|
|
290 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner
"There is a fear that haunts theologians who write from and to a modem consciousness. The fear is that, in meeting faith's need for intelligibility, we will inadvertently undermine the religious piety and sensibility without which a living faith cannot survive. Part of the power of Kushner's writings is that they constantly work to allay that fear, perhaps because his constant story telling and his 'correlation' methodolog address not simply the mind of the religious life, but also the life of the religious person, including the mind."
HAROLD Kushner, the relatively unknown rabbi of a Natick, Massachusetts congregation, catapulted into fame with the 1981 publication of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Within a year, the book sold half a million copies in hardback, and, with the publication of the paperback edition, sales went quickly over the million mark. Ten years later, the book remains in print, is distributed worldwide, has achieved best-seller status in three other countries, and has been translated into nine other languages.
Strictly speaking, the book belongs under the categories of theodicy and counseling. Kushner offers religiously and psychologically informed counsel to those who suffer from personal affliction. Such books leap from the press regularly, and usually suffer a stillbirth or die young. It completely misses the point to attribute, as is sometimes done, the sensational sales of Kushner's book to its catchy title. The same was said, with equal misunderstanding, of John Robinson's Honest to God when it met with popular success in the 1960s. (The reference to Robinson is instructive, not merely fortuitous.) Nor does the reason for Kushner's success simply lie, as is also often said, in the compassionate and authentic way he met afflicted people's religious and psychological needs. We can come upon another set of reasons if we compare Kushner's book, not with other popular theodicy books, such as C.S. Lewis' Problem of Pain, but with Robinson's book. This
Burton Cooper is Professor of Philosophical Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of The Idea of God (1974) and of a highly-praised treatment of theodicy, Why, God? (1988).
|
|
291 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
immediately yields the insight that Kushner's audience should be described, not only as religious people whose suffering raises questions of faith, but also as religious people whose modern consciousness troubles their faith.
The phrase "a modern consciousness" needs elaboration, since it is variably used and easily misunderstood. I am using "modern" in its flexible, popular sense rather than in its current, academic sense where it is associated with a rationalistic, "enlightenment" mentality now superseded by something called post-modernism or post-liberalism (terms which also have varied meanings depending on the school of thought doing the defining). By a modern consciousness, I mean a worldview informed, but not determined, by those philosophically powerful ideas of the physical sciences that have entered our culture and affect the basic way that we picture and behave in our world. These ideas, in a rough way, derive from the theories of evolution, indeterminism, and relativity, and account-sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously-for the developmental, dynamic, connectional, open -way -we -think about -things.
Half a century ago, Bultmann sent shock waves through the theological world by providing a negative definition of the modern consciousness. He suggested that people who drive cars, turn on radios, avail themselves of modern medicine, and the like, cannot accept the Bible's ancient worldview: its three-story universe with God and the angels above and the devil and the demons below, each intervening from time to time in the affairs of humans and the norms of nature. Bultmann himself was certainly naive about the mind's capacity to contain contrary notions-for it is certainly the case, and sometimes even desirable, that people entertain ideas and actions consonant with conflicting worldviews. Still, Bultmann's negative definition leads us toward an important aspect of the modem consciousness: a yearning for a rough coherence between our religious beliefs and what we, otherwise, and from other sources, believe about our world. My argument is that Kushner, as Robinson before him, explicitly addressed himself to religious people with a modern consciousness, and that his success, as Robinson's, was that he knew how to take powerful, modern theological ideas out of the academic place and the clerical place and into the marketplace of religiously interested people. I also want to argue that the mainline Protestant denominations, so concerned with the vitality of fundamentalist and conservative churches, on the one hand, and their own apparent malaise, on the other, can vitalize themselves by taking the clue to their method and mission from Kushner. They, too, should address, forthrightly, religious people with a modern consciousness. But more of that later. First we need to revisit -the whole of the Kushnercorpus, with an eye on how Kushner writes from and toward a modern consciousness. That corpus is larger than we might think.
|
|
292 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
Kushner's first book, When Children Ask About God (1971, 1976), was written for parents "dissatisfied with answers they themselves received as children." Kushner's theology appears full-blown here, including his theodicy which he sets forth in chapter 4. In his foreword, he acknowledges his theological debt, incurred in seminary, to Mordecai Kaplan's "naturalistic theology." In 1981, When Bad Things Happen to Good People appeared, followed by When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough (1986) and Who Needs God? (1989). Once we get past the catchiness of the titles, and note their form and content, it is evident that they are intended to evoke the anxiety points of a person's life. The same is true of Kushner's chapter headings. Here is a sample taken from his last three books: "Was There Something I Was Supposed To Do With My Life? When It Hurts Too Much To Feel," "Why Do The Righteous Suffer?," and "More Die Of Loneliness." What emerges from this mere listing of titles is that Kushner writes on classic, existential themes: the need for meaning and purpose, the problems of loneliness, inner and outer suffering, the emptiness of worldly success, and, of course, death and dying. Or, perhaps, I should say, given his story-telling, personal style, that Kushner writes to and about people who acknowledge feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and purposelessness, even if only to themselves.
It is not simply existential themes that characterize Kushner's writings. The basic existential assumption, worked out by Soren Kierkegaard 150 years ago, is also present in Kushner, albeit implicitly: the anxiety-producing nature of human existence drives us to despair; despair opens us to God. Kushner simply assumes, as would any existentialist, that, whatever facade. we may present to ourselves or to others, deep down we hunger for a sustained sense of meaning, purpose, and values that the world itself cannot provide.
In When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Kushner addresses himself to those whose sense of meaning has been knocked out by some material cause: the death or illness of one's child or spouse, one's own fatal illness or crippling disease, the birth of a deformed child or the break-up of one's family or some outrageous social injustice. In his latter two books, Kushner writes to those whose loss of meaning was triggered by inner factors: feelings of emptiness despite possessing material wealth, feelings of loneliness amidst groups of people, feelings of "not mattering" despite worldly success. A sense of meaninglessness has many triggers, and Kushner, like Kierkegaard before him, though not so well organized or so conscious of what he is doing, supplies us with a host of stories illustrating the spirit and forms of meaninglessness. There is a constant refrain running through Kushner's stories and the arguments accompanying them: When we think about people caught up in life's events, then we realize that not only they, but we, cannot make it alone. If we are to deal with issues of
|
|
293 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
life's ultimate meaning-questions of good and evil, our desire for justice and fair play, our needs for strength and courage in times of adversity, we need God and the supportive religious community inspired by God. On this latter point, Kushner differs significantly from the individualism found in Kierkegaard's classic, existential thought.
II
There are many orthodox religious people, both Jews and Christians, who find Kushner's thought anathema. The basic reason for this lies in Kushner's modern consciousness forming the sieve through which his faith and thought flow. When this is not clearly identified, misunderstandings flourish. In a 1986 essay, published in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, Rabbi Mordechai Winiarz levels a charge against Kushner that is staggering in the extent of its misinterpretation. The essay is entitled, tellingly: "Is Religion for the Happy Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner." Winiarz writes:
Here we arrive at the essence of Kushnerism. It is axiomatic, for him, that the purpose of religion is always to make its clients feel good. It should never cause them to feel worse, for that would contradict the true goal of religion. Truth of doctrine is irrelevant and immaterial. Religion is one of the many varieties of therapy.1
Winiarz has mistaken Kushner for a new-age Dr. Feelgood, a position explicitly condemned in Who Needs God?, where Kushner affirms "God-given" standards of good and evil and insists that God "demands righteousness of us." At best, Winiarz has superficially read When Bad Things Happen To Good People, for he misses the existential "angst" that lies just below the lines in that book. What is axiomatic to Kushner is that none of us has our life apart from some form of suffering, some tragedy, some senseless occurrence that wreaks havoc on our soul. The purpose of religion is neither to explain away such negativities, by appealing to God's purpose or to divine mystery, nor is it to promise that they will be put right by divine intervention. Rather, religion provides us with the strength to endure negativities and to realize life's goodness and value despite them.
This understanding of life and religion is present even in Kushner's earliest book, When Children Ask About God, where Kushner cautions parents against giving their children too simple an answer to why calamities happen in the world. He urges parents not to teach their children that God has caused some destructive event, but rather, that God calls us to find some positive response in destructive situations, such as comforting those who are hurt or rebuilding our lives or helping others to rebuild theirs after a disaster. Kushner certainly believes that God affirms and leads us toward feeling good about ourselves, but not in the "happy-minded" sense suggested by Winiarz. For Kushner, religion is soteriological, or redemptive, power; it is a
1Mordechai Winiarz, "Is Religion for the Happy Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner, "Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, vol. 22, No. 3 (1986), p. 62.
|
|
294 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
power for good, even for feeling good, despite the inevitable inner and outer tragedies that run through our lives. Winiarz's remark that for Kushner, "truth of doctrine is irrelevant and immaterial" has some truth in it, but its truth is the same as it is for Kierkegaard or any other existentialist, none of whom would ever be accused of happymindedness. For Kushner, religion provides the inner means, or inner power, to renew us when life threatens to bowl us over. Doctrines that are not connected to such experienced, renewing power are considered irrelevant. Which brings us to Kushner's method.
III
A startlingly apt clue to Kushner's method and his understanding of the theological task appears in Paul Tillich's preface to his Systematic Theology. Tillich writes, "A help in answering questions: this is exactly the purpose of this theological system." Kushner's theology, as Tillich's, except more immediately so, is an "answering theology." This is literally the case in his first book, When Children Ask About God, where Kushner urges parents to encourage children to ask religious questions and counsels parents not to provide answers that a few years later will strike a child as "fatuous nonsense." The bulk of this book contains questions that children are likely to ask, with Kushner answering each question individually. These answers make it evident that what Kushner means by "fatuous nonsense" are responses that lack all consonance with what children will otherwise learn about the world in their physics, biology, psychology, and history classes.
Kushner begins with the question, Who is God? God is "not a thing" nor does God "do things the way a person does." God gives us the world's order and direction, encourages human goodness and moral growth, and is the source of the impulse in each of us to be a good person. "Why can't I see God?" Kushner suggests that parents describe God as an intangible force (rather than an "invisible" one, which might frighten a child) who does not take up space and encourages things to happen. We should tell our children, he counsels, that God is present when people act in ways that suggest they value honesty, justice, goodness, and so forth. "Can I be absolutely sure there is a God?" Kushner answers that the reality of our experience provides the surety and witness to God.
In his chapter on evil, Kushner raises a host of questions whose answers set the basic theological and counseling framework out of which he wrote When Bad Things Happen To Good People. There is residual chaos or randomness in the world, there is human freedom, which cannot be overridden by God, and there is an order of creation rooted in God, but which God cannot violate. Kushner urges parents to tell children that there are things God cannot do, such as compelling our actions or controlling negative consequences. Further, disasters are never to be interpreted to a child as divine punishment or condemnation, and the most useful and religious response to calamity
|
|
295 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
is to say to the child, "Now that it has happened, what can we do about it?" If there is such a thing as Kushnerism, we are touching upon it here. Kushner's characteristic response to disaster is to divert us away from any notion of God as cause and to direct us towards a notion of God as inspiring positive actions and new possibilities. God, for Kushner, means that the future holds possibilities of goodness, and helping a child form such a consciousness of the future is what Kushner means by conveying a religious sense to the child. Thus, when a child asks about disabled people or the death of someone close, Kushner reminds parents to address not only the question, but also the fear underlying the question: the parent's vulnerability to death and disablement, and the child's consequent fearful attitude to the future. Parents need to reassure their children that they will not be abandoned in the future and to convey to children a positive and hopeful sense of the future's possibilities.
These last remarks suggest the interdependence between the question, in this case arising out of the child's life situation, and the parent's religiously informed response. Kushner's positive orientation to the future is rooted not in the present situation, which is often filled with destructive social and psychological forces, but in his faith in God's presence in the future. On the other hand, Kushner's refusal to speak "fatuous nonsense" to the child reflects the way the modern consciousness in the child's life situation, and ours, affects the nature of the religious answer.
IV
Kushner's way of doing theology exemplifies Tillich's "method of correlation," which correlates "the question implied in the situation with the answers implied in the message. It does not derive the answers from the questions [Winiarz's misunderstanding of Kushner] nor does it elaborate answers without relating them to the questions." In When Children Ask About God, the question-answer method is used in the simplest, most obvious way. In the later books, Kushner has developed a more subtle style.
Kushner's books are filled with stories. While most of them seem to come out of the life of his congregation, there are also Hasidic tales, biblical stories, historical stories, stories from literature, stories from the newspaper, and, of course, stories from Kushner's personal life. In any given chapter, Kushner will tell a story, analyze it briefly, tell another story to further the analysis, and so on. (In chapter one of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Kushner tells fourteen stories in a twenty-four page chapter.) For this reason Winiarz calls his method anecdotal, with the implied criticism that it lacks a holistic, theological perspective. Of course, Kushner's method is not appropriate to all, or even to most, theological purposes. But its power does not lie simply in the fact that stories gain people's attention and help illustrate an argument. The stories imply a situation and a conscious-
|
|
296 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
ness appropriate to the situation. For example, when Kushner, in chapter three of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, tells story after story of bizarre and unlikely horrors that happen to innocent people, he is not simply illustrating a point. He is reminding people of the notion of randomness, which they are familiar with and accept in the world of physics and sociology, and he is asking them to think theologically in a way that takes randomness into account. Similarly, in a chapter entitled "No Exceptions for Nice People," terrible tales of fatal illnesses and birth defects are discussed in terms of our assumptions regarding the regularity of the order of nature and the human body. Kushner is encouraging us to think theologically of God's power in a way that coheres with what we know of modern physics, sociology, biology, medicine, and so forth. He is employing the method of correlation in a way that makes it plain that method affects content. The situation out of which theological questions arise for a twentiethcentury person includes a modern consciousness. A genuine religious answer to these questions, then, must reflect both the religious community's faith in God and that modern consciousness. Two of the most significant, but also controversial, effects of this method lie in Kushner's limitation of divine power and its consequences for the meaning of prayer. Any interpretation of Kushner's impact on our culture needs to account for his popular acclaim despite his rejection of the doctrine of God's unlimited power, a doctrine thoroughly ingrained in the popular mind (and, of course, in the theological tradition).
The great public reception that met When Bad Things Happen To Good People was followed almost immediately by a theological outcry that came primarily, but by no means only, from conservative church and synagogue voices. The positive reception surely lay in Kushner's articulating, in an engagingly intelligent and pastoral way, a strongly felt need in our culture to dissociate God both from massive historical and social evils and from the personal and private tragedies that afflict individuals and families. The negative reaction was to the theological means by which Kushner accomplished that dissociation: the placing of limits upon our notion of divine power. People seemed ready to accept-even to welcome-the notion of divine suffering, but the notion of divine limits seemed to compromise the very godness of God and to threaten God's redemptive powers. Kushner's oft-quoted confession, "I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die," captured the heart of his "theodic" resolution and evoked both the personal relief and the theological shock that characterized the public response. This polar response accomplished what a half century of academic debate could not. It brought into public awareness the mutually obstructive character of two currently powerful, religious ideas: the dissociation of God from senseless forms of evil and the association of God with the notion of
|
|
297 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
unlimitedness. Kushner, of course, dismisses into the dustbin of "fatuous nonsense" the notion of God's unlimited power. He dismisses the notion that allows us to believe that God can do whatever God pleases or that God can intervene in nature and history whenever and wherever God likes or that God can compel the actions of others. Whatever the problems in the no doubt too unqualified character of this dismissal, it had the virtue of uncovering what previously had been obscured: that we are not dealing simply with two conflicting ideas in our mind. Rather, in our mind, there are two consciousnesses, the modern and the traditional, and each sits uneasily alongside the other, producing incompatible ideas. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that those of us who are religious have a divided consciousness, one side of which we inherit through the worldview present in the Bible's three-storied picture of the universe and implicit in much biblical language, and the other we inherit through the worldview informed by the central theories and images of the universe given to us by modern science.
The history of the relation of science to religion has not, on the whole, been a constructive one. There has been too much conflict in that history, too much of a sense that the theories of science threaten the truths of faith, especially the truth of God's existence. Part of the reason for the split in the religious person's consciousness is the fear of the incompatibility of the truths of science and religion. The theory of "creationism," advanced by conservative and fundamentalist Christians, reflects that fear. Kushner's theology, in all his books, demonstrates the compatibility of a deeply held and lived religious faith with a basic acceptance of a modern scientific picture of the universe. For Kushner, what is incompatible with a modem consciousness is not the notion of God, but the notion of a God with unlimited power. This message, for the many with a divided consciousness, is felt as relief; yet questions, and worries, linger.
The worry, of course, is that a God with limited power cannot fulfill the redemptive promises upon which faith depends. Some have proposed that the notion of self-limited power can meet that worry and satisfy the need of a theodicy both to account for senseless suffering and to allow for a modern worldview. In our post-holocaust times, the notion of God's power as self-limited finds support across the theological spectrum. Winiarz, speaking out of orthodox Judaism, reminds Kushner of the "common Jewish position, classical, medieval, and modern" that God grants permission "for the destroyer to destroy." He adds, in a critical slap, that "no classical Jewish position has ever maintained that God is incapable of controlling the (destroyer)." Similarly, Philip Yancey, writing in Christianity Today (August 1983), criticizes Kushner's view that God lacks the power to "hold back the chaos." Instead, he argues, "God's self-imposed limitation," designed to promote such high possibilities as freely given human love, accounts for the presence of chaos and evil. Yancey points
|
|
298 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
to the cross to illustrate his argument. Jesus' suffering, he says, is not a question of impotence; he "could have called on a legion of angels" to rescue him. Of course, the idea of divine self-restraint as necessary to allow for the high possibility of freely given love was advanced by John Hick in his 1966 book Evil and the God of Love.
Kushner is aware of the notion of a self-limited God. He hovers close to it in discussing the relation of evil to human freedom, where the Holocaust looms as the backdrop of his analysis (in chapter five of When Bad Things Happen to Good People). Kushner begins by identifying freedom as the divine image in us, the mark distinguishing humans from animals. To be human is to be free, to have a God-given ability to choose between good and evil. For Kushner, this means that, no matter what horrors we perpetrate, "God can't stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human. God can only look down in pity and compassion at how little we have learned." This statement can be interpreted in two ways: (1) God's unlimited power is freely held under self-restraint in order to allow for the existence of (free) human beings; or (2) the existence of free (human) beings means a limit on God's controlling powers. In the second case, of course, God's creation of freedom, not God's self-restraint, sets limits to divine power.
Significantly, Kushner's speech loses its ambivalence when he directly discusses the holocaust. He asks where God was and cites Dorothee Soelle's answer that God was with the victims and not with the murderers. Kushner asks why God did not intervene and strike Hitler dead and answers, "[Hjaving given Man freedom to choose, including the freedom to choose to hurt his neighbor, there was nothing God could do to prevent it." Kushner's argument is close to the one advanced by Kierkegaard in a footnote in Christian Discourses. Kierkegaard located the true mark of divine omnipotence in the power to create free beings, rather than in the unlimited power to control all beings. What precipitated Kierkegaard's reinterpretation of omnipotence was his understanding of the self as (self-transcendent) spirit. What precipitated Kushner's reinterpretation is, of course, not an abstract analysis, but human suffering on a "holocaustic" scale that forbids him, psychologically, if not logically, from invoking a doctrine of self-restraint to account for it. God's "No" to the horrors of the holocaust had to be unequivocal. It is not only a God who "chooses" to make children suffer that Kushner cannot worship. He also cannot worship a God who would "allow" children to suffer-regardless of the high-minded reasons advanced by the Winiarzs, Yanceys, and Hicks of the theological world.
Kushner has another reason for placing limits on God's power, as Yancey well understands in berating Kushner for stating that God cannot "hold back the chaos." There are evils that arise not out of the abuse or mutual obstructiveness of human freedom, but out of the instabilities and randomness of natural forces. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, diseases, physical malformations, and so forth, suggest
|
|
299 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
instabilities in the created world, and the "chance-like" character of much evil suggests an element of randomness in the forces of nature and history. Kushner, therefore, needs some other reason than God's creation of free humans to account for the full range of evil. "God cannot hold back the chaos" provides that reason. But what does Kushner mean by it? We know that, with regard to humans, God's power, however we conceive it, is not of the sort that can override or intervene in the expression of human freedom. Similarly, with regard to the instabilities and randomness of natural forces, however we conceive God's power in relation to nature, it cannot be of the sort that overrides or intervenes in nature's expression of its God-given order and modes of relating. This does not mean that God's power is not continually effective in nature-at a minimum, Kushner holds that God provides the order of nature-but the mode of that effect cannot be of the intervening sort. We are back to Kushner's modern religious consciousness, which seeks to think through the notion of divine activity in a way coherent with a modern picture of the universe. Thus, Kushner maintains the intelligibility of his thinking, but not without raising further questions about the nature of God's relation to the world and our relation to God. It is not surprising that his latest book is entitled Who Needs God? but it is significant that in it he devotes a full chapter to the nature of prayer.
There is a fear that haunts theologians who write from and to a modern consciousness. The fear is that, in meeting faith's need for intelligibility, we will inadvertently undermine the religious piety and sensibility without which a living faith cannot survive. Part of the power of Kushner's writings is that they constantly work to allay that fear, perhaps because his constant story telling and his "correlation" methodology address not simply the mind of the religious life, but also the life of the religious person, including the mind. Kushner does not simply provide us with theological ideas consonant with a modern consciousness, leaving it to us to work out the appropriate changes in our piety. He takes on the necessary task of helping us into a piety reflective of a modern religious consciousness. That is the importance of his chapter on prayer (and, also, in Who Needs God? of the adjoining chapters on the sense of the sacred, the moral life under God, the hiddenness of God, and so on).
Kushner makes it clear that Buber's I-Thou relational theology underlies his understanding of prayer. He sees individualism with its myth of independence, its competitiveness, and its focus on our needs (and not the needs of others) as the basic barrier to genuine prayer. In fact, we are relational beings; we need personal, I-Thou relations with others, and we need an I-Thou relation with God. The more we focus on our individual needs, the more we drive others away, and the more we tend to use God to meet our needs as if God were an "it," an object there to serve our purposes. True prayer, he says, will lead us into meeting God, not using God. This "meeting" with God is at the heart of prayer; it brings us to see things from God's perspective so that we
|
|
300 - When Modern Consciousness Happens to Good People: Revisiting Harold Kushner |
come to see ourselves and our world differently. It also teaches us how to hear others and respond to their needs, thereby meeting our own deep need for belonging and community.
How are we to pray then? What are we to pray for? We are to offer prayers of thanksgiving, expressing gratitude for our life, for the good things that we do have, for God's strengthening presence and for God's love. We are to pray for God's love, knowing that we have it, even if, by the world's standards, we are unsuccessful. We may even pray for things, Kushner allows, as such prayers help us to acknowledge our limits. The very fact of our asking demonstrates we are not in control of things. Kushner remains the existentialist; we find God at the point that we acknowledge our limits. We are to pray to be a channel of love and strength to others, and we are to acknowledge our own need of, and thanks for, communal support. And, of course, prayer itself, the talking to God, moves us into God's presence, nurturing our sense of the mystery and awe at the base of things. In ways such as this, Kushner answers his critics who charge that his God is too "sick and feeble" (Charles Colson's words) to possess redemptive power: not with analytical arguments but by picturing forth a religious piety consonant with a modern consciousness.
V
Kushner never claims to be an original theologian. There is nothing in his theology that has not been there for the "picking" since the middle of this century. Thus, his popularity provides the clue to the great need of the church and synagogue in the second half of this century: for pastoral theologians who live and work with their congregations and who know how to lead religious people beyond their split consciousness into a reflective, vital, lived piety consonant with their modern consciousness. If we in the mainstream churches, in our "malaise," learn that this is our need, we will have learned much.
There is much we will not learn from Kushner. In many ways, his is a "dated" modern consciousness. The voices of the traditionally marginalized others-blacks, women, third world people-who increasingly have been sounding their religious perspectives since the 60s, are not heard in Kushner's books. Only in his last two books does he begin to show some sensitivity to feminist concerns regarding the use of inclusive language. Nor are the changes in the philosophy of science that have moved it beyond its former positivism noted here. Similarly, the dialogues that are currently going on among the world's religions are barely hinted at-and so on. For all that, Kushner's consciousness is not that dated. The rampant problems of individualism, so sharply brought to our attention recently in Bellah and company's Habits of the Heart, are one of his central concerns. In any event, we do well not to carp at Kushner for what he has not done and to take notice of what he has done.