NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 42, Issue 4, 1988

The awakening of the Netherlands Reformed Church in the fourties is mainly Kraemer’s personal effort and goes back to his own experience. Moved by God’s reality in the Bible, he never ceased to appeal: fellowship of believers, put yourselves under God’s reality, so He may open your eyes to the needs of the word.

Before W.W. II he saw the tide of secularism coming: man stepping in the centre of history. But western culture and an affluent society have put man into exile, away from the source of life. Calling for an awakening is a contradiction in his ears. That’s why Kraemer has not really been heard.

We present a number of authors who have dealt in various ways with Hendrik Kraemer’s work. We find first a distance of the catholic side due to the confessional separation, where one does not see the position of the other side or where one is dealing with it only in an apologetic way. Finally, the catholic side is showing a certain interest in H.K.’s work because it is discovering the common fundamental preocupations in theory and praxis. The most recent Catholic publications on H.K. are suggesting that a simple opposition between continuity and discontinuity (of religions and Christianity) does not correspond to the theological problem of religions as it presents itself to us today.

Alexander Men is a scholarly priest with a flourishing parish near Moscow, who is developing an original creative theology. After a general introduction with biographical and bibliographical data the author concentrates on two items: Men’s reflections on the relation between religion and science (Men graduated in biology and theology) and his theological account of the impact of the history of religion on the past and future evolution of christianity.

In this article it is suggested that secularization does not necessarily mean desacralization. One should distinguish several aspects of the development of religion, among which secularization and desacralization are only two. There are others as well, such as pluralization and privatization.

The importance of the sacred may diminish in modern society, it is certainly not completely faded out; instead, the sacred is secularized, which means that it has become more of this world. Here, the faith in progress is taken as an example: from a belief in the Kingdom of God, it developed, via the idea of an ideal future society, into a faith of progress as a fate.