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Theology's New Fact
By Mark Kline Taylor

KARL JASPERS identified the nuclear threat as the "new fact" for human life and for all thinking. ¹ Theology, as talk about God and human life, is not immune from the pressures of the new fact. Theologian Langdon Gilkey, for example, confesses the seeming impossibility of reflection here because a sense of the "bizarre" ravages the mind when human extinction is what we ponder. ² In his 1982 address to the American Academy of Religion, Gordon Kaufman urged theologians to repent of any dogmatic slumbers that lead us to trust divine providence without addressing meaningfully the threats of nuclear holocaust. ³

Threat of nuclear holocaust as "new fact" is for the theologian what Arthur Cohen says the Nazi Holocaust is-a rupture or tremendum in human experience that compels basal attention and threatens the very possibility of thought. ⁴ This "new fact" of experience seems to render moot all those debates about whether and how the claims of human experience relate to theological tradition and systematic thought. Whether we have "turned to experience" in the impressive tradition of Schleiermacher; whether we have given theological priority to various experiences of oppression as in the equally impressive liberation and political theologies; whether we "correlate" experience and theological language according to diverse modes ranging from Tillich to Tracy; whether we argue for a distinctive theological tradition that creates its own experience in the styles of Barth, Hans Frei, and George Lindbeck-for all of us the "new fact" cannot be ignored. The claim of this possible experience, though addressed theologically in a variety of ways, overwhelms theological discourse, as it does every discourse.

Recent books roll off publishers' presses, showing theologians and ethicists hard at work thinking about this unthinkable-wondering not just what theology should say about the tremendum, but what theological thought is now to become.

When taken together, the three slim books here under review provide their readers with one compact introduction to the complex demands placed on Christian thinkers who work now in the shadows of the new

Mark Kline Taylor is Assistant Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is active in the American Academy of Religion, serving as the chair of the Steering Committee of the "Currents in Contemporary Christology" group.
¹ Karl Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
² Langdon Gilkey, "On Thinking About the Unthinkable," The University of Chicago Magazine (Fall, 1983): 6-9, 28.
³ Gordon D. Kaufman, "Nuclear Eschatology and the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion LI/ 1 (March 1983): 3-14.
⁴ Arthur A. Cohen, Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981).

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fact. ⁵ Shannon lays out the broad lines of thinking about the nuclear catastrophe. Hollenbach exhibits concisely the kind of rigorous ethical analyses that the threat elicits. Soelle, while staying focused on the arms race, leads her readers from that explicit theme to reflection on the other threats of our time. The new fact demands the infusion of a new passion and a new intellectual rigor, and these three books, each in its own way, struggle to meet that challenge.

I

Shannon's book, What Are They Saying About Peace and War?, seeks to cover enormous territory in a very few pages. He begins with a brief discussion of the world religions' varied responses to war. Only three or four paragraphs are given to each religion, but when he turns to Christianity, he offers more extensive treatment of the history of this religion's views, giving special stress to the rise of the just war tradition. Following these opening comparative and historical observations, Shannon takes up the basic teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on war, from its early centuries to the United States Catholic Conference's "Pastoral Letter." Then in a helpful shift of focus, he moves from church teachings to ten Catholic thinkers who write most directly on the morality of war. The final two chapters of the book set out the main lines of post-Vietnam discussions of the morality of war, and the author's own very briefly articulated call to a "theology of peace." The book is a noteworthy addition to Paulist Press' What Are They Saying … series and works best as an introduction to the range of issues, traditions, and thinkers that have come into play during this time of intense concern about the nuclear threat.

II

To say that Hollenbach's book, Nuclear Ethics: A Christian Moral Argument, is rigorous ethical analysis, is not to suggest that he ignores broader theological and philosophical questions. To the contrary, Hollenbach's book is ethics in the best sense of the word: a well articulated unity of moral argument with the perspectives that guide such argument.

The first part of his book weaves together historical, philosophical, and theological perspectives to argue that "the pacifist and just war approaches to the morality of warfare are complementary and that both are needed as the Christian community approaches the nuclear debate." This argument for complementarity includes a vigorous defense of the importance of the pacifist position.

But in the book's second part, which is devoted primarily to current debate on nuclear policy, Hollenbach finds the just war theory to be most instructive. He presents the criteria of just war theory to set "the

⁵ Here reviewing Thomas A. Shannon's What Are They Saying About Peace and War? (New York: Paulist, 1983); Dorothee Soelle's The Arms Race Kills Even Without War (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); David Hollenbach, S. J., Nuclear Ethics: A Christian Moral Argument (New York: Paulist, 1983).

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outside limit for pluralism in the evaluation of the morality of warfare." Just war criteria thus take a more privileged place for guiding public policy formulation in a pluralist society. However, as he wields just war criteria in the context of current nuclear threats, his conclusions are " nuclear pacifist" ones. Even on the basis of "just war" criteria, "the use of nuclear weapons can never be justified" (p. 63). When taking up the "hardest question," that of deterrence, Hollenbach argues theologically that one consequence of our world's being "broken by sinfulness" is that we need to maintain a will to deter that is not a will to use. Though he manifests here a commitment to deterrence, he insists that moral judgments about deterrence should be based on analyses of "the direction in which we are moving." And when that is the basis for moral discernment, many alleged deterrent proposals actually turn out to lead toward greater probability of war, or toward increased arms production. Thus, for Hollenbach, while there should be a will to deter, not all deterrent policies are morally justified. On these grounds, he seeks to show how the new NATO systems in Europe actually decrease world-wide security, and how MX strategic missile systems "turn deterrence into provocation." ⁶

III

Soelle's book is of a different sort. It is a collection of thirteen brief essays, originally drafted by Soelle for radio audiences, for political rallies, and for publication in periodicals. These essays are occasional, responding to such developments as deployment of missiles in Europe, the deaths of Maryknoll sisters in El Salvador, the visit of Alexander Haig to Berlin, and the sentencing of Daniel Berrigan to ten years in prison. Occasional and passionately drafted as these pieces are, they provoke substantive thought in two ways.

First, Soelle does not allow her readers to isolate the arms race and the nuclear threat from the greater network of issues. Her call for peace is also a cry for justice. The nuclear threat as "new fact," for example, is discussed in relation to the threats that have already become actualized and now live on in our memories as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Moreover, Soelle skillfully threads her way through the fabric of contemporary problems-from the issues of nuclearism to those of human envy, racism, multinational exploitation of "third world" regions, the journey of women to liberation. In all this she displays how focusing a thinker's attention on the global nuclear threat fosters more than macro-level analysis. It also re-orients one for understanding other more particular concerns. The various forms of oppression that fix on race, gender, class, nation, or military are not just so many "-isms" that can be studied in isolation. Rather, Soelle suggests the need for an agenda that embeds each of these in a single though

⁶ Readers may wish to compare Hollenbach's position on deterrence with those of other theologians and ethicists in Geoffrey Goodwin (ed.), Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).

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intricate field of systematic distortion. Such an intellectual agenda, by the way, resonates with the life-journeys of many Christians today who find that their efforts to promote justice by fighting hunger, urban blight, or racism lead them into the Christian peace movement to protest the militarisms and nationalisms of our day.

Second, Soelle's book serves as a commentary on the different symbols and doctrines of Christian theology in light of the systematic distortions clustering around the nuclear threat. Again, this text is occasional and often at best only suggestive, but fundamental theological issues are nevertheless broached. Above all, Soelle here tries to explain what divine love has to do with her "despair over the culture in which we live." Since Auschwitz and Hiroshima, she cannot sing, as perhaps many of us cannot, of a God "who o'er all things so wondrously reigneth." Against the notion of "God almighty" or God as "heavenly Superbeing," there emerges her testimony to a God whose presence is with the victims of violence. Her Christology is one that is forged out of the depths of suffering. She reinterprets traditional concepts of sin in relation to the sociopolitical structures and yet also to forces of personal envy. The notion of the Holy Spirit is reworked as a life-giving Spirit that spontaneously and unexpectedly assaults old distortions, manifesting the new in concrete spaces and places. Her eschatology is one that nurtures hope out of communal living where peace and justice can be glimpsed as alternatives to the ways of living that lead to holocaust.

IV

If this "new fact" demands both passion and intellectual rigor, both prophetic and analytic critique, then these three works might be placed in terms of their contributions to a response that meets both demands.

Shannon's book presumes the sense of urgency. While he works out of a strong sense that "a tremendous change is occurring in the moral analysis of war," his text suggests that those who fashion prophetic critique now do well also to cast a glance at the whole history of war and peace positions and at a full range of contemporary options.

Hollenbach's book is an exemplary demonstration of the cool passion for analytic precision that we might hope to find in theology in this era of the "new fact." Indeed, Hollenbach's well-reasoned discussion, together with his eminently fair discussion of rival positions, may be read not as analysis in contrast to passion, but as another kind of passion, a "cooler" one, that may give real weight to the prophetic outcry that the church must register.

Soelle's book is brimful with a passion that is prophetic not only about things nuclear, but also about things racist, tyrannical, sexist, or despairing. In her terms again, "the arms race kills even without war." While her wide-ranging prophetic passion issues in some brilliant political and theological analyses, this particular book, as analysis, remains largely suggestive. Her book is best read as a programmatic piece calling for a kind of theological work that will meticulously trace

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out, and so reveal, the intricate connections she envisions between nuclearism and the other human pathologies of our era.

V

Reviewers of books about the "new fact," can all too easily find ways to suggest how authors do or not adequately take account of their subject matter. But how can any book or series of books help but fall short of adequate reflection when examining the tremendum of possible nuclear holocaust? Ultimately, the bizarre does break in here to ravage every author's words, and it seems a small mind that would, in this era, merely move from book to book to find a weakness here or a strength there. Instead, we might do best to close with observations about what theology, as intimated by these three slim books, becomes under the pressure of the "new fact."

We may note the obvious first: Theology becomes a clearly public activity, referring to the realms and concerns of human experience. When theology can comfortably assume loyalties of an ecclesial establishment, or when its place is secure as a practice of trained academics who work and rework the doctrinal grammar, then theology might be tempted to forget its public character and content itself with acceptance gained from its ecclesial and academic quarters. But as these authors' works demonstrate, theology, under the pressure of the new fact, is forced beyond any one such realm-ecclesial or academic-to address the quandaries of human existence. Indeed, there is nothing "new" about this implication for theology pondering the fact of nuclear holocaust. Good theologies have usually engaged social and public realms of experience. But now, though theologians may debate how best to address human experience, the threat of this holocaust ruptures every complacency, removing temptations to do theology only for its own tradition or set of adherents.

Having noted what for many may be a mere commonplace, let me observe, secondly, that these texts point to a remarkable resiliency in the Christian tradition (scriptural, ecclesial, and theological) to address issues of war and peace generally, and the problems of the nuclear threat in particular. To show just how rich the tradition is in this respect is one of the contributions of Shannon's historical treatment and survey of current viewpoints. Soelle's suspicions and revisions of Thomas' perspectives, for example, are also at the same time retrievals of the Christian tradition. Hollenbach, too, shows how present policy debates about nuclear issues might benefit from the very perspectives that theology has traditionally examined. Therefore, while there may indeed be exhibited here a very intense "turn to experience" or to the formation of a public discourse, there is an almost equally intense commitment to dig deeply into the church's rich tradition of thought.

Finally, we might observe that from the pressure of the "new fact," theology-playing with equal intensity in the realms of public experience and ecclesial tradition-becomes intensely ethical. The "new fact"

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prompts a confirmation of those theological voices who increasingly decry our tendency to view theology as a largely conceptual task, which one then later "applies" practically. Distinctions between theology and ethics have all too often become separations. Current discussions among a diverse group of theologians-including the social phenomenology of Edward Farley, the hermeneutical phenomenology of David Tracy, and the liberation and political analyses of Gustavo Gutierrez and Johann Baptist Metz-point to a much more organic view of theology. Theology becomes an activity or conversation that rises from religious symbols an activity that is indeed conceptual (doctrinal) but also continually invokes and is rooted in concrete practices and preferred ways of being in our world (ethics). Doctrines and ethics together constitute the organic reflection that theology is, and without both there is no theology. Again, one can point to theologians who have presumed this or written this before. But, especially under the pressure of the "new fact," systematic theology must practice its intellectual rigor not only on the coherencies of doctrine, but also on the ethical analysis that enables doctrine to serve life.