A stinging critique
In the late 1970s a colleague handed me a copy of Douglas John Hall's Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theology of the Cross. "I think you'll like this," she said. I didn't so much like it as find myself challenged and stretched by it—as I have been by every book Hall has written and as readers are likely to be by his essay in this issue.
Hall was a sharp critic of institutional religion in Lighten Our Darkness, and so he remains. What most people hear from the churches, he wrote in 1976, "is a positiveness that is phony and ridiculous: a bright and happy message that has all the depth of a singing commercial." He wrote those words before the emergence of market-based megachurches or the prosperity gospel industry. His critiques sting, but I have always found them to be honest and to spring not from self-righteousness but from a humility grounded in the mystery of God and in a hopeful longing for the church to be the body of Christ on earth, doing the things that Jesus did.
I still turn to Lighten Our Darkness for passages like this: "The theology of the Cross declares God is with you—Emmanuel. He is alongside your suffering. He is in the darkest place of your dark night. You do not have to look for him in the sky beyond the stars, in infinite light, in glory unimaginable. He is incarnate. That means he has been crucified. For to become flesh, to become one of us, means not only to be born but also to die, to fail."
