295 - The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology

The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology

Edited by Paul Deats and Carol Robb

Macon, Mercer University Press, 1986. 295 Pages. $28.95.

This book is comprised of sixteen chapters by ten authors, chapters originally presented as lectures in a course on the "Ethics and Theology of Personalism," given at Boston University in 1980 and 1984. The chapters spell out some of the intellectual background to personalism, particularly in the idealist philosophical tradition of Kant and Hegel, detail the lives and careers of major personalist thinkers (Bowne, Knudson, Brightman, McConnell, Harkness, Schilling, Bertocci, DeWolf, and Muelder), and engage in both criticism and development of personalist thought. All the authors are personalists, all studied at Boston University, and most, if not all, are Methodists.

One who is neither a personalist nor a Methodist and who did not study at Boston University learns three things from this book: (1) that personalism is an important and distinctive American contribution to theology, (2) something of what personalism is, and (3) that personalism discloses inner gaps and tensions which indicate a need on its part to be engaged in wider conversation with other movements and issues in theology.

Personalism holds that "the person is the ontological ultimate and [that] ... personality is the fundamental explanatory principle." Sometimes this is expressed as: "There are no realities other than persons." The friendly critic, setting aside a coffee mug after having read the last sentence, wonders whether the coffee mug is (a) not real or (b) a person. Neither option is attractive. The strong influence of the idealist tradition on personalism, resulting in the emphasis on consciousness, compounds the difficulty. Personalism needs to take seriously experience that is nonconscious in order to make more sense of its affirmations and also, apparently, to make more logical distinctions between what counts as a

296 - The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology

person and other kinds of realities. Strikingly, the thought of one personalist who was more influenced by Freud than by Kant, Paul Johnson, is not represented in this book.

Disagreements show up among personalists on the question of God and evil. Some place a kind of drag or impediment (a non-rational "given") within God in order to deal realistically with evil. Others recoil from this, seeing it as calling into question God's unity, or goodness, or worthiness of worship.

There is enough similarity between personalism and process theology, and enough difference, that one wonders why there is not much more conversation between these two movements. Personalism could help process theology see how a movement with its commitments could develop moral laws or principles, and process theology could help personalism address some of the issues articulated above.

Additionally, personalism (at least as disclosed in this book) needs to be in conversation with the various liberation theologies, with theology that takes seriously ecological questions, and with post-Holocaust theology. Although Martin Luther King, Jr., studied at Boston, his thought is not treated here. All of these movements raise questions close to the heart of personalist concerns, yet they frame the issues in ways different from personalism's approach to them. Personalism has much to offer such movements and much to learn from them.

This book shows one a living, self-critical, and developing intellectual movement that needs to be more intensively involved in those contemporary conversations to which it has much to offer and by which it could be further strengthened.

CLARK M. WILLIAMSON

Christian Theological Seminary
Indianapolis, Indiana