573 - Theology for a Nuclear Age

Theology for a Nuclear Age

By Gordon D. Kaufman

Philadelphia, Westminster, 1985. 66 Pp. $12.95 ($7.95 Paper).

Few contemporary books pose the most debated issues of theology, ethics, and society in a brief, comprehensive way. But these 1984 Ferguson Lectures (England), which extend and refine the major motifs first set forth in the Presidential Address at the American Academy of Religion in 1982, do just that.

Kaufman, a leading theologian at Harvard, argues that full awareness of the capacity of humans to destroy all of life through a nuclear catastrophe demands a fundamental recasting of our religious symbols, our conception of biblical and theological traditions, and the very methods by which we think about the relationship of faith and world. Modern science and technology, based on theological images of dominion, have put us in the totally unprecedented situation of a new human sovereignty over the earth's destiny, one that radically challenges all previous notions of the sovereignty of God.

The "objective" situation for theology is paralleled by the "subjective" situation of theology. We "know" that theology-biblical, traditional, and contemporary-is less the unpacking and transmission of revealed meaning than it is a very human activity consisting essentially of the "imaginative construction" of symbols. Inevitably and indelibly, they are shaped by the social, historical, and cultural requirements (and interests) of specific times, places, and peoples. The task for theology is, thus, twofold: (1) the deconstruction of those symbols and clusters of images that may have been pertinent once, but which transported over the centuries have brought us to this perilous situation; and (2) the imaginative reconstruction of those kinds of symbols that can in fact save us from both our social situation and the pathologies of traditional theology.

Kaufman finds it strange that so few theologians (other than apocalyptic fundamentalists-see Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth) have been concerned about the uniqueness of our situation. "Secular" authors, such as Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), are among the few who have been bold enough to ask the basic new questions about existence and the fact that it can no longer be presupposed. He seems unaware of or disinterested in anything theological ethics has produced about these questions, and wants to address them strictly in terms of certain post-Barthian sensibilities.

First, theology itself as an enterprise has to be reconceived. It has been the basic method of all traditional theology, says Kaufman, that Truth is already thought to have been authoritatively given in tradition, espe-

574 - Theology for a Nuclear Age

cially the Bible. Thus, the task has been to discover Truth from texts and apply it to successive contexts. This "authoritarian" method denies that anything of basic theological importance can derive from historical novelty.

In contrast to the authoritarian method, a method of programmatic and practical imagination is now required, especially since it now " seems evident that all [religious]... expressions have been much more the product of the creativity of the human spirit, attempting to find its way in the face of ever new problems and crises arising in life.... This is just as true of theology... as of any other aspect of religious life or praxis. Theology... should be judged in terms of the adequacy with which it is fulfilling the objectives we humans set for it."

In other words, Kaufman turns to a historicist-aesthetic method he worked out several years ago, one that would have been called "poesis" by the classic thinkers, "ideological" by continental modernists.

On this basis, Kaufman turns to his final two points: "God" must now be taken to be a humanly constructed symbol of a wholistic reality, "an ultimate tendency or power, which is working itself out in an evolutionary process that has produced not only a myriad of living species but also at least one living form able to shape and transform itself, through a cumulating history, into spirit. . . . " And "Christ" becomes a valuation of those self-sacrificing "qualities and potentialities which make for reconciliation and loving community [as]... paradigmatically epitomized in the story of Jesus." If the latter is used to reconstruct our images of the former, disaster may be averted.

The slender volume is likely to become required reading in introductory seminary courses in several disciplines. I intend to pair it with the Catholic Bishops' Pastoral on nuclear policy (The Challenge of Peace), primarily because I think that this "traditionalist" grasp of the human condition and our present situation is deeper, more accurate, and more imaginative. It reflects the continuing value of biblical and traditional materials, of thinking about God's sovereignty, and of how the constant reconstruction of past wisdom enables the facing of new crises. I doubt that our situation is as novel as Kaufman imagines. I do not believe that the Scriptures or the great theological doctrines heretofore functioned only, or primarily, in the ways he says they did, or that Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the rest were quite so oblivious to either theological creativity or to the prospect of total human destruction. It may even be that we see, in Kaufman, a repristination of certain key themes from his sectarian background, which never did approve of the great theological tradition, now couched in the current jargon of neo-romantic epistemology.

It is exciting. It is not convincing.

MAX L. STACKHOUSE

Andover Newton Theological School
Newton, Massachusetts