464 - Recovering the Personal: Religious Language and the Post-Critical Quest of H. Richard Niebuhr

Recovering the Personal: Religious Language and the Post-Critical Quest of H. Richard Niebuhr
By R. Melvin Keiser
Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1988. 154 pp. $20.95 ($13.95 pb.).

Keiser claims that Niebuhr's thinking progressed beyond "critical" dichotomies, such as fact/value, subject/ object, and reason/feeling, toward a "postcritical" stance in which persons characterized by tacit commitments and relations use language to shape themselves and their world. This can be seen, says Keiser, in Niebuhr's recognition that language expresses and shapes the commitments and phenomena of our lives, and in his concern for the integrity of the self in its commitment to a shared world. With the metaphor of responsibility, Niebuhr realizes that the essential problem is linguistic. God appears in the background of our being as irreducible and committed selves. Religious language is personal because it expresses our faith in this background as "ultimately supportive of the existence of 'I's." The use of this language elicits increasing trust in the faithfulness of being, and so it also shapes our integrity as selves who are committed

465 - Recovering the Personal: Religious Language and the Post-Critical Quest of H. Richard Niebuhr

to standing in dialogue with the faithful Thou in all that happens. Thus, Niebuhr's quest leads to the linguistic expression of a form of life deeply committed to being at home in the world.

Keiser's perspective is distinctive, and it makes a suggestive contribution to Niebuhr scholarship. Unfortunately, it also obscures and distorts. He makes much of connections between Niebuhr and Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, though he overlooks the importance of the "realistic" turn among Niebuhr's theological contemporaries, and he minimizes the contributions of G. H. Mead to Niebuhr's understanding of responsibility. Again, the fact that Niebuhr retains objective and referential elements in his understandings of religious language and belief is, for Keiser, evidence of "a critical recalcitrance" that exists in tension with the postcritical thrust of his entire theology. Left largely unexplored, however, is the possibility that substantive convictions encouraged Niebuhr to recognize expressive, shaping, and referential dimensions of religious discourse. Indeed, Niebuhr's path may finally lead beyond even Keiser's interpretation of the critical/ postcritical dichotomy.

Douglas F. Ottati
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
Richmond, Va.