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Praxis: “America must Listen”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
Commenting upon Neville Chamberlain's announcement of war to the British people on September 3, 1939, Frederick Lewis Allen remarked, “With these sentences, spoken so quietly thousands of miles away, an era ended for America and another began.” Sufficient time has now elapsed for historians to analyze and appraise the events which informed and circumscribed that past era. Two articles have recently appeared in this journal substantiating such a conclusion. In his article dealing with “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I,” Professor Sydney Ahlstrom forcefully argued that the most significant points of contact between the altered theological situation on the Continent and America's post-liberal thinking were four in number and scope: 1) a new movement in biblical exegesis and interpretation; 2) the German social movement; 3) the Swedish movement in theology; and 4) the “crisis theology” or dialectical school associated with Karl Barth. Without taking issue here with Ahlstrom as to the correctness or adequacy of his delineation of these times as “post-liberal” (in itself a somewhat unattached and ambiguous term), I would like to record those same points of contact within and from the perspective of American Methodism.
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