A Modern Theologian Ponders God-Talk
With apologies to Robert Frost.
Last Monday James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal concluded his regular Best of the Web column (that day featuring King Frederik X of Denmark’s redesigning of the royal coat of arms to emphasize Danish possession of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, his country’s last overseas territories)1 by quoting Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, which every pupil of my generation learned by heart. (I wonder whether pupils today have even heard of Robert Frost.) It was so familiar that it inspired parodies, such as this one that I wrote long ago:
Whose world this is, I do not know. The question's unimportant, though: Irrelevant and too unmod For theologians on the go. My students all must think it odd As through my lecturings they plod That when I speak of "Christian Faith", I never, never mention God. We need a slogan to awake The world for Revolution's sake. "Kerygma" will do quite as well As any other word we take. And as I trace the parallel Between Marx and Emmanuel, I also never mention Hell. . . . I also never mention Hell.
The Danes used to own what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands. They sold the archipelago, less one 500 acre islet, to the United States in 1917. The U.S. purchased the islet from its private Danish owner during World War II. Precedents for Donald Trump to savor.