196 - Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology

Inscriptions and Reflections:
Essays in Philosophical Theology
By Robert P. Scharlemann
Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1989. 254 pp. $35.00.

Here is a book from the hand of one of the masters of contemporary American theology. Readers familiar with Scharlemann's The Being of God (1981) and his Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich (1969) will not be wholly surprised by what they find here. But they may well find it somewhat more accessible than those two more strictly systematic treatises. This is a collection of Scharlemann's shorter pieces, spanning the years 1967 to 1987 and ranging over such topics as Tillich's politics, the connection between theology and the liberal arts, Buber's I and Thou, Hegel's and Schelling's impact on modern theology, and Berlioz's Faust. Readers who are up on the current methodological debates in American theology will also probably find the book a refreshing (and disturbing?) change. While Scharlemann does not neglect methodological issues, neither does he dwell on them. Like few books in American theology today, this one does not merely discuss what one would do if one were going to do theology, but in fact does it. Throughout the book, Scharlemann aligns his methodological discussions with more substantive chapters, both theological and historical, which are solidly argued and carefully researched.

Still, the book is not easy going. It is divided into three parts, through which run three main themes as warp to woof. The themes are the

198 - Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology

elusive relation between being and non-being, the triple relation of sign, sense, and reality, and the need to deconstruct old theological habits in order to bring these relations to light. In the first part, Scharlemann tackles the thorny topic of "Ontology and Theology." Here, drawing on Heidegger and the postmodern deconstructionists, he works out his difficult but seminal idea that theology is "afterthinking"-that is, thinking of God as "what is not-I and not-this"-and then links this idea to that of Christ as the figure of otherness which this afterthinking most properly entails. Granted, Scharlemann's idea borders on the unorthodox, since he seems to have to begin with the idea that Christ is not God. But that, he argues, is just what needs deconstructing. In the second part, on "Science and Culture," he traces the links between theology thus conceived, the role of technology in modern society, and the arts. Here also are two of the three best pieces in the book-one on "Constructing Theological Models" and the other on the famous debate between Barth and Tillich in the 1920s on the possibility of doing theology as a science. In the third part, finally, he takes up the question of pluralism, but does so in a fresh manner that betrays few debts to the approaches currently taken by the partisans of either Yale or Chicago. Especially exemplary (and the third of the three best pieces) is his chapter on Tillich's argument from faith to history, in which (with a certain quiet pride, one fancies) Scharlemann draws the "apparently unassailable" conclusion that one can move from a "faith-symbol to a historical actuality," Tillich's critics notwithstanding.

Those readers who do not like Heidegger or German idealism, or who (for whatever strange reason) have decided that Tillich is no longer a live option, will probably set this book aside. Nor does Scharlemann mitigate the difficulty of thinking (and writing) in the Heideggerian mode. But the remarkable opening sentence of the Introduction-from which the book takes its title-should surely beckon one to think again: "One way of describing the task of theology is to say that it is to inscribe the name 'God' upon any name, the tale 'God is' upon any event, and the judgment 'God is God' upon any identity."

David S. Blix
Wabash College
Crawfordsville, Indiana