Religion: Shapers and Shakers

Who are today’s religious superstars—the Earths, the Tillichs, the Niebuhrs?

After polling academics and church leaders, the editors of one Roman Catholic and six Protestant denominational magazines published in the U.S. and Canada last week issued a list of eleven “shapers and shakers of the Christian faith.”

Five of the eleven are Roman Catholics. Among them are Dom Helder Comoro of Brazil (TIME, June 24), the activist, junta-baiting archbishop whose “cry is justice”; Jesuit Philosopher Bernard Lonergan of Canada, a “notoriously difficult thinker” whose work seeks to join theology and the social sciences; and Father Andrew Greeley, a Chicago sociologist whose insights have provided “a better understanding of today’s religious crisis.” Swiss-born Theologian Hans Küng of West Germany’s Tübingen University was described as “devotedly Roman Catholic” although he has a deserved reputation as a radical for his criticism of papal infallibility. Howard University Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether—the only woman on the list—was cited for seeing traditional Christianity as “an ideology of oppressors” and trying to transform it into “a gospel of liberation.”

Among the Protestants, Billy Graham made the top eleven on the strength of the fact that he “has personally spoken to more people, in more places, than any other evangelist in the world’s history.” Others included United Church of Christ Minister James Gustaf son, professor of Christian Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, whose quiet work, which insists on the importance of ethical rules, “will influence people in the pews”; Rhodesia’s black Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a steady voice for racial equality “whom Rhodesia’s black people have learned to trust”; and David Du Plessis, globetrotting apostle of the fast-spreading, transdenominational Pentecostal movement. The editors reserved some of their highest praise for German Theologian Jürgen Moltmann, a Reformed thinker whom they call “the most dominant theological presence of our time.” They find that Moltmann’s rigorous but essentially optimistic thought (The Theology of Hope; Religion, Revolution and the Future) offers “a hope for the present and future life to victims of today’s chaotic world, instead of just hope for an afterlife.”

The eleventh name on the list says flatly that he is no longer a Christian at all: Sioux Indian Lawyer Vine Delorio. But the Indian activist “out of a Christian background … offers North Americans a stirring call for society’s repentance and reform.” Whether or not he is a Christian in essence, that presumably qualifies him as a shaker.