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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
September 1988 saw the twentieth anniversary of the untimely death of Ronald Gregor Smith, one of the most creative and most neglected theologians of the post-war years in Britain. Although associated with the ‘secular theology’ of the sixties, Smith transcended the faddishness of much of this trend with his quest for a theology which could do justice to the existential reality of faith as a mode of being, an orientation of life operative within a secular context. This article seeks to indicate the value of Smith's work to contemporary debates about the nature of Christian believing, and in particular to the possibility of faith taking on a critical and reflective form within the congregation.
page 85 note 1 References from Gregor Smith's works in this article are noted in the text as follows:
1956: The New Man: London, SCM Press.
1966: Secular Christianity: London, Collins.
1969: The Free Man: London, Collins.
1970: The Doctrine of God: London, Collins.
On Smith's work see further Ray S. Anderson, Historical Transcendence and the Reality of God, 1975; and the essay collection edited by E. T. Long, God, Secularization and History, 1974.
page 87 note 2 Smith has been criticised for not making it sufficiently clear that his use of the word ‘history’ is dependent upon the German sense of Geschichte rather than Historie. Smith deals with this debate on pp. 78–88 of Secular Christianity. Without going into the whole complex debate among the Bultmann school, we simply point out that Smith only applies the name ‘history’ — i.e. Geschichte — to significant past events which have been carried into the present in virtue of their continuing existential significance for human agents. Events which are ‘historical’ are such that my world and yours are different now from how they would have been if they had not occurred. Smith cites Gogarten, ‘history as the presentness of the past’.
page 93 note 3 This understanding of pastoral counselling by Smith envisages for Christian faith a function rather similar to that of Critical Theory: see e.g. Davis, Charles, Theology and Political Society, Cambridge, 1980, ch. 4Google Scholar; Segundo, J. L., The Liberation of Theology, Dublin, 1977Google Scholar.