism made at any time by anyone. This repudiated the abuse heaped on Jewish people through the years because they were considered “Christ killers.”

There were also many changes in Catholic worship and practice. For example, there was a new emphasis on lay people reading the Bible. Also, Mass began to be conducted with the priest facing the congregation, and the language spoken by the congregants was used in worship rather than Latin.

Of course some things didn’t change, to the disappointment of some of the more progressive clergy and lay people: priests still couldn’t marry, women still couldn’t become priests, and contraceptives continued to be banned.

Some Catholics are now hoping Pope Francis will call for “Vatican III,” but that is not likely to happen.

But thank God for Vatican II!