topic parenthetically, however, I certainly do not want to overemphasize the need to maintain a little critical distance in our relationships with countercultural elements in our present society. One of the most hopeful aspects of today’s chaotic world is that as Christians we may quite legitimately make common cause with so many others who are concerned for the future of the planet and human civilization. Ours is a time of experimentation: old relationships are perhaps no longer reliable; new relationships may be possible and productive. George A. Lindbeck has named this period in the history of Christianity an “awkward intermediate stage”: we are moving (he says) from a position of “having once been culturally established” to one in which we are “not yet clearly disestablished.”19 In this interim it is, I think, inevitable that the most serious Christians and Christian groupings will experiment with all kinds of new arrangements and alliances. Some of these will prove unhelpful or wrong, and some will be or become important—will prove a way into the future. I think we should try to see in all such experiments, as in the mostly unorganized dissatisfaction with the so-called Christian cultural establishment that is their background, a certain continuity with what has been best in Christianity throughout the ages, and was of the very essence of the Protestant Reformation. “The most important contribution of Protestantism to the world in the past, present and future,” wrote Tillich in 1948, “is the principle of prophetic protest against every power which claims divine character for itself—whether it be church or state, party or leader.” And we could echo, with emphasis, Tillich’s next sentence: “this prophetic, Protestant protest is more necessary today than at any time since the period of the Reformation.”20
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