Theology Today - Vol 32, No. 2 - July 1975 - BOOK REVIEW

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The Politics of Transfiguration
By Paul Lehmann
New York, Harper and Row, 1975. 366 pp. $12.95.

Paul Lehmann states that the purpose of his book is to seek to show "that the pertinence of Jesus Christ to an age of revolution is the power of his presence to shape the passion for humanization that generates revolution, and thus to preserve revolution from its own undoing. All revolutions aspire to give human shape to the freedom that being and staying human take; and all revolutions end by devouring their own children." "At the center-where the decisive action is-what is happening and what is required are nothing less than the transfiguration of politics" (p. xiii). Transfiguration "means the ingression of 'things that are not' into the 'things that are,' so that man may come abreast of God's next move in giving shape to human life." "Transfiguration connotes a radicalization of transvaluation as transvaluation connotes a radicalization of transformation" (p. 76). "Transfiguration is the unveiling of the hidden destiny of revolution in the miraculous inversion of its dynamics from self-justifying, self-destruction to the concrete practice of an order whose presupposition and condition is freedom, of law whose foundation and criterion is justice, and of the displacement of the love of power by the power of love in the societies of humankind" (p. 271).

I believe that these quotations state the basic thesis of Lehmann's book and also indicate his general style. Lehmann writes with passion and seeks to persuade. This is theological ethics written with the intention to alter the lives of readers and to alter the course of events. Dramatic turnings of phrases and statements of apparent paradoxes arrest one's attention over and over again. The results of extensive reading in literature on revolution (Brinton and Arendt, for examples) and in revolutionary literature (a chapter of about 130 pages organizes this) is demonstrated. Lehmann's deep absorption in the Scriptures is apparent, for allusions to biblical passages and quotations from them abound. Also he has further developed his "political messianism" primarily with interpretations of two passages traditionally central to the theology of politics, Jesus before Pilate and Romans 13, and one that is not, namely, the transfiguration story in Matthew 17. (His interpretation of Romans 13 is in my judgment the most novel I have read in the history of the use of that thorny text.)

In my own terms, I read the argument to be as follows. God's action is for the humanization of the world. This Lehmann developed in his 1963 book, Ethics in a Christian Context. This action is pri-

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marily liberating action. In the 1963 book, this was less fully developed. In this book it is applied to politics more extensively. Political and social revolutions are occasions in which God is acting to bring a new state of freedom. They are signs of God's humanizing work in the world. But revolutions need to be transfigured by the presence and power of Jesus as the Christ in order to be truly humanizing. The weight of God's work, however, is in the impulse to revolution. Christians have too long been on the side of "legitimacy." The presence of Christ has the power in and through revolutions to transform political priorities and create a new order of freedom, justice, and love.

The book rests on some very crucial judgments. One is historical. "We are all caught up in a Marxian world" (p. 23). It is a "revolutionary age." The evidences for this judgment are more asserted than extensively developed, and probably to some Americans they were more persuasive in 1968, when the lectures from which the book developed were given, than they are in 1975. 1 only note the importance of Lehmann's historical judgment and do not intend to dispute or defend it.

A second judgment is theological. God is working for freedom. The centrality of this judgment is observable in the ways in which Lehmann interprets his three principal New Testament texts and in the ways in which he reads the significance of historical events. Like much of contemporary theology, this comes close, in a descriptive sense, to a thematic unitarianism. Wherever there is true revolution there is a struggle for freedom, and wherever there is a struggle for freedom God is present.

There are other theological judgments as well. Revolutionary impulses and activities are not without possible corruption. Both on the basis of historical observations of the consequences of some revolutions and on the basis of Christian insight it is perceived that revolutions need to be saved from themselves. While Lehmann's world has its "good guys," they do need transfiguration. Most intriguing is the theological judgment about and confidence in the presence and power of Christ. Lehmann has no difficulty in affirming that presence and power, and such faith is indeed rare. "Jesus is the Christ, whose very human presence at the center where being and staying human in the world make all the difference in the world, sets power free in binding power to his new beginning" (p. 33). The basic Christology is not carefully explicated. How Jesus is present in the world and how his presence has effects upon politics are by no means clear. Lehmann is as certain as Barth was of Christ's presence and power.

Another important judgment is that the Bible can be read "tropically" or tropologically. The perceptive reader will have noted this long before it is admitted on page 231. "Given, then, 'the empirical integrity of the biblical witness,' incarnationally understood and tropically interpreted, there is a correspondence between the biblical and the human meaning of politics" (p. 233). I find this reading of the Bible

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to be extraordinarily difficult to justify methodologically and to control practically. At some points Lehmann is clear about the theological principle that is informing his tropological reading of the Bible; at other points there seems to be little more than free association connecting a biblical passage with a contemporary event. A passage from Fanon and a passage from Cleaver remind him of passages in Matthew; by connecting them only with an "and" and an "it is written," it is apparent that they are mutually reinforcing in Lehmann's mind (pp. 178-179, 225-226). Political events about which he writes evoke biblical quotations (p. 201). "According to Jesus, violence is an apocalyptic happening that erupts whenever, in the dynamics of the world's formation for freedom over order and justice over law, the power of systemic violence has provoked the counter-violence of the concrete responsibility for setting right what is not right, for setting aside what is dehumanizing, and setting straight what is humanizing in the world" (p. 266). Surely one can dispute whether this is "according to Jesus." This reader worries about what is in control in the selection, interpretation, and location of biblical materials in the course of the argument. The most negative interpretation would be that Lehmann, for various moral and political reasons, has decided that revolutions are on the whole good, and in turn has shaped theology to justify them and selected biblical passages and interpreted them also to justify them. Actually his work is more complex than that, but he does not seem to recognize the grave difficulties that are involved.

Lehmann's discussion of violence will surely be of great interest to all readers. He handles the issue by taking it out of the context of a moral justification and placing it in the context of apocalypse in which its inevitability is accepted. It is important to read his own words on this. "At the level of revolutionary politics, violence is unveiled not as the endemic nemesis of revolution but as a sign that politics has arrived at an apocalyptic moment of truth and point of no return. At the level of biblical politics, violence as the ultima ratio of a fallen world, in which civilization rests upon a primal crime, is exposed as the ultima ratio of a world already lost, in the act of being displaced by a new and human world already on the way. In short, the apocalyptic significance of violence is the talisman of its transfiguration." "The shift is the recognition and assessment of violence not in primarily ethical (moral), or legal, or even sociological terms; but as an apocalyptic phenomenon" (pp. 261-262). That means, for Lehmann, "that the question of the justification of violence is a question out of court." "Biblical politics, centered upon transfiguration, have no place for a justification of violence. They do, however, make room for the inevitability of violence in the course of the revolutionary struggle for humanization. In that struggle, violence is part of the apocalyptic threshold dividing revolutionary fate from a revolutionary future. It too belongs to the transfiguration under way" (p. 265). Lehmann has

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only moved the question of justification of violence from the moral sphere to another. How do we determine when we are in the apocalypse? Whether civilization rests on a primal crime? Who decides that? And are there no moral principles or values that limit proper means of action? How would Lehmann regard Luther's appalling counsel once a war was declared: "In a war of this sort it is both Christian and an act of love to kill the enemy without hesitation, to plunder and burn and injure him by every method of warfare until he is conquered."

The book is excessively discursive in many parts, and it is even difficult to determine a logic in the sequence of the chapters. There are coincidences noted that Lehmann cannot help but find pregnant with deep meaning. I note only one, namely, the bombing of Hiroshima and the Feast of Transfiguration in the Eastern Church year, August 6, 1945. Whether this coincidence is even accurate, not to mention meaningful, depends upon whether you date the bombing east of the international dateline where it was ordered, or west of the line where the bomb dropped!

Surely Lehmann's book is one of the most provocative written on politics by a North American theologian for some time. It invites more extensive analysis than this review can include. One could very instructively compare it with John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus with which it shares the centrality of Jesus and the Bible as a basis for political theological reflection. Such a comparative analysis would isolate sharply the basic judgments that inform different theologians who relate biblical politics to human politics.

I believe that the fundamental weakness of the book is one that it shares with a great deal of contemporary writing about theology and politics, both Protestant and Catholic. This book, like so many others, uses biblical and theological themes and symbols to interpret the significance of political events and assumes that from this interpretation one is sure about what God is doing and that a course of proper human action is fairly clear. Lacking is a sufficient justification for the selection of the biblical and theological themes and symbols. Also, as I have noted in a previous review in THEOLOGY TODAY, Lehmann and others move from theology to politics without being sufficiently informed by ethics-by moral and political philosophy and the concepts derived from them. This results in lack of rational clarity in the arguments and also makes it impossible to have meaningful intellectual discourse with those who do not find the religious symbols meaningful.

James M. Gustafson
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois