Protestant Christianity throughout the world once looked automatically to Germany for the newest direction in theology. Not so any more, for "the science of things divine" is international in scope, ecumenical in spirit. The giants who still dominate Protestant thinking—Karl Earth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann—all came to prominence in Germany after World War I, but among the most promising of their successors are a number of men under 45 who have been educated in U.S. divinity schools.
Many of them seem to have a common purpose: to consolidate the best historical and cultural learning of igth century "liberal" theology with the most relevant doctrinal insights of 20th century "neo-orthodoxy." Says an impartial but interested observer, Jesuit Theologian Gustave Weigel: "The generation of our day is on principle open-minded, and genuinely scholarly by the revived standards of scholarly investigation." Five of U.S.
Protestantism's most promising theological pathfinders: ∙JAROSLAV JAN PELIKAN JR., 38, Professor of historical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, prolific "Jary" Pelikan has written six books (best known: 1959'S The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, which sold 42,000 copies), co-authored six others, produced more than 100 scholarly articles. He also serves as one of the religion editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A graduate of the Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, he won his doctorate at Chicago at the age of 22, has established himself as an ecumenical-minded expert on church history. Pelikan, who styles himself as an "evangelical catholic" and "critical traditionalist," believes that the success of the ecumenical movement depends upon a proper understanding of the Christian past, and is trying to further understanding by writing a comprehensive history of the development of church dogma. "Tradition," he says, "needs to be critically re-examined for its richness and its depth." He has "grave doubts" about the ability of a divided Christianity—already on the defensive everywhere, he feels—to withstand the stresses of the modern world, but expects the emergence of new forms of inter-Christian relationships "beyond our imagination." Pelikan's "catholicity" can shock: he dumfounded many Protestants last March by chastising his fellow Lutherans for failing to give enough devotion to the Virgin Mary.
Next fall, he takes over the Titus Street professorship of ecclesiastical history at Yale.
∙ROBERT McArEE BROWN, 41, Auburn professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary. Presbyterian Brown, who will transfer to Stanford this fall, sees himself as a "filter through which the thoughts of the great pass on to the layman, the translator of topflight minds to those who haven't had three years in a seminary." A graduate of Amherst and Union Theological, he served as a Navy chaplain at the end of World War II. One of Brown's first teaching assignments, eleven years ago, took him to Macalester College in Minnesota, where he got to know a young Roman Catholic Democrat named Eugene McCarthy.