In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology.

Neville, Robert Cummings

By Gordon D. Kaufman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1993. Pp. xv + 509. $39.95.

Twenty-five years after his Systematic Theology, Kaufman has published a truly systematic liberal theology, arguably the best and possibly the last. It is a grand book.

K. begins with an exposition of his theological method of imaginative construction. He describes theology in every period as the ongoing attempt to make sense of life in its basic elements. Theology is the imaginative reconstruction of the ancestral images particular to each culture to meet the needs of contemporary life. Contemporary theology, e.g., must find life's meaning in a world interpreted also by science, which was not a problem for the theologians at Nicea. Theology is not intended to refer to independent realities such as God, K. argues. But Christian theology appeals to the idea of the absolute and transcendent creator of the universe to make sense of the encompassing mystery that appears behind everything. (K.'s dogged testimony to mystery runs counter to the liberal meliorism of much of the rest of his theology.) The Christian appeal to God is also intended to make sense of the ultimate claims on our moral behavior that are part of the Christian worldview, providing fundamental orientations for human practice.

Next K. elaborates his modern understanding of human nature, emphasizing what we know from biology, what claims morality lays upon us, the importance of self-consciousness, subjectivity, freedom, and responsibility, and how issues such as ecological concerns require a reordering of the human agenda. Here K. is remarkably like John Dewey in, say, Human Nature and Conduct.

K. goes on to construct a concept of the world as the context of human existence. The world, in K.'s view, has no intrinsic purpose nor is it for human life in any special sense. Rather it is the outcome of serendipitous natural processes, set off perhaps by the Big Bang. But K. recommends for Christian theology the taking of six "small steps of faith" (see the chart on 287), each so innocuous as not to offend a fully modern sensibility but cumulatively adding up to faith in God. The first step is to commit ourselves to thinking through a responsible position on "ultimate questions about life, death, and reality" (244). The second is to opt for a view of the world as evolutionary and historical, with a (serendipitous) place for human life, rather than a view of the world as mere physical structure and order which is also compatible with the scientific facts. The third is to take note of the fact that serendipity manifests creativity, i.e. the development of the new. In the human context this novelty gives rise to the achievements of human responsibility and civilization and it is but a small (fourth) step of faith to see the serendipitous creativity of the universe as setting a trajectory toward (among other things) the human and humane. The fifth step is to summarize the imaginative riches of the Christian concept of God as the ground for humanization in those creative serendipitous forces; God is the mystery behind or in those cosmic forces that make human culture and morality possible. The sixth step is to take Jesus Christ to be the key both to normative humanness and humaneness and to the nature of God as the sum of humanizing forces.

K. next develops the concept of God as an ultimate point of reference, not a being or ground referred to by the theological concept but rather a way the humanly creative cosmic processes are to be understood in the life of faith. With this concept of God, we can understand sin and evil and our own responsibility. The Christian understanding of Jesus Christ provides the character content for this, although God is not to be understood as a person in any traditional way. Finally, K. draws out the implications of this view of God for the practice of Christians in their churches.

Several questions can be raised for further discussion. Why is K.'s strategy of avoiding a large leap of faith by taking several small steps of faith, each of which seems unobjectionable though gratuitous, not dangerous because of their cumulative consequence, namely a great unwarranted fiction laid upon the evidence? The evidence in fact is that creative serendipity is countered by destructive serendipity; cosmic entropy drags pain, dissolution, and frustration of promise in its wake. When K. says that "our religious symbolism is not valid in its own right, but only to the extent that it represents, and thus reinforces, those cosmic and historical tendencies and forces which are moving us toward further humanization" (334), does he not have it backward? Religious symbolism on K.'s interpretation would be valid only in its own right because it chooses to refer only to those cosmic and historical tendencies that agree with it. If religious symbolism were meant to be truly referential, it would have to refer to all cosmic and historical tendencies and forces, and adjust itself to represent the terrible, wicked, and destructive movements as well as the humanizing ones.

Having made these critical points, let it be said that K. is right to see in his ethics that grand schemes are mischievous and that progress is made by making our neighborhoods ever more humane. This is a great book of liberal theology. That it might be the last such book stems from the fear that humanistic ethics might accomplish his purposes without the need for reimagining any religious symbols whatsoever. Only K.'s continued appeal to mystery hedges this conclusion.