65 - Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation

Unapologetic Theology:
A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation
By William C. Placher
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989. 178 pp. $13.95.

The author of this book, William Placher of Wabash College, is one of the more prolific, perceptive, and wide-ranging of America's younger theologians. Previously best known for his A History of Christian Theology, he has now turned to contemporary discussions and provided us with the best compact pathfinder through the thickets that I know.

In the first chapters, he sketches developments in philosophy, science, and cultural anthropology during the last half century that are undermining modern Enlightenment convictions regarding the nature of knowledge and rationality. For hundreds of years, these convictions have influenced religious life and thought by action and reaction and have shaped both liberal and conservative theologies into basically apologetic patterns. The passing of these Enlightenment notions of knowledge and rationality marks a transition no less profound than the seventeenthcentury one represented by, for example, Descartes and Locke. Placher then displays a spectrum of options within the new situation. Habermas and Rawls are the liberals he discusses, Foucault and Rorty the critics of modernity, and hermeneutical thinkers, especially Gadamer, retrievers of tradition who seek to move beyond the sterile modern dichotomy between traditionalism and anti-traditionalism. Unlike most accounts of these matters, the implications for theology are at every point made evident. These two-thirds of the book are a tour de force of expository skill that will appeal to both specialists and general readers.

Argumentative tension mounts in later chapters as Placher sketches his version of unapologetic postliberal narrative theology and shows how this relates to the dialogues with science and with non-Christian religions. The climax comes in the concluding chapter, which engages the apologetic "concern of the revisionist theology that dominates most academic circles in the United States … to preserve the public character of theology, that is, to find ways in which Christians can explain what they believe and argue for its truth in ways which non-Christians can understand."

"Revisionism" and "postliberalism" are recent coinages originating at Chicago and Yale respectively, but for Placher they articulate with special clarity the possibilities Christian theologians now confront. They are often seen as polar opposites, but this, he argues, is a mistake.

For someone as sympathetic with Placher as the present reviewer (I was one of his teachers at Yale), the chief constructive contribution of

66 - Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation

this book is its effort to overcome the polarization just mentioned and replace it with mutually fruitful conversation. It makes clear that the revisionists at their best (for example, David Tracy of Chicago) no longer cling to the Enlightenment assumptions that continue to shape anti-traditional radicalism and the equally apologetic traditionalist conservatism that is its mirror opposite. The revisionists are not closed to the need for unapologetic approaches. Conversely, postliberals need not and should not ignore the revisionist concern to make the faith intelligible to non-Christians. What they insist on is that apologetics be piece-meal and ad hoc rather than central to the theological enterprise. Precisely because of its distaste for syntheses, unapologetic theology can widen and deepen the conversation between the rival positions that balkanize our increasingly pluralistic world.

The cash value of these generalizations can only be assessed by reading the book. Those who do so will find that they have had as interesting and instructive a crash course in the contemporary state of theology as is to be found between the covers of a single volume; and their appreciation will not be lessened even if they do not agree with the author's own position.

George A. Lindbeck
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut