No Center

For about eight years we lived in Houston,Texas. It has the honor of being the birth place of both of my sons. It gave me a brief insight into the mind and spirit of Texas people. It is where I learned that the South Houston School System purschased student insurance on the football players because they were the only athletes in the school. So I learned about the reality of football. The coach of the University of Texas was quoted one time as saying, "The University of Texas football team has three quarterbacks this year, which means that we don't have any quarterbacks." The fact that none of them was superior to the rest and therefore had established himself is "the quarterback" meant that the coach believed his team lacked leadership.

That experience flashed back when I got the October 19Th Christian Century magazine. On the cover was the big block letter announcement that inside were "The Best Theology Books of the past 25 years." On the inside one discovered that they had put the question of "the 5 essential theological books in the last 25 years" to 8 different scholars and ended up with 40 different titles. Only three appeared on more than one list. The message I get from that survey is that there were no clearly pivotal theological works in the last 25 years. That there may have been lots of nice, thoughtful, well researched works by able scholars, but there were no seminal or dominating works of theology that marked the last 25 years. Every body is doing what is right in their own eyes. While each author is producing something interesting, there is no center, no consensus on the essential theological works. If three quarterbacks mean no quarterback, forty suggested books for the five essential books means there were no essential books.

Perhaps all these diverse works may be the plowing of the landscape so that the ground is fertile for the next great work of theology that is to come.