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The Ethics of Radwaste Disposal

High-level radioactive waste is piling up around our nuclear power generation plants. It is dangerous -- and something needs to be done about it.

The U.S. government will take steps to do something about it within this decade. Most likely it will be disposed of through burial in deep mines or salt domes. The planning was set in motion by President Jimmy Carter’s directive to Congress on February 12, 1980, wherein he said, “My paramount objective in managing nuclear wastes is to protect the health and safety of all Americans, both now and in the future.” The Carter plan was to begin developing a safe and permanent technology so that terminal disposal of radwastes could begin in 1997. Now the Reagan administration wants to speed that process up by a decade.

It is commonly recognized that the radioactivity and extreme toxicity of nuclear reactor postfission effluent and spent fuel rods constitute a hazard to human health and safety. It is also very expensive to handle these materials. Will someone try to cut expenses for the sake of increased profit and thereby increase the danger? Even if the money needed to ensure safety is granted, will its expenditure guarantee security? If so, for how long? What about the people who will have to live near the disposal sites? And what about their great-great-grandchildren? If radwastes must be disposed of, let us do it the right way.

How does the question of reactor waste disposal relate to the overall issue of whether or not we should employ nuclear power generation at all? First, even if we were to impose an immediate moratorium on all nuclear reactor construction and cease operating all existing reactors, the problem of radwaste disposal would still be before us.

Waste already exists. At present 5,900 tons of high-level waste (HLW) in the form of spent fuel assemblies are sitting in pools next to operating reactors, together with 75 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, plus 27 million cubic feet of trans-uranic waste (TRU). All of these by-products have a property of high-intensity, penetrating radioactivity. The TRUs are especially dangerous because they emit the highly carcinogenic alpha particles. Many of these materials will remain toxic for 10,000 or -- in the case of plutonium -- for 250,000 years. Whether or not we produce more waste, the present inventory will require careful placement.

In the attempt to put a stop to further reactor construction, the antinuclear movement may be tempted to constipate the system -- to plug up the radwaste outlet for the nuclear industry -- hoping thereby to force a shutdown of electrical power generation. Whether or not this tactic could be successful, it would contravene the stated goal of the antinuclear program: the protection of the public and the environment.

Current temporary storage facilities spread all across the land are more hazardous than long-term burial. Where they are now, sitting at ground surface, HLWs and TRUs are far more susceptible to natural disruptions like earthquakes and tornadoes. They are also more difficult to guard against sabotage, terrorism and theft. The fact that it takes only 8.8 pounds of plutonium to produce an atomic bomb in the one-kiloton range makes spent fuel rods an alluring target for sophisticated revolutionary groups. These risks would be reduced as the waste materials are collected into only three deep subterranean locations. It is in the long-range interest of both sides of the nuclear power debate to produce a safe permanent disposal program.

Where will the waste go? It will have to be buried in somebody’s backyard. Will living in the vicinity of a high-level nuclear waste disposal site be hazardous to one’s health? The solution to the safety question is not yet clear. The Department of Energy is confident that we either have the technology now or soon will have it to keep escaping radiation to a level “as low as is reasonably achievable.”

Here we will mention three relevant considerations: the government’s “multiple barrier” plan, quality control in implementation, and intergenerational ethics.

First, it is the stated intention of the Department of Energy (DOE) officials that the hazard be minimized through the use of the “multiple barrier” plan. The canister for containing radioactive waste will be carefully constructed. Sandia Laboratories has designed one that can withstand a broadside crash from a train traveling 60 miles per hour without releasing its contents. The DOE believes such a canister of aluminum oxide with 100mm thick walls can conservatively withstand the action of groundwater for thousands of years.” In saying this, the DOE is addressing concern about leaks into groundwater that might migrate back to the earth’s surface and infect the biosphere. The container will be placed in a concrete sleeve or over-pack for additional protection. It will then be buried 2,000 to 4,000 feet deep in a carefully chosen geological formation.

The host formation is very important. In the event of an underground leak, we want a surrounding rock that will impede travel of the toxic materials. Granite, tuff, basalt and salt domes are the likeliest candidates. The U.S. government plans to drill exploratory shafts in at least three locations by the mid-1980s. Rural sites are being studied in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Nevada, Utah and Washington. The DOE will stake its claim that the program is safe on the combination of technical and natural barriers.



The second consideration has to do with implementation. No matter how high the quality of engineering or how safe the design, unless the disposal program is carried out with care and thoroughness, it will be useless.

In 1960 considerable radwaste was dumped into the Pacific Ocean near the Farallon Islands just west of San Francisco. I interviewed one of the ship workers involved. The waste was in 55-gallon drums, along with a few concrete boxes or crates holding contaminated clothing and medical supplies.

“How many barrels did you dump?” I asked.

“Hmmm.” He thought for a minute, calculating the number of barrels per boatload and the number of boatloads. “I’d say about 2,500 or 3,000.”

“Some people say the barrels were already leaking when you dumped them. Is that true?”

 

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember any with leaks.”

 

“Then why do you think California congressional committees are in an uproar? Do they have the wrong information?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because we shot ‘em.

 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

 

“Well,” he went on, “some of the barrels wouldn’t sink when we first dumped them overboard. So we took out our rifles and shot ‘em full of holes until the water went in and sunk ‘em.”

 

I believe we can assume that shooting barrels full of holes was not part of the original disposal plan. This incident illustrates an enduring concern: quality control in implementation. The safety record of the industry and the U.S. government to this point is not without blemish. Some 430,000 gallons of nuclear waste effluent have gradually leaked from a dump site at Hanford, Washington, threatening the ecology of the Columbia River system. In 1979 an earthen dam operated by United Nuclear Corporation near Church Rock in New Mexico broke, releasing 94 million gallons of low-level radioactive waste into the Rio Puerco. The contaminated river has nearly destroyed the livestock-based economy of the Navajo Indians living downstream. The “best-laid plans” will be for naught unless we maintain unyielding vigilance throughout the disposal process. If we have the technical capacity to build safety into the design, then we must insist on the managerial power to perform it.



Then there is the question of intergenerational ethics. Our radioactive garbage will remain hazardous for 10,000 years or more; what is our responsibility to people as yet unborn?

I believe we have a moral obligation toward the future; I call it the protect posterity principle. The human community of which each one of us is a member is universal; we are united not only in space but over time.

The present generation should make three commitments. First, we should commit ourselves to employing the best technology and management we have to reduce the degree of risk to as low a level as possible. The DOE contends that present designs for engineered and natural barriers will keep HLW and TRU isolated despite water movement, earthquakes or impacts from giant meteors; and it will emit a minimum of radionuclides if accidentally drilled into. We should not compromise these designs to save money or personnel.

Second, we owe our grandchildren knowledge of the hazard. At every level of present discussion we should require candid sharing of information. This includes leaving a detailed message describing the location and nature of our radwaste grave. A stone monument on the site with warnings in multiple languages and with diagrams seems the least we can do.

There may be a third commitment we should make. Because it is our generation that will benefit from the wealth produced by nuclear fission reactors, all our heirs will receive is our radioactive garbage. Should they have to pay to protect themselves from our trash? I suggest that we set aside an endowment fund from current profits, so as to share future management expenses and to provide accident insurance. Some people believe site monitoring may have to go on for 700 years. Who should pay for it? Suppose there should be a leak 300 years hence and an emergency situation is declared, requiring great effort and expense to protect the people then living. Who will be liable? A fund with compound interest and minimum withdrawal could build up a rather large sum over a century or two, providing considerable fiscal protection to future generations.

Already a handful of communities have been approached by industry and government officials seeking disposal sites. Final decisions will not be made until after tests are returned from an exploratory shaft and an agreement has been worked out with local residents.

Some community somewhere will have to play host. It will be doing the whole nation a favor. What the country owes that community is to carry out the disposal program correctly. The best technology must be employed. Safety must not be compromised. Candid information must be shared. Posterity must be protected.

Even if we accomplish all these aims, we still leave open the bigger question of whether we should allow contemporary affluence to become dependent on fission power. If we fail to come up with a satisfactory disposal program, the answer has to be No.

Chariots, UFOs, and the Mystery of God

Twenty million copies of Chariots of the Gods? (Bantam, 1968) have been sold, and its author, the young Swiss Erich von Däniken, is campaigning aggressively for converts to ‘his thesis that our earth was visited by interstellar travelers between 40,000 and 500 BC. He sanctioned "In Search of Ancient Astronauts," the TV travelogue that has been screened throughout the U.S. in the past year or so. Narrated by Rod Serling, it presents the evidence supporting von Däniken’s claim. More recently, he authorized a full-length feature movie bearing the book’s title. The movie -- a 90-minute compilation of footage taken at various archaeological sites around the globe which purportedly proves the thesis -- has now been released in most Western countries. (Currently it is showing at 24 theaters in Moscow.)

Symptoms of the Pseudo-Scientist

How has von Däniken managed to get such a grip on the curiosity of Europeans and Americans? I submit that his views are received so avidly because they appear to wed scientific method with religious doctrine. A decade ago, as Theodore Roszak and others have pointed out, our young people repudiated the West’s scientific mind-set. But today’s college students have turned away from the counterculture of the ‘60s and, like the older generation, profess to value science. At the same time, both groups are in quest of new religious foundations. Unfortunately, most of these people are not sophisticated enough in either science or religion to be able to discriminate between good and bad science and between true and false religion. That is why a book like Chariots of the Gods? has been so eagerly received. It seems to blend science and religion in an exciting and respectable way. In fact, however, it does nothing of the sort. Consider von Däniken’s "science" first.

In his delightful Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Dover, 1957), Martin Gardner describes the characteristics which distinguish the pseudo-scientist, or crank, from the orthodox scientist. For one thing, the pseudo-scientist works in almost total isolation; i.e., he holds no fruitful dialogue with fellow researchers. Of course he insists that his isolation is not his fault but that of the established scientific community and its prejudice against new ideas. He never tires of citing the numerous novel scientific theories which were initially condemned but later proved true.

Second, the pseudo-scientist is likely to be paranoiac. Gardner lists five ways in which these paranoid tendencies manifest themselves: (1) the pseudo-scientist considers himself a genius and (2) regards his colleagues as ignorant blockheads; (3) he believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against; (4) he focuses his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories; and (5) he often employs a complex jargon and in many cases coins words and phrases (neologisms) of his own. Do any of these characteristics fit Erich von Däniken? Except for the fifth, I suggest that they do.

Von Däniken’s thesis is this: the postulate that the earth was once visited by spacemen from another world serves better to account for ancient artifacts than do the scientific theories now accepted (p. 51). Why then has the scientific community either refused to consider von Däniken’s position or rejected it out of hand? For several reasons. First, scientific investigation as now carried on is out of date, because the investigations do not ask of the past questions based on our knowledge of space travel; i.e., they presuppose that ancient man could not fly, consequently they cannot accurately assess evidence that he did when they find it (pp. 13 f., 83). Yet the only conclusions available to research are those which are arrived at in response to the questions asked. If you do not ask the right questions, the right answers will never appear. To put it another way, von Däniken claims that if archaeology does not question its data on the basis of what we now know about space travel, it cannot possibly set up an explanatory theory that takes account of space travel. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this claim; it is sound hermeneutics.

But the second reason von Däniken advances to explain orthodox science’s prejudiced condemnation of his postulate sounds a bit more "pseudo." He argues that today’s scientists stubbornly persist in refusing to admit that they need to change their methods and theories (pp. 29, 61, 80, 107, 122). Since they assume that ours is the most advanced civilization in the history of this planet, they are blind to any evidence that civilizations higher than our own once existed (pp. 28, 73). For example, present archaeological theory explains artifacts in terms of "primitive" religion and refuses to entertain other possibilities (p. 32). Thus the orthodox scientific community has shut itself off from the truth beforehand. Here is a clear symptom of the pseudo-scientist: the established scientists are block-heads who cannot see past their noses.

Von Däniken’s third reason is an extension of the second. He claims that modern science will not consider any theoretical explanations which tend to cast doubt on the accuracy of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. He says that "even the scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . . were still caught in the mental fetters of thousand-year-old errors, because the way back would inevitably have called in question parts of the biblical story"(p.50). It is amazing that, after all we have been through with Galileo, Darwin, Freud and fundamentalism, von Däniken should still speak of a scientific-religious conspiracy to defend the literal authority of the Bible. In projecting a conspiracy against himself, the pseudo-scientist reveals one of the most serious symptoms of paranoia. Certainly von Däniken’s ego seems to be of grandiose dimensions, for what greater establishment could a theorist seek to triumph over than a unified Judeo-Christian- scientific conspiracy?

Von Däniken’s fourth argument for the credibility of his claim is that the orthodox scientific community has frequently erred in the past (pp. 6, 29f, 68). For thousands of years it insisted that the sun orbits the earth, and less than a hundred years ago it decreed that objects heavier than air could never fly. That von Däniken stands alone against gigantic opposition from the scientific establishment does not prove that he is wrong. Rather, it suggests that the scientific establishment, having been wrong so often in the past, may well be wrong again. Here surely is the pseudo-scientist harping on an obvious theme to his own advantage.

Easter Island Revisited

An examination of von Däniken’s argument from literary and archaeological evidence indicts him beyond appeal. Invariably he employs a four-step formula: (1) he reports an interesting archaeological discovery or cites a passage from ancient literature; (2) he describes it as only partly explained or even baffling; (3) he raises a hypothetical question regarding its origin, sometimes suggesting intervention from outer space; and (4) he goes on to another subject.

Thus von Däniken speaks about Easter Island and the hundreds of gigantic stone statues that have been standing there since time immemorial. Some of these colossi are as much as 66 feet high and weigh as much as 50 tons each (pp. 90,96). Originally they wore stone hats weighing over ten tons apiece. What is more, the stone for the hats came from a quarry different from that which supplied the stone for the bodies, and in addition the hats had to be hoisted high in the air. The usual explanation is that the stone giants and their hats were moved to their present sites on wooden rollers and put in place by the conventional "heave-ho" methods. But von Däniken is amazed at the very suggestion that primitive people could accomplish such feats of engineering. He speculates that even 2,000 men, working day and night (for how long?), would not be nearly enough to carve these colossal figures out of the steel-hard volcanic stone with rudimentary tools; and the island is so small that it could scarcely have provided food for more than 2,000 people. So von Däniken dangles questions before the reader: ". . . who did the work? And how did they manage it?" (p. 91). This surely is an egregious case of the argumentum ad ignorantiam; it proceeds by way of an unanswerable challenge to disprove rather than by way of a serious attempt to prove. We are supposed to conclude that highly skilled technicians from space were responsible. Von Däniken then turns to another topic.

But let me cite a few facts about Easter Island that will reveal the "pseudo" quality of von Däniken’s scientific investigation. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl seems to have resolved the mystery in his book Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (Rand McNally, 1958). He persuaded some of the natives of the island to demonstrate the procedure for carving and erecting the statues. He found that it would take six men using simple stone implements about a year to carve a 15-foot statue. Next, 180 men attached ropes to a statue weighing between 25 and 30 tons and pulled it across the island by the ancient "heave-ho" method. They demonstrated also how the colossi were stood upright by pushing stones under a log lever and how ramps were constructed to put the hats on top. Von Däniken quotes Heyerdahl in Chariots of the Gods? -- but very selectively.

The Numbers Game

Von Däniken also plays the numbers game. He asks, for example, ". . . is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops [in Egypt] multiplied by a thousand million -- 98 million miles -- corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and the sun? . . Is it a coincidence that the area of the base of the pyramid divided by twice its height gives the celebrated figure pi, 3.14159265?" (pp. 76f.). We are supposed to conclude that the pyramids were constructed under the supervision of spacemen. But in Fads and Fallacies Gardner analyzes the baffling numbers technique. If you set about measuring a complicated structure like the pyramid of Cheops, he says, you will soon have dozens of measurements to play with; and if you have the patience to juggle them about in various ways, you are bound to come out with many figures that coincide with important historical dates or with scientific calculations.

Gardner supposes, just for the fun of it, that the number five has a particularly numinous quality, and then imagines that he opens the World Almanac to the entry on the Washington Monument.

Its height is 555 feet and 5 inches. The base is 55 feet square, and the windows are set at 500 feet from the base. If the base is multiplied by 60 (or five times the number of months in a year) it gives 3,300, which is the exact weight of the capstone in pounds. Also, the word "Washington" has exactly ten letters (two times five). And if the weight of the capstone is multiplied by the base, the result is 181,500 -- a fairly close approximation of the speed of light in miles per second. If the base is measured with a ‘Monument foot," which is slightly smaller than the standard foot, its side comes to 55 1/2 feet. This times 33,000 yields a figure even closer to the speed of light. . . . It should take an average mathematician about fifty-five minutes to discover the above "truths," working only with the meager figures provided by the Almanac [op. cit,, p. 179].

Bible readers will be interested in another of von Däniken’s arguments. He writes: ". . . without actually consulting Exodus, I seem to remember that the Ark was often surrounded by flashing sparks. . . Undoubtedly the Ark was electrically charged" (p. 40; italics mine). He goes on to insist that God was really a spaceman with whom Moses communicated via an electrical transmitter whenever he needed help or advice. Well, I have consulted Exodus and could not locate the flashing sparks. I am not flatly saying that von Däniken’s thesis is wrong. But I say that if scholarly integrity is part of what defines genuine science, Erich von Däniken definitely belongs on the pseudo-science side of the ledger.

God as Supertechnician

What von Däniken actually says about religion is not immediately clear to me, though it seems to be clear to some of his readers -- for instance, to the retired Denver businessman who, after reading Chariots of the Gods?, remarked that all of our Western ideas about religion will have to be rethought.

Happily, one R. L. Dione, a schoolteacher from Old Saybrook, Connecticut, has published God Drives a Flying Saucer (Bantam, 1968), a little jewel of a book which might serve as the theological extension of von Däniken’s theory. Although working independently of von Däniken, Dione operates on the same hermeneutical principle: reinterpretation of the past from the standpoint of space-age presuppositions. In his case, the past is the Bible and the presupposition is that flying saucers, or UFOs, are manned by humanoid creatures from outer space. He argues that God is not supernatural but supertechnological, and is capable of producing by technical-mechanical means all acts hitherto attributed to his miraculous powers. God is really a humanoid creature, living on another planet. who has made himself immortal through technology. He created the human race on earth for his entertainment -- in order to observe our evolution.

Dione seems under a compulsion to translate everything in our religious tradition which hints of the supernatural into naturalistic terms. His credo is a stern faith in natural science. He maintains that miracles, Christian or otherwise, break no laws of nature; that as soon as science understands all the laws of nature we shall realize that miracles can never occur. God is a technician, not a magician (pp. 44 f.). To be sure, the Bible says that Jesus miraculously healed the crippled and the blind. But what really happened was this: spacemen had previously hypnotized certain people into infirmities of a psychosomatic nature, and at the same time had programmed them to respond to Jesus by way of posthypnotic suggestion. Again, the Bible tells of the visits to Abraham and others by supernatural beings known as angels; however, they were really messengers from outer space who were trying to influence the course of human affairs according to God’s interplanetary directives. With regard to the Virgin Mary -- who was undoubtedly a virgin at Jesus’ birth -- the angel Gabriel was a biological specialist who artificially inseminated the Mother of God with a hypodermic needle. The semen, of course, came from that supertechnological deity somewhere in the outer reaches of space. Dione even explains the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917; the Lady, he says, was a UFO hovering above the ground, shedding a mist which lent it a luminous glow, and then communicating telepathic messages calling the people of Portugal to repentance and faith.

What such theories make clear, it seems to me, is that their authors are driven by a strong desire to re-explain the more mysterious dimensions of our spiritual existence in naturalistic categories. Theorists like von Däniken and Dione believe that all reality is just a finite number of natural laws, all of which can in principle be known -- and then perhaps manipulated -- by the human mind. Obviously the mood or mind-set of naturalistic scientific thinking has a grip on these authors and their followers. But they are scientific only in mood, because in their haste to supply the ultimate explanation they have flouted the rules basic to scientific method: tedious experimentation and cautious hypothesizing.

It must be said, however, that the urge to re-explain religious mysteries is not unique to UFO theologians; it has been pervasive among religious intellectuals for the past two centuries. How often have we been told that the ecstatic prophets and demon-possessed characters of the Bible were merely victims of what we now know as epilepsy? Or that the fire and brimstone which the Lord sent down on Sodom and Gomorrah were really the result of an explosion of the sulfur beds underlying those cities? No, the naturalistic perspective is as much a part of our religious consciousness today as is the Bible itself. In this sense, von Däniken is simply doing what other theologians are doing. What is at issue is whether he does it well or not. In my opinion he does not do it well at all.

Holy Therapy: Can a Drug do the Work of the Spirit?

What if science could demonstrate that original sin is something we inherit from our families either through the genes or our upbringing or both? And if science could show us how we inherit a predisposition toward sin, might science also show us how to heal the soul and harvest fruits of the Spirit? For instance, could the laboratory produce a drug that would do the work of the Holy Spirit?

I will answer these last questions in the affirmative, but in the process I will try to clarify what Christian theology means by original sin and inherited sin. Under the hypothesis of genetic determinism or genetic influence, questions are being asked about biological factors in human behavior. This becomes especially relevant to theology when the behavior in question is either sinful or virtuous.

Let’s take a look at a scientific study -- we will call it the X chromosome study -- that addresses the question of genetic influence in moderating environmental influence on antisocial or criminal behavior. This study examined young boys who were maltreated in their youth (Avshalom Caspl et al., "Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children," Science, August 2, 2002). The researchers asked: why do some male children who are maltreated in their home grow up to develop antisocial behavior traits while others do not?

The assumptions behind the research question are worth noting. First, boys were selected because the researchers were already looking for a factor on the X chromosome which only males carry; they assumed, in other words, that the antisocial behavior in question is a gender-specific phenomenon. Second, the researchers assumed that maltreatment of young boys increases the risk that they will grow up exhibiting antisocial symptoms and being violent offenders -- that a social environment of victimization exerts a strong influence toward becoming a victimizer.

The researchers focused on 26-year-old males who had been severely maltreated between the ages of three and 11, and slated them for genetic testing. They examined the gene on the X chromosome for monoamine oxidase. A (MAOA), a gene that governs a neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzyme in the brain. Those young men whose MAOA gene exhibited low expression levels were much more likely to exhibit aggressive antisocial behavior and become incarcerated for violent crimes than those whose gene exhibited a high level of expression. Conversely the effect of childhood maltreatment on antisocial behavior was significantly weaker among males with high MAOA activity. Moreover, the researchers noted that maltreated males with low MAOA activity were more likely than nonmaltreated males with this genotype to be convicted of a violent crime, a finding that reinforced the environmental assumption identified above. Finally, they concluded that the association between maltreatment and antisocial behavior is conditional, depending on a child’s MAOA genotype.

In sum, environmental or social influences are relevant but insufficient to explain antisocial behavior, genotype must be factored in. The DNA is decisive.

Both the beginning assumptions and research conclusions are deterministic in structure. They began with the assumption of environmental determinism -- if maltreated, young boys will grow up antisocial. Then they shifted to genetic determinism -- gene expression exacerbates or mitigates environmental influence. The net effect of both the assumptions and the conclusion is that some boys are born into situations in which the combination of gene expression and social context heavily determine what kind of person they will be. Do such findings contradict or complement what theologians have traditionally believed?

We could imagine that a modern Pelagian might want to defy the science of the X chromosome study by asserting that we are born morally neutral, that we enter the world and grow up with the capacity to decide equally between right and wrong. Good and evil are equal options standing before a freely deciding human psyche. Assumptions about determinism, either biological or social, would have to be dismissed as compromising this morally neutral anthropology. The theological position that we are born morally neutral will find rough sledding in this scientific environment.

An Augustinian, in contrast, might see such scientific research as partially demonstrating what most Christians have assumed all along: that we emerge from our mother’s womb with a self-orientation that makes loving God and loving neighbor contradictory to our innate predisposition. We are born homo incurvatus in se, curved in upon ourselves. It takes an act of divine grace to reorient us toward loving God and loving our neighbor as we would love ourselves. It takes the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to orient our hearts and wills and minds toward expressing the fruits of the Spirit.

This theological perspective is much broader and more sweeping in scope than what appears in the X chromosome study which does not ask about the total orientation of the human self. It deals with only one segment of human behavior, and a pattern of behavior that applies to some but not all of us. But this restriction does not obviate the value of comparing science and theology. Science is still quite relevant to theological anthropology. If genetic inheritance and social inheritance combine to predispose us to behavior with moral significance, then we can hypothesize that some level of biological and environmental determinism has an effect on everyone’s life. Our genes and our family experience provide both opportunity and constraint for the kind of person we will grow up to be.

Although we are focusing here on a predisposition toward sinful behavior, in another setting we might provide a parallel analysis of caring behavior. I believe we can safely assume that favorable genotypes and loving family contexts increase a child’s opportunity to grow up with high-minded values and an increased capacity for loving his or her neighbor.

A nuance related to the X chromosome study might be worth pondering here. The young men studied were victims of maltreatment. We might wish to ask: do they love themselves? Does their whelming experience of abuse permit the emergence of self-love, or might maltreatment more likely retard the growth of self-worth and leave the child with self-loathing? Might the antisocial behavior in question be an expression of self-hatred rather than a self-love unable to expand to include others? If the Augustinian lens through which sin is interpreted is that sin is too much love for self and not enough love for God or neighbor, then perhaps we need a more subtle analysis of the young men in the X chromosome study If scripture is light -- that we love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19) -- then all of us, these young men included, need first to experience love before the capacity to love either self or neighbor can develop. Perhaps we need to experience unconditional love before we can develop the capacity to love others unconditionally. This may be the way grace works toward redemption.

The theological language of original sin creates discordant sounds In the ears of modern people. The concept is unwelcome, even shunned. Perhaps this shunning is due to the historical connotations of the term "original." The picture painted by Augustine is that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve committed the first sin, the original sin; and through procreation they have passed this fallen state on to each subsequent generation. We all Inherit Adam’s sin; we all participate in Adam’s fall.

This prompts two contemporary objections. First, modern notions of justice limit responsibility to our own sins; we should not be held accountable for someone else’s action. Second, the Augustinian perspective is apparently no longer acceptable in a Darwinian era. The theory of evolution has no room for a myth of origin that places the human race in a prior state of grace. Rather than a fall from a pristine state, modern science sees the human race arising from a long struggle characterized by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

However, the concept of ‘original" in original sin does not require a history that includes a past Garden of Eden with a now lost perfection; nor does it require blaming Adam and Eve for our own moral condition. Rather, it is sufficient for original to refer to the origin of each one of us. Our own individual origin is characterized by genetic conditioning and family-context conditioning. We are born with opportunities and constraints over which we had no original control, and some of this conditioning influences our predisposition to behavior toward others.

The theological term "inherited sin" is relevant here. The Augsburg Confession in Article III says that all of us who are conceived according to nature are born into sin, that we are "full of evil lust and inclinations" from our mother’s wombs onward, and that we are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. This state is referred to as an ‘inborn sickness and hereditary sin (Erbsunde)." John Calvin similarly interpreted the concept of original sin so that what we inherit becomes prominent.

When we are born we find ourselves already conditioned and predisposed toward a life that is alienated from God’s will and alienated from faith in God. Although the presumption was that this inheritance is physical -- passed on through conception and birth -- the point is that we begin our life of moral responsibility already conditioned by factors beyond our control.

It was appropriate, then, for early 20th-century Social Gospel theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch to observe how prejudice and social discrimination are passed from one generation to the next, and it is consistent for theologians today to incorporate observations about social inheritance -- what liberation theologians and feminist theologians call "social location" or "systemic evil" -- into our understanding of the human condition. Whether biological or social, whether innate or environmental, we begin our morally responsible life with a specific inheritance and a predisposition toward behaving in specific ways.

Suppose a clever researcher could invent a pharmaceutical capable of regulating the expression of monoamine oxidase A, with the result that this genetic therapy strengthens the influence of genetic determinants over environmental determinants. Suppose also that if the rung boys subjected to family abuse could have access to this MAOA therapy so that when attaining adulthood they would possess a greater sense of social responsibility exercised through greater self-control. Theologically speaking, should we consider this to be a fruit of the Spirit?

A fine cover story, ‘How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body" (January 20), proclaimed extraordinary benefits from antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors such as Nardil and Marplan, despite dangerous side effects, may increase our control over genetic expression. Such chemical therapies have demonstrated potential for enabling many people to function with increased emotional equanimity. Should we consider such therapies also the work of the Holy Spirit?

Let me offer a highly qualified affirmative answer. Augustine sorted out the dialectic of sin and grace with a movement from bondage to sin to liberty from sin. "He who is the servant of sin is free to sin," he said. "And, hence, he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness. And this is true liberty" (Enchiridion, XXX). If we think of the combination of genetic predisposition and maltreatment in youth as a form of bondage, might we think of medical therapy that readies a person for increased self control a form of liberation?

I am trying to avoid defining the question in terms of metaphysics. If we assume that the distinction between body and soul or the conflict between flesh and spirit are metaphysical divisions, then the situation is conceptually hopeless. However, if we presume that a person is a psychosomatic unity inclusive of both body and soul, then their interaction at the level of the human self becomes accessible. If we understand flesh and spirit as forces (Gal. 5:19-22) at war with both body and soul, then we will not equate flesh with body or spirit with soul.

One of the fruits of the spirit is "self-control" (Gal. 5:22). No matter what genotype we are born with or what family pattern of rearing we experience, self-control remains an achievement that each self must attain in the maturing process. Self-control means, literally, that the self assumes a level of control previously under the hegemony of bodily cravings and social influences. If a pharmaceutical could enhance one’s capacity for self-control, such therapy could very well be thought of as a spiritual force. That this therapy would work on the body does not make it any less spiritual. Nor does it make medical therapy anything less than an expression of God’s grace in the life of a person who benefits from it.

Theologians need not worry that medicine will put them out of a job. The struggle between flesh and spirit is a big one; winning one little battle over genetic expression of MAOA does not in itself indicate that we are ready to declare total victory in the war against the flesh. The Spirit’s orchard covers many acres, and there are many more fruits of empowering grace the Holy Spirit can cultivate through either our body or our soul.

Designer Children: The Market World of Reproductive Choice

BOOK REVIEW: Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technology. By John A. Robertson. Princeton University Press, 296 pp., $29.95.

The explosion of progress in reproductive technologies is creating new choices in baby-making. Fertile women can stop baby-making with Norplant, RU486 or abortion, while infertile couples can make babies with the help of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor semen, donor eggs, frozen embryos and surrogate mothers. Soon we will be able to control the health and perhaps the genetic makeup of children with the aid of genetic screening, genetic engineering, nuclear transplantation, egg fusion, cloning, selective abortion and in utero fetal surgery. A woman can become a mother at age 62. And if experiments in ectogenesis and interspecies gestation prove successful, she may become a mother without becoming pregnant.

John A. Robertson, professor in the law school of the University of Texas, celebrates these and other achievements in technological control. "The decision to have or not have children is, at some important level, no longer a matter of God or nature, but has been made subject to human will and technical expertise." "Choice" is no longer a term reserved for the discussion of abortion: it is now the banner waving over the expanding influence of technology on the future of our children.

Technology and choice quickly translate into markets. The already nascent reproductive industry is likely to expand as new technologies open up new possibilities for baby-stopping, baby-making and baby-selecting. As infertility clinics expand the range of services, their clientele will expand to include fertile couples and even those seeking to design their baby's genes.

Under market conditions will babies become commodities to be bought and sold? To my mind the more important issue is the value that children will have when they are the result of engineering or selection.

Parents naturally want their children to enjoy good health. But in reproductive technology, choice may mean selecting the healthy baby and discarding the unhealthy. Parents naturally yearn for a child with certain traits or talents or abilities. But genetic screening for acceptable embryos or engineering for enhanced genetic configurations may lead to such an emphasis on the perfect child that children born the old-fashioned way may be led to feel inferior. And since technology is not perfect, something might go wrong in the production process. Will parents be tempted to deprive the less than perfect child of unconditional affection?

On the basis of how Jesus behaved with the poor and the diseased outcasts, and also on the basis of the theology of the incarnation wherein God loves the imperfect world enough to become a part of it, I submit the following fundamental principle: God loves each of us regardless of our genetic makeup, and we should do likewise. My central concern is that children--perfect or imperfect, the product of choice or destiny--receive unconditional love from their parents and equal opportunities in society. Babies made by reproductive technology must be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means for fulfilling social or parental values. Perhaps I am a consequentialist, for I want an ethic that successfully places the love of children first and foremost, an ethic that orients all other concerns regarding reproductive technology or parental fulfillment toward this greater end.

The American ethical psyche is schizoid. Like two housecats who hiss at each other, then later nap together in a single ball of fur, Americans operate out of two ethical visions that sometimes compete with each other and sometimes complement each other. On the one hand, Americans are deeply committed to the libertarian vision. This view maximizes individual liberty, assumes that each of us is born free and that the primary ethical or political task is to prevent criminals or government from eclipsing this freedom. Though these values derive from the liberal vision of the 18th-century Enlightenment, many today call this the conservative position. On the other hand, Americans are also deeply egalitarian. They think the primary ethical and political task is to liberate people from prejudices, economic forces or political structures that prevent them from having equal opportunity or equal access to resources. Today we call this the liberal position.

Children of Choice belongs squarely in the libertarian camp. Robertson has developed a comprehensive philosophy he calls "procreative liberty." At its most general level, procreative liberty refers to the freedom either to have children or to avoid having them. Even though this freedom is most frequently exercised by couples, Robertson is cultivating a rights-based political philosophy rooted in modern individualism. It follows that procreative liberty belongs not just to traditional married couples but also to individuals and to gay and lesbian couples.

Robertson does not endorse unbridled individualism. His strong stand in favor of procreative freedom does not mean that the individual's procreative choice should always triumph. There may be occasions in which the community's interest in protecting people from harm overrides a couple's choice. But Robertson emphasizes that procreative liberty should always be presumed; those who would limit it have the burden of showing why the exercise of this choice would harm someone else.

Robertson recognizes the rising anxiety over the prospects of noncoital baby-making. Some people are worried that noncoital reproduction will undermine the boundaries that define families, sexuality and procreation. The worry is that "the technical ability to disaggregate and recombine genetic, gestational and rearing connections and to control the genes of offspring may... undermine essential protections for offspring, couples, family and society."

Anxiety alone, however, does not warrant restricting or discouraging use of the new reproductive technologies. When this anxiety generates criticisms of such technologies, the criticisms need to be fairly evaluated. Often these criticisms assume a moral tone, frequently buttressed by a specific religious or deontological ethic. Robertson is unsympathetic to religious ethics or deontology, and claims that they have no place in making public policy for a pluralistic society. Critiques of procreative liberty "seldom meet the high standard necessary to limit procreative choice.. . . Without a clear showing of substantial harm to the tangible interests of others, speculation or mere moral objections alone should not override the moral right of infertile couples to use those techniques to form families. Given the primacy of procreative liberty, the use of these techniques should be accorded the same high protection granted to coital reproduction."

In addition to discussing contraception, abortion, IVF and surrogate motherhood, Robertson considers genetic selection--both preconceptual and postconceptual selection--and the risk of turning children into commodities. He notes that the Human Genome Initiative will increase the capacity to screen out undesirable traits "by identifying new genes for carrier and prenatal testing, including, potentially, genes for alcoholism, homosexuality and depression." We already can test fetuses in utero for such things as cystic fibrosis or Down's syndrome and abort those with defective genes. This method can also be used to discriminate between genders, which usually entails the aborting of female fetuses. In the future, through selective abortion or the more sophisticated selection of embryos in vitro , couples will be able to screen out potential children with undesirable genes. Past experience teaches that "most affected fetuses will be discarded based on a judgment of fitness, worth or parental convenience." Because abortion is currently the simplest method of selection, these developments will make any pregnancy "tentative" until prenatal screening certifies that the fetus is acceptable.

Parental choice may mean that criteria such as fitness, worth and convenience will determine which children see the light of day. "The danger is that selection methods will commodify children in a way ultimately harmful to their welfare. Carried to an extreme, parents will discard less than 'perfect' children and engineer embryos and fetuses for enhanced qualities. A worst-case scenario envisages repressive political regimes using these techniques to create a government-controlled Brave New World of genetically engineered social classes."

Yet, after alerting us to these dangers, Robertson returns to his defense of individual liberty: "The perceived dangers of 'quality control' appear to be insufficient to remove these choices from the discretion of persons planning to reproduce." Unless we can establish on a case-by-case basis that harm will be done to someone other than the planning parents, he says, then the presumptive right to procreative choice requires social and legal protection. In Robertson's view, no religious ideals or cultural norms regarding family life are sufficient to justify restricting procreative liberty.

Robertson also seeks to protect the right to refuse to use the new technologies. Public action to prevent the birth of genetically handicapped offspring by mandatory means--a potential public threat revealed in the current debate over community rating of health care insurance--is unjustified. Families should be permitted to rely on the luck of the genetic draw and still retain their rightful place in the communal health care system. Some couples will employ the new reproductive technologies, others will accept the roll of the procreative dice.

Feminists's reaction to procreative choice will be mixed. Those advocating a pro-choice position on abortion will likely see Robertson's notion of procreative liberty as an extension of the rights outlined in Roe v. Wade . New reproductive technologies provide women (with or without spouse) with an increased range of options. On the other hand, feminists with a more essentialist vision--a vision of some essential quality unique to women or unique to a woman's relationship to her child--will find Robertson's doctrine unacceptable. Many pro-life feminists argue that the relational bond between mother and child is so fundamental that it cannot be surrendered. Robertson's procreative-choice doctrine runs counter to this deep dimension of human nature.

Pro-choice feminists who employ an essentialist argument against Robertson will have to deal with an inconsistency, however: advocating freedom to choose to abort is inconsistent with the claim that the mother-fetus bond is more fundamental than choice. Robertson's argument is . finally an extended form of the pro-choice position that "assures women a large measure of control over their reproductive lives.

The advance in reproductive technology is carrying us into complexities unanticipated by Roe v. Wade . The key to the legalization of abortion was the identification of the fetus with the mother's body during the first trimester, thereby ceding to the mother the right to do with her body what she wills. The court consciously denied to the fetus protection under the 14th Amendment. Such legal logic depends entirely on the premise that the child-to-be is part of the mother's body. But what about phases in embryo development outside the mother's body? What about cases in which the genetic bond between mother and child is broken?

Take the case of in vitro fertilization. The creation of a genetically unique individual takes place in a petri dish, perhaps miles away from the mother-to-be. Normally, many eggs are fertilized at once. In some cases genetic selection takes place in the petri dish; those eggs with desirable traits are chosen and the others discarded. In the future, actual engineering of genetic inheritance will take place at this point. The desired pre-embryo will then be transferred to the woman's uterus or the fallopian tube. By law it then becomes part of the mother's body. But what is the legal or moral status of the preimplanted embryo?

To complicate matters, a family that is planning to bring a new baby into the world may use semen from a donor or eggs from a donor. They may use cryopreservation, freezing semen or even embryos for future implantation. And to bring the baby to term they may employ a surrogate mother. In the most complex case, a child could be born with two fathers--the semen donor and the man who plans to rear the child--and three mothers--one for the egg, one for gestation and one to rear the child. The costs for such a child run about $45,000. Choice after choice is being made here. We find ourselves in a new situation.

What is the ethical status of the pre-embryo whose genes are subject to parental choices and the clinic's technological capabilities? The Vatican in its Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day offers an answer: the human being must be respected as a person from the first instance of his or her existence as a fertilized egg. This implies a number of things, including the view that the right to life prevails over the mother's right to abortion. As in the case of IVF, noncoital baby-making is judged to be contrary to moral law. The Vatican also seeks to protect the integrity of marriage. The ideal child is one produced by a sexual union of two married parents. Marriage and sexual union within marriage are a part of the essence of human nature, and the connection between genes, gestation and family life should not be broken. Like the essentialist feminists, the Vatican appeals to a depth dimension in human ontology that goes deeper than choice and that would justify restricting procreative liberty.

I would not argue that individual freedom of choice must be the bottom line in every ethical deliberation. Nor am I interested in restricting choice on the basis of appeals to an essentialist ontology or to increasingly outmoded assumptions about the necessary ties between sex, baby-making and family life. I am single-mindedly interested in one thing: loving children who are already here and children yet to be. This stance derives from a theological truth and an ethical response: God loves us unconditionally and we should similarly love one another (1 John 4:11). Although Robertson allows for no religious ideals or deontological mandates, I do.

In itself, taking advantage of new reproductive technologies will neither enhance nor diminish a parent's motive for bringing a new child into the world. Robertson is quite optimistic on this score. On genetically enhancing a child's IQ or physical strength, he comments: "Enhancement could be seen as an act of love and concern, rather than a narcissistic effort to make the child a product or commodity." In advocating the use of donors and surrogates, he says that "rather than undermine family, these practices present new variations of family and community that could help fill the void left by flux in the shape of the American family." I like such optimism.

Nevertheless, we need to remind ourselves that the ethical burden for loving children and not treating them as commodities lies in the commitment by parents and community to love each child and to seek his or her fulfillment regardless of the child's genetic makeup or form of procreative origin. Neither appeals to traditional family values nor claims of an intrinsic value to sexual mating will allow us to escape the challenge posed by new reproductive options: we must choose either to commit ourselves to loving the babies we make or not. Our ancestors faced this choice when coital reproduction was their only option; it is our choice today as well. The glitter and glitz of the new reproductive technologies may dazzle us with options, but the sparkle should not keep us from providing what children need: to be wanted, loved and cared for.

God Happens: The Timeliness of the Triune God

Does God need to wear a wristwatch, or glance at a clock now and then? If God is eternal, and if God holds all events together simultaneously, does it matter to God that we experience events sequentially? Do openness, contingency and freedom in temporal affairs have any effect on God’s eternity?

These sound like ancient questions, the kind we would expect from theologians in the Roman and Byzantine eras. Yet we ask them again in our own time for three reasons. First, those who believe in God dislike thinking of God as uninvolved in the temporal world. Second, our scientific understanding of reality is drenched in time. Third, attempts to identify the God of Israel as witnessed to in the resurrection of Jesus Christ must take God’s involvement in temporal history as essential to the divine reality.

That the eternal God can be affected by—even more, can be identified by—temporal events is the thesis of the first volume of Robert W. Jenson’s Systematic Theology. Jenson, who teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, codirects with Carl Braaten the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. He also coedits its journal, Pro Ecclesia. In 1984 he and Braaten edited Christian Dogmatics, a two-volume systematic theology that was for a decade a standard text in Lutheran seminaries.

"God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit," Jenson declares. This makes God an event, not a being. Jenson is not talking about religious subjectivity, nor about the human proclivity for drawing pictures of a likable deity. Nor is he talking about the utterly transcendent mystery of philosophers and mystics, the divine that allegedly lives in a far-off eternity uncontaminated by the ordinariness of time and space. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is the subject of this book.

Jenson belongs to the new trinitarianism. He shares a conceptual agenda with Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Duane Larson (who has succeeded Jenson at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg) and the late Catherine Mowry LaCugna. The new trinitarians begin with the principles of the two Karls, Barth and Rahner. Barth’s principle is that Christians do not seek card-carrying membership in a larger club of monotheists. What is revealed about God in the Jesus Christ event identifies something about God that is not reducible to generic belief as found in other religions or in the philosophy of religion. God is so free as to be able to define divinity, and in the temporal event of Jesus Christ God has included humanity in that eternal self-definition.

Rahner’s rule is that the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity, and vice versa. This means that God’s external relations to the world provide the very arena in which God’s internal relations take place. That is, historical events such as Jesus praying to the Father or the Father abandoning the crucified Jesus to death constitute the very relations of the first two persons of the Trinity; they do not merely mirror in time some other relations taking place in a separated eternity.

According to Jenson’s historical retrieval, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Cappadocian theologians of the Eastern church accurately understood and articulated the differential relations within trinitarian life, whereas Augustine did not. In fact, Augustine betrayed the Nicene insight by retreating to the Greek notion that God is ultimately simple and, as eternally simple, unable to engage authentically with us in time. So we must choose, says Jenson, and he chooses the Eastern path and rejects the Augustinian.

Nicea teaches dogmatically: the true God needs, and the gospel provides, no semidivine mediator of access to him, for the gospel proclaims a God who is not in fact distant, whose deity is identified with a person of our history.. . Any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God "himself’ from this person, from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises, has, according to Nicea, no place in the church.

Jenson’s emphasis on the historical particularity of God’s identity makes him a narrative theologian with an attitude. God’s story takes on an ontological status—that is, the story of Jesus of Nazareth and the story of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the church belong to the very being of God. God is not God without this story. What identifies God as Trinity is not some abstract debate regarding how three can be one or one can be three. Rather, God is Trinity because this historical involvement as Son and as Spirit belongs essentially to the life of the one God.

What Jenson does with the Trinity he redoes with Christology. He is impatient with the lackluster thinking at Chalcedon in 451 that gave us a Son with two natures, making the divine nature immune to the suffering of the human nature. By distinguishing the eternal logos from the temporal Jesus, the Chalcedonians once again sought to protect an impassible God from being contaminated with the world. But the gospel message tells of a God who is contaminated with the world.

To get the point across, Jenson builds community right into the definition of divine and human nature. "What is surely required is to recognize that ‘humanity’ and... ‘deity’ must be communal concepts. That Christ has the divine nature means that he is one of the three whose mutuality is the divine life, who live the history that is God. That Christ has human nature means that he is one of the many whose mutuality is human life, who live the history that humanity is."

Rather than identify a disembodied atemporal logos with the second person of the Trinity, Jenson insists it is Jesus. "Jesus’ human action and presence is without mitigation God’s action and presence." And because the second and even the third person of the Trinity are open to definition through time and history, God is communal. "God can indeed, if he chooses, accommodate other persons in his life without distorting that life. God, to state it as boldly as possible, is roomy.

Understanding God as "roomy" can lead us down two paths, one irenic and the other acerbic. Following the irenic path, the notion that historical relationality is internal to God’s life is quite compatible with feminist trinitarianism, especially as articulated by LaCugna. It also places this form of trinitarianism into conversation with process theologians such as Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki and Joseph Bracken who embrace a metaphysics of internal relatedness in all things. In addition, it opens trinitarian thought to new thinking in the field of theology and natural science, wherein the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the second law of thermodynamics are prompting investigations into the concept of time built into natural processes.

With regard to this last item—temporality in physical cosmology—theologians who want to incorporate time into the divine life have a major intellectual hurdle to jump, namely, eschatology. We are no longer fighting the ancient battle of Hebrew linear vs. Greek cyclical time. The cyclical view was founded on earth consciousness: the cycles of day and night, summer and winter, moon and menstruation and such. The cycles, though real, have been subsumed by contemporary cosmology into a more inclusive space consciousness. Cycles are seen as a small chapter in the big-bang story of the universe, which on a macro scale is traveling in a single temporal direction from past toward future.

What of the future? The physical cosmologists project two scenarios: freeze or fry. The universe as a whole, due to the second law of thermodynamics, popularly known as entropy, may freeze as the original heat of the big bang dissipates and every physical thing becomes devoid of energy. Or, if more matter exists in the universe than we currently perceive, the force of gravity may stop the expansion process at some point and compel a recontraction, a sucking of all the galaxies, stars and planets back into a very dense and hot singularity.

According to neither scenario do scientists project the advent of what theologians call the "kingdom of God" or the "new creation." To provide an appropriate eschatology, theologians who take temporality seriously must decide on interventionist or noninterventionist understandings of divine action. Robert Jenson is strong on eschatology, but we will have to await later volumes of his Systematic Theology to see how he jumps this hurdle.

Jenson also opens the gate to a more acerbic path. He takes strong stands against idolatry—that is, against the universal religious inclination to paint pictures of a god in eternity that look like what we want to be in history. Feuerbach was right about human nature, believes Jenson; we really do project our mundane wishes onto the transcendent. Consequently, we close our ears and eyes to revelations from the true God. This view makes Jenson less than friendly to certain trajectories in contemporary theology, such as the projecting of goddess images or the revival of paganism.

How will this vigorous trinitarianism play out in interreligious dialogue or, more pointedly, in dialogue or more pointedly, in dialogue with the emerging school of theologians who think of themselves as pluralists? Religious pluralists—known sometimes as "inclusivists"—recognize the plurality of religious traditions and the plurality of doctrines of the divine, yet posit that at some hidden or transcendent level they all refer to the same ultimate reality. This is a way of imputing integrity to every religious tradition by affirming truth in every religious claim. It also functions to de-establish Christendom by undermining truth claims regarding the uniqueness or divinity of Jesus Christ. In the process, however, the historical particularities of differing commitments to the various gods are washed into the deliberately vague sea of the eternal: the limit, the mystery, the one God, or the ultimate. Christians in particular have been asked to join an alleged new Copernican revolution—that is, they are being asked to give up on the historical particularity of God’s presence in Jesus Christ in order to embrace a de-Christized doctrine of God that better fits the supra-Christian understanding of the eternal God who transcends, yet is present in, the other religions of the world.

It would seem at first that the type of trinitarianism advocated by Jenson is at odds with this revolution. Such things as time, history and particularity are so necessary to identifying God—the God of Israel who is the one true God—that a systematic disregard of this temporal particularity on behalf of a supraparticular ultimate reality that only some call "God" would be impossible. Either the God of Israel, who engaged in the events we have heard reported, such as the raising of Jesus from the dead, is the true God, or he is not. To remove these historical events from the divine identity would be tantamount to a denial of truth.

Yet, we might ask, is there another, more irenic approach? Might we add other historical events to divine identity, events not reported in the biblical testimony? If so, what would count to give them credibility? If not, why not?

I would like to see Jenson address such questions. In the meantime, we need to think about time. God takes time just to be the God that God is and will be.

The Dimensions of God’s Life

BOOK REVIEW: God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, by Catherine Mowry LaCugna. Harper San Francisco, 434 pp., $25.00.

 

On the floor of theological debate in recent decades boisterous voices have been arguing about methodology, ecumenism, hope, liberation and the place of women or other marginalized groups in the conversation. Outside the arena of loud debate, however, there has been a whisper-level conversation of enormous significance for our understanding of God. I call it "Trinity talk." The quiet conversation began with Karl Barth’s first half volume of Church Dogmatics and continued in Claude Welch’s work of the 1950s, In This Name. With the formulation of Karl Rahner’s rule— the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity, and vice versa—Trinity talk has become a buzz in the works of Jürgen Moltmann, Eberhard Jüngel, Leonardo Boff, Robert Jenson and Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Catherine Mowry LaCugna has added a real jewel to the works of Trinity talk. With lapidary precision this University of Notre Dame theologian cuts through the roughly hewn doctrinal conversations of the centuries to polish the primary facets. "The doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian life," she says. The aim of the Christian life is "to participate in the life of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit." This means that trinitarian theology is best described as par excellence a theology of relationship, which explores the mysteries of love, relationship, personhood and communion within the framework of God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ and the activity of the Spirit."

LaCugna starts with the question: Why has the doctrine of the Trinity been marginalized? Whether we dismiss the Trinity as irrelevant or consign its difficulties to sublime mystery, we proceed as if the Christian faith can get along without it. LaCugna traces this marginalization back to a split that occurred at Nicea between theologia and oikonomia, between the so-called immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity. The term oikonomia, which we identify with the economic Trinity, refers to the self-communication of God in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit’s activity in the history of salvation. Everything we know about God is a result of this activity. Theologia, or our knowledge of the eternal being of God, should in principle be coextensive with what we have learned from revelation in the divine economy. We have no access to the immanent life of God that goes beyond what has been revealed. So if we consign the trinitarian life to a realm beyond what has been revealed, we consign it to incomprehensible mystery

This is a mistake, contends LaCugna. Theologia and oikonomia should be one, as they were until the fourth century. But in the process of writing the Nicene Creed, soteriology became separated from the doctrine of God, so that theologia came to refer to the inner workings of the divine life apart from the work of salvation. The intradivine relations of the three persons lost their link to God’s activity in the world.

In response, LaCugna recommends that we reconceive the doctrine of the Trinity. She says that Rahner has described God as by nature self-communicating. The mysterious and incomprehensible God is God in the act of expressing and sharing the Godself. God’s actions reveal who God is. We can be confident that the God revealed in salvation history is in fact the real God, even if God’s mystery remains absolute. This banishes the possibility of a hidden God who lurks behind the revealed God.

The LaCugna corollary to Rahner’s rule reads: "Theology is inseparable from soteriology, and vice versa." Her corollary carries us beyond the problem and solution Rahner formulates, and beyond Jüngel’s correspondence view by which God’s inner life corresponds to what we have experienced with the economic life. Rahner’s rule presupposes that theologians need to get the immanent and the economic back together again. By revising the vocabulary slightly so that what we are identifying is theologia with oikonomia, LaCugna’s reconceptualization—"more accurately the return to the biblical and pre-Nicene pattern of thought"—dispenses with the distinction between God’s inner and outer aspects. There is but one trinitarian life of God, and it spans and incorporates the entire scope of temporal history.

LaCugna envisions a chiastic model of emanation and return. There is neither an economic nor an immanent Trinity; rather there is only the mystery of the theologia manifest in the concrete events of time, space, history and personality. God as Father begets Jesus Christ the Son. From this proceeds the Holy Spirit, then the world. The Holy Spirit consummates the world into the eschatological unity of Jesus Christ, who remits all to God the Father. It is a movement from God into creation, redemption, consummation and back to God. There is no reason to stop at any point along the path, she says. There is no reason to draw a sharp line between Christology and pneumatology. There is no reason to separate God’s immanent from God’s economic relations.

This position has drastic implications for our understanding of spirituality. With the collapsing of the distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, the inner life of God no longer belongs to God alone. No longer can we speak of God in isolation. The divine life is also our life. As soon as we free ourselves from thinking of two levels of Trinity, one inner and the other outer, then we can see again that there is but one life of the triune God, and that life includes God’s relation to us.

When LaCugna contends that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa, or that God’s energies express the divine essence, she is saying that God’s way of being in relationship with us is God’s personhood. She is also saying that this is the perfect expression of God’s being as God. Furthermore, in God alone do we find the full correspondence between personhood and being. God for us is who God is as God.

Should we apply the term "person" to the one nature or to the three identities? This question marked a significant split between Moltmann, who posits a social Trinity in which the three persons constitute three distinct subjectivities, and his mentor, Barth, who held that God is a single subject manifested in three modalities. LaCugna does not take sides:

It does not so much matter whether we say God is one person in three modalities, or one nature in three persons, since these two assertions can be understood in approximately the same way. What matters is that we hold on to the assertion that God is personal, and that therefore the proper subject matter of the doctrine of the Trinity is the encounter between divine and human persons in the economy of redemption.

LaCugna also puts the divine mystery closer to where it belongs. Mystery does not belong to the doctrine of the Trinity as a doctrine. We ought not to use mystery as an excuse for our inability to explain difficult theological propositions. Nor does mystery refer to the inner trinitarian life of God apart from the creation, apart from what has been revealed in the economy of salvation. To apply the term "mystery" to an alleged transcendent reality that has not been revealed is to make theology indistinguishable from fantasy. LaCugna applies the term "mystery" to our inability to comprehend what we have experienced: the saving activity in the mission of Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Despite our participation in it, we cannot fully understand it. It remains ineffable. This is the paradox that pervades theological knowledge in general. God freely and completely bestows the Godself in the encounter with humans, yet remains ineffable because we creatures are incapable of fully receiving or understanding the one who is imparted.

LaCugna’s insightful scholarship adds a new and welcome voice to the chorus singing a tune first hummed by Barth and then sung by Rahner. However, something is missing from this otherwise fine study, namely, God’s temporality. One would have expected the question of the relationship between eternity and temporality to have appeared on her agenda. The concept of person in relationship implies dynamism, change and growth. The concept of divinization sets our sights on eschatological fulfillment of our personhood. Her chiastic route requires that we look forward to the return to the Father. The movement from the Father to the Father is just that, a movement through time toward a still-outstanding future. If the internal relation of the divine life is as tied to the course of world history as LaCugna seems to believe, then one would expect her to investigate the possible temporal dimensions of God’s life.

As the Trinity talkers continue the conversation, I would like to hear them discuss this question: How can God, who is eternally Trinity, act in and be affected by a temporal world? Traditional Christian theologians have placed the immanent Trinity in eternity and then defined eternity in terms of timelessness. However, once we tie closely the immanent Trinity to the economy of salvation that takes place in the course of temporal history. then the course of temporal events becomes somehow constitutive of the divine life proper. Whatever eternity is, it cannot be divorced from time. The trinitarian history of God’s saving work affects eternal reality.

The keystone here, I think, is eschatology. Time is incorporated into eternity through the eschatological consummation of God’s creating and redeeming work, and this work itself constitutes the eternal perichoresis of the three persons making up the trinitarian life. The realm of creation receives the coming of God through the incarnate Son and the Holy Spirit, who by virtue of their internal relations to the Father bring the redeemed creation within the very life of the triune God proper.

By entering temporal history in the incarnation. God has experienced otherness, and through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, God and the world are experiencing an integrating wholeness. In the Father-Son relationship, the eternal and ineffable Father becomes intimately related to the incarnate Son, who takes up residence in the mundane world of time and space shared by the rest of creation. In the Son-Spirit relationship. Jesus Christ becomes freed from his finitude to become spiritually present in the faith of believers in all lands and times. In the Spirit-Father relationship, the whole of creation, redeemed in Christ, becomes eschatologically restored to an everlasting harmony within the divine life.

Shaken Atheism: A Look at the Fine-Tuned Universe

Both astrophysicists and microphysicists have lately been discovering that the series of events that produced our universe had to happen in a rather precise way—at least, they had to happen that way if they were to produce life as we know it. Some might find this fact unremarkable. After all, we are here, and it is hardly surprising that the universe is of such kind as to have produced us. It is simply a tautology to say that people who find themselves in a universe live in a universe where human life is possible. Nevertheless, given the innumerable other things that could have happened, we have reason to be impressed by the astonishing fact of our existence. Like the man who survives execution by a 1,000-gun firing squad, we are entitled to suspect that there is some reason we are here, that perhaps there is a Friend behind the blast.

When we consider the first seconds of the big bang that created the universe, writes Bernard Lovell, an astronomer, "it is an astonishing reflection that at this critical early moment in the history of the universe, all of the hydrogen would have turned into helium if the force of attraction between protons—that is, the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms—had been only a few percent stronger. . . . No galaxies, no stars, no life would have emerged. It would have been a universe forever unknowable by living creatures. A remarkable and intimate relationship between man, the fundamental constants of nature and the initial moments of space and time seems to be an inescapable condition of our existence" ("Whence?," New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1975).

Astronomer Fred Hoyle reports that his atheism was shaken by his own discovery that in the stars, carbon just manages to form and then just avoids complete conversion into oxygen. If one atomic level had varied half a per cent, life would have been impossible. "Would you not say to yourself . . . 'Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule' ? Of course you would. . . . The carbon atom is a fix.

. . .A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics. . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question" ("The Universe: Past and Present Reflections," Engineering and Science, November 1981).

"Somebody had to tune [the universe] very precisely," concludes Marek Demianski, a Polish cosmologist (quoted in Science News, September 3, 1983, p. 152). Stephen Hawking, the Einstein of our time, agrees: "The odds against a universe like ours coming out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications" (John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe, p. 121). How the various physical processes are "fine-tuned to such stunning accuracy is surely one of the great mysteries of cosmology," remarks P. C. W. Davies, a physicist. "Had this exceedingly delicate tuning of values been even slightly upset, the subsequent structure of the universe would have been totally different." "Extraordinary physical coincidences and apparently accidental cooperation . . . offer compelling evidence that something is 'going on.' . . . A hidden principle seems to be at work" (The Accidental Universe, p. 90, p. 110).

B. I. Carr and M. J. Rees, cosmologists, conclude, "Many interrelations between different scales that at first sight seem surprising are straightforward consequences of simple physical arguments. But several aspects of our Universe—some of which seem to be prerequisites for the evolution of any form of life—depend rather delicately on apparent ‘coincidences' among the physical constants. . . . The Universe must be as big and diffuse as it is to last long enough to give rise to life" ("The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World," Nature, April 12, 1979).

No universe can provide several billion years of stellar cooking time unless it is several billion light years across. If the size of the universe were reduced from 1022 to 1011 stars, that smaller but still galaxy-sized universe might seem roomy enough, but it would run through its entire cycle of expansion and recontraction in about one year. And if the matter of the universe were not as homogeneous as it is, then large portions of it would have been so dense that they would already have undergone gravitational collapse. Other portions would have been so thin that they could not have given birth to galaxies and stars. On the other hand, if it were entirely homogeneous, then the chunks of matter that make development possible could not have assembled. (See John A. Wheeler, "The Universe as Home for Man." in Owen Gingerich, editor, The Nature of Scientific Discovery.)

Physicists have made some other, quite striking thought experiments. If the universe were not expanding, then it would be too hot to support life. If the expansion rate of the universe had been a little faster or slower, then the universe would already have recollapsed or else the galaxies and stars could not have formed. The extent and age of the universe are not obviously an outlandish extravagance. Indeed, ours may be the most economical universe in which life and mind can exist—so far as we can cast that question into a testable form.

Change slightly the strengths of any of the four forces that hold the world together (the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, gravitation—forces ranging over 40 orders of magnitude), or change various particle masses and charges, and the stars would burn too quickly or too slowly, or atoms and molecules, including water, carbon and oxygen, would not form or would not remain stable.

It is not that we cannot imagine another world in which intelligence or life might exist. It is rather that, in this world, any of a hundred small shifts this way or that would render everything blank. Astrophysicists John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk calculate that "small changes in the electric charge of the electron would block any kind of chemistry" ("The Structure of the Early Universe," Scientific American, April 1980: see also John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle). A fractional difference, and there would have been nothing. It would be so easy to miss, and there are no hits in the revised universes we can imagine: and yet this universe is a delicate, intricate hit.

One can still explain the universe by randomness—this universe is one of a run of universes and big bangs, and ours happened to have the right characteristics for life. Or one can invoke the many-worlds theory: the universe is constantly splitting into many worlds, some of which will be right for life. But to invent myriads of other worlds in order to explain how this one came to be seems to show an addiction to randomness in one's explanatory scheme. It seems more economical (and remember that science often recommends simplicity in explanations) to posit that there were some constraints on the only universe we know that made it right for life.

The human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense. The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human being is the geometric mean of the mass of the earth and the mass of a proton. A person contains about 1028 atoms, more atoms than there are stars in the universe. Such considerations yield perhaps only a relative location. Still, questions of place and proportion arise.

Nebulae and stars exist at low structural ranges. A galaxy is mostly nothing, as is an atom. Fine-tuned though the system is, at both ends of the spectrum of size nature lacks the complexity found at the mesa levels in Earth's ecosystem. Humans do not live at the range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but they may well live within the range of the infinitely complex, a range generated and supported by the simpler but stunning microphysics and astrophysics. In our 150 pounds of protoplasm, in our three pounds of brain, there may be more operational organization than there is in the whole of the Andromeda Galaxy. The number of associations possible among our 10 billion neurons, and hence the number of thoughts humans can think, may exceed the number of atoms in the universe. Humans, too, are stars in the show.

The point is not that the whole universe is necessary to produce Earth and Homo sapiens. To so conclude would demonstrate myopic pride. The issue is richness of potential, not anthropocentrism. There is no need to insist that everything in the universe has some relevance to our being here. God may have overdone the creation in pure exuberance, but why should the parts irrelevant to us trouble us? We might even be a bit sorry if the entire sublime universe turned out to be needed simply for our arrival, or even for the scattering of life and mind here and there within the universe. But certainly we cannot leave ourselves out of the account, either.

Since Copernicus, physics has made us wary of claiming a privileged location for Earth. Since Darwin, humans have seemed the result of selection operating over blind variation. Since Newton, the world has seemed only matter in motion. Since Einstein, our location in space and time has seemed a function of our reference frame as observers. Humans have been dwarfed from above, celestially; deflated from below, atomically; and shown to be nothing but electronic particles. In a universe 20 billion years old and 20 billion light years across, humans, the result of 5 billion years of evolution, have felt lost in the stars and in the agelong struggle for life.

But physics has been busy painting a new picture. Christians caught up in the debate over creation in biology may not have noticed how congenial physics and theology have become. The physical world is—shades of Bishop Paley!—looking like a fine-tuned watch again, and this time many quantitative calculations support the argument. The forms that matter and energy take seem strangely suited to their destiny.

Theology for a Time of Troubles

It was some 16 years ago that I was graciously invited (challenged?) by The Christian Century to write one of the articles in the series "How I Am Making Up My Mind" ("Dissolution and Reconstruction in Theology," February 3, 1965). Now, 16 years later, writing for the awesome series "How My Mind Has Changed," I prefer, if I may, to say "How My Mind Is Changing." Instead of having the sensation of motion followed by present rest and clarity ("has changed"), I am now overwhelmed by the sense of being theologically still in passage, as yet unsolidified and unclear. Whatever is here in motion is only beginning or embarking on its journey; it is not at all completing or fulfilling it. What is more, I have the feeling of being in quite another sort of passage than that which dominated my experience 16 years ago.

Gasping for Breath

Since this all sounds like a fairly heady trip, let me begin with the contrast I note between the sense of change characterizing the present, and the upheavals and radical changes experienced in the middle ‘60s and recorded in that earlier article. In each case (1965 and 1981) it is evident (and somewhat embarrassing) that my sense of theological dislocation is hardly a matter of my own new insight or innovation, but one of a somewhat panicky, sloppy and inept reaction to external events, to massive and threatening cultural and historical changes that, quite against my will, force on me a different procedure, a different viewpoint, a different set of questions -- a different theology.

Theology (at least as I do it) is hardly serene, self-generated, or in control; it is barely able to get the ship in before the unexpected storm, or the clothes in out of the rain -- and it is always gasping for breath! I was, therefore, relieved to note that Reinhold Niebuhr, in speaking of one of his own articles in this series (1959-60), also suggested a title expressive of the experience of reactive passivity:

"How My Mind Has Reacted to World Events."

The sense of upheaval, of radical change and of the need for a new mode in theology was acute in 1965. I referred in that article to "shifting ice," "the sudden thaw of theological certainties," and "rushing depths of dark water." The problem raised for us as theologians or preachers came from renewed awareness of the reality, power and value of the "secular," as we liked to call it -- that is, of the scientific, technological, pragmatic, liberal and democratic culture that made up the "modern world" in which we theologians lived. This was a serious problem for us, if not a lethal menace, because this culture asked empirical questions about the meaning and the validity of our religious language -- questions that were embarrassing to our early theological certainties (mostly "biblical theological" certainties). And this secular culture challenged a church (and most theologians) concerned with private and personal, "existential" problems to become active and involved in the more serious public Issues of a segregated and an imperialistic America.

In comparison with this "modern" world with its demanding cognitive criteria and its high social ideals, the traditional religions seemed anachronistic and outdated, empty and uncertain, narcissistic and undemanding -- and incurably white and bourgeois. Most of us felt this contrast as a deep challenge, and it was a challenge precisely because the secularity that threatened our theology and even our religion represented such a compelling lure to us -- in fact, as we recognized, it represented in many respects a major, or the major, aspect of our own self addressing us.

A Secular World

Consequently, many of us spent the next decade working through an answer to the question of the meaning of religious language in terms of ordinary experience, in terms of a "revision" or "re-presentation" of the Christian tradition "intelligible to modern minds," and worked on formulating an appropriate and strong political theology. Even if the "God is dead" theology has itself long since been interred, these problems which a secular culture poses to religious meanings have by no means vanished. That same secular world with its nagging empirical criteria of meaning and validity remains in power in academia and among the middle and especially the professional classes -- and we who try to do theology are still ourselves very much a part of that same world.

Correspondingly, the questions of justice, liberation, and peace represent the predominant moral issues of our present cultural life. Thus in our present situation the hermeneutical problem (how traditional words, concepts and symbols are to be interpreted intelligibly in our cultural present) on the one hand remains the problem for those concerned with the theoretical issues of theology, and on the other the issue of liberation represents the center for those concerned more with the meaning of theology in life and in action. And there is hardly any constructive theologian worth her or his salt who does not try to do both.

Although these issues arising in the ‘60s still remain central for theology, the world has meanwhile changed and (as usual) changed radically. The fundamental balance of things that created that former set of problems has itself shifted, uncovering some new and quite different issues. I find myself seeing quite a new scene when I look out the same windows, sniffing different winds from another direction, and thus sensing quite different theological problems moving rapidly toward me over the same old terrain.

Questioning the Scientific Method

The first element of the new scene may be called the "re-evaluation of the secular"; in this context, by "secular" I again refer to a culture that depends primarily on the empirical, scientific consciousness and that therefore tends to negate any sort of mystical consciousness. Those who like brisker language might wish to define this new scene not as one merely of re-evaluation but as the beginning of the "disintegration of the secular culture" -- but that judgment is probably quite premature. What is clear, however, is the fact of its reassessment or reevaluation.

And the first thing to be re-evaluated has been the claim of the scientific method to represent the method of knowledge solely able to relate cognitively to reality -- a claim that seemed quite dominant and secure in the ‘50s and the early ‘60s. In its place has come a new consciousness of the ambiguity and the inadequacy, even the distorting effect, of that method if it alone contributes to or fashions our fundamental view of reality. It was perhaps the central thrust of the counterculture of the late ‘60s to repudiate this claim of the scientific consciousness (cf. Theodore Roszak’s analysis), and to question the ability of technology to provide, via an expanding industrial and consumer culture, a creative basis for human fulfillment. Since then, for a number of reasons (air and water pollution, health concerns ignored and in fact unknown by scientific medicine, ecological issues), this questioning of the omnicompetence of the scientific method to uncover the truth, and of the creative value of technological "progress," has deepened and spread and now penetrates much further into the culture as a whole.

Corresponding to this new sense of the ambiguity (not the invalidity or inutility) of the scientific and technological base of the culture has come what could be termed the reappearance of the religious. That religious concerns, beliefs and institutions might linger on for some time in a secular age had been ruefully admitted by the children of Enlightenment humanism. But that these concerns would reappear in fresh and vigorous power, not only in the midst of a modern scientific and industrial culture but as a conscious and relevant reaction to the tensions and dilemmas created by that culture -- that was not at all expected.

This is precisely what has happened, and happened in ways that caught theological as well as secular savants by surprise. For what has reappeared in strength has not been at all the kind of mainline, liberal and "modern" religion (Christian Century and University of Chicago religion!) designed to be intelligible to and appropriate for a secular world. On the contrary, it has been precisely those forms of religion believed in one way or another to be antithetical to a secular world, and so vulnerable to "the acids of modernity," that have sprouted up everywhere and have grown at an astounding rate; namely, fundamentalist religion of every variety; ecstatic, charismatic religion; esoteric, cultic religion; mystical, otherworldly religion; religious sectarianism that "opts out" of society, its customs and its responsibilities -- not to mention every possible variety of the occult.

And the further interesting thing is that the forms of religion that are more bizarre or alien to modern Western "scientific" culture -- astrology, occultism, Zen, yoga, Sufism -- appeal to the "intelligentsia" and so ironically tend to cluster about our contemporary university centers (the remaining seats of that culture). Meanwhile the less alien varieties -- that is, fundamentalist or ecstatic forms of our own traditional faiths -- abound amid the non-intellectual portions of our cultural life, in "Middle America."

New Questions

The religious as an authentic, self-evidencing, powerful and healing aspect of experience, yet often also a demonic and destructive one, has made its appearance in every conceivable form in the midst of an "advanced" culture, baffling and alarming both the established secularism of academia and the established religious forces of the ecclesia. Former nagging questions of the meaning and verifiability of religious language a language thought to be totally inapplicable to ordinary experience -- now seemed themselves to be anachronistic questions, reflective of ivory-tower intellectuals or academics quite out of touch with vast ranges of ordinary experience.

The questions about religion and public life, those calling for "public" discussion, no longer focus on the verifiability of religious speech but concern quite other issues: methods of understanding and describing the religious realities, old and new, that we see appearing around us; useful criteria for assessing these religions and for defining and comprehending this new set of powers in our public life; and ways of protecting vital religious groups from the excesses of the public reaction to them, and protecting the public from the excesses of powerful religious groups -- hardly questions a secular culture had thought it would have to take seriously!

The religious dimension of experience appears to have re-presented itself in full force, in all its historic creativity, in answer to real social and psychological needs, and in all its historic explosive and demonic power. One could point as further evidence to the manifest "religious" characteristics of the two dominant contemporary secular ideologies: communism and liberal, democratic capitalism. These characteristics include their concern for commitment by their adherents; their concentration on questions of heresy or revisionism; their endless missionary propaganda; their global claims for their own values, for their unique place in history, for their "God-given" destiny for all of humanity. Whatever the case may be with "God," religion and the religious are not dead in our present cultural or political situation.

On the contrary, most counterfactual of all now appears the "secular" confidence, common not so long ago, that as a scientific and democratic culture unfolded, religion would gradually dissipate as an effective force in personal and social life alike. As a consequence, the "secular" understanding both of society and of the religious must be reassessed. This reappearance of the religious in the midst of secular society -- and in forms far different from our traditional religious communions -- raises as well, of course, a host of vital theological issues that cannot be ignored: What is the relation of Christianity (or of Judaism) to these new and old religious communities? What is the relation of Christianity to the "religious dimension" of a social order? Granted that a purely "secular" social order now appears as more a wish-fulfillment than a possible reality, what kind of social order can really encompass the religious in all its creativity, its uneasy pluralism, and its demonic force?

The second and certainly more important element in what I have termed the "re-evaluation of the secular" is the manifestation of the precariousness in future history, if not the imminent mortality, of that secular culture. To itself, as it developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to its loyal descendants (at least, in the Anglo-Saxon West) through the first half of the 20th century, that culture defined and was thought to be identical to "modernity." As a result, it was believed that this same culture would shape all the continually developing forms of modernity; that is, would represent the dominant culture not only of the immediate future but of the distant future as well. Would not of a certainty science, technology and industrialism develop, mature and so only increase in extent? And would not the accompanying cultural values of that scientific society -- pragmatic openness; tolerance; freedom of inquiry, of belief and of decision; the democratic process; and self-control -- also increase? And with an increase of democracy and goods, would not equality and justice also steadily grow in strength?

To be sure, Continental Europe -- or some Europeans -- felt by the end of World War I that it was experiencing the gradual disintegration, if not the final end, of its culture. But Americans had not experienced that war in that way; and thus our confidence -- on whatever terms -- in the future stability and even expansion of our own scientific, technological, industrial liberal and democratic society remained unabated through the brief challenge to that culture’s domination represented by the rise of fascism.

Again, to be sure, the appearance of fascism in a highly advanced society effectively dissolved the easy (but to us now strange) identification of advancement in civilization with an advancement in morals -- an identification intrinsic to the conception of historical progress. But the subsequent defeat of fascism seemed to have rescued our culture, to have given it a new start -- and thus covered over once more the possibility of that culture’s ending, the incipient mortality of the democratic and liberal culture which fascism had challenged. In any case, it has remained for subsequent decades to herald that approaching end, to exhibit that possible mortality in ever clearer fashion. For what these decades have done is to uncover internal and yet unknown contradictions in that culture, and unheeded external threats to it, which now seem to portend clearly its objective loss of dominance, its internal disintegration and transformation. Those contradictions and threats might well in the end result in the culture’s ultimate demise.

The Threat to Ecology

These remarks do not represent a prediction. Nothing in history is certain or determined. But it is simply the case that in a "time of troubles" (to borrow Toynbee’s phrase), wisdom, courage and virtue must abound lest the mere possibility of demise be transformed, through our frantic reaction to its menacing appearance, into a virtual certainty.

The first manifestation of this dilemma or contradiction leading to possible mortality is the ecological crisis -- the threat which an expanding technological and industrial culture poses to the nature system and the natural resources on which all life depends, including the life of a technological and industrial society itself. Unless that technological, industrial establishment is radically controlled -- thereby effecting a transformation of vast areas of our political, economic and social life -- the culture has a very good chance of destroying itself through increasingly inadequate supplies, through endless conflicts for those ever scantier materials, and through the systems of control and authority necessary to cope with each of these dangers.

The problem is essential and not accidental for the culture, and thus it is deep, lethal. That is, it arises precisely from what has been most characteristic and creative about modern civilization: its dynamically accumulating knowledge and technology, its expanding industrial system and its emphasis on egalitarian consumerism. It is these that have together caused, and continue to cause, "advanced" culture’s menace to our common resources and to our natural environment as a whole. ‘This menace threatens what is noble as well as what is "earthy’ in the culture’s life: its emphasis on personal individuality and freedom, its democratic processes and rights, its tolerance of variety and pluralism, as well as its high levels of bodily security and comfort, its affluence and its constant hopes for material improvement.

The Loss of Western Dominance

The second harbinger of possible mortality for Western civilization and culture has been the dramatic shift in the past few decades in the relative global power and influence of that culture. From the time the Turks challenged Vienna in 1456 to the Japanese attack in 1940 (nearly 500 years), no non-Western power had been able effectively to challenge a major Western power, let alone the whole of the West. Western powers challenged and vanquished one another, to be sure; but the entire globe was theirs to take unless they were checked by one of themselves. Thus their arms, as well as their ideas, their modes of existing and operating, their symbols and values, conquered almost everything in their way. (No wonder this expanding Europe thought that history represented progress!)

Since 1945, this situation has altered dramatically and with incredible speed: now only one Western power remains among the four major powers, and no European power any longer by itself enjoys the level of a world power. Europe has begun to acclimatize itself to this precipitous descent. America, being the remaining inheritor of Western world power, has yet even to try to realize that domination is no longer a possibility or a possible goal, that world power must be shared, not only with other groups with their own interests but with groups holding quite other cultural and value systems -- and thus that the continuation of our power (and that of our forms of cultural order) is precarious at best.

The fact of this vast reduction in our relative power is presently writ large on countless world events; it is felt every day by Americans; and it is expressed by them in a wide variety of frustrated, angry, anxious and "macho" ways. The concrete policies of particular administrations can no doubt slow or accelerate this massive historical trend marking the end of an era of Western dominance; no one American administration, however, has created that trend, nor probably can any fundamentally alter its course.

As with the trend represented by the unraveling ecological crisis, policy cannot stop the process, but policy still can be rational or irrational, moral or immoral, and so creative or destructive. We as a nation might (at least in principle) face dwindling common resources by creating rational and fair modes of common control, of mutual sharing and of gradually effective methods of redistribution -- or we can react to the same trend by trying to commandeer those scant resources, by fighting with our rivals and by imposing an authoritarian discipline.

Correspondingly, we can face the loss of dominant authority and power with wisdom and serenity, with an eye to the just aims of newly emerging forces, and, above all, with resolution in maintaining our most creative traditional ideals. Or we can seek to retain our power and affluence intact; support "friendly" dictators here, there and everywhere; and thus corrupt our ideals into an ideology defending remaining islands of privilege, and in so doing render those ideals irrelevant to and meaningless for the newly emerging world.

Human freedom in history never means the freedom to change the fundamental trends of an epoch -- England could not have willed to remain a "great power" in the second half of the 20th century. But still, within the unfolding of a trend, freedom is faced with momentous political choices, choices representing reason or unreason, courage or panic, generosity and compassion or aggressive and destructive sin. An old culture, like an old bear, can suddenly whiff the dank odor of its own mortality; and then it is tempted, and tempted deeply, to sacrifice its ideals for the preservation of its life -- and thus to hasten the very demise in history that it fears so much.

A Worldly Word

Clearly, the secular culture of which we are a part -- and to which we rightly seek to adapt the gospel -- is itself undergoing the deepest of crises. In such "times of troubles," problems mount to seemingly insoluble proportions; fears, basic anxieties and panic increase; conflicts become more lethal; "civil religions" begin to come apart -- and a process of self-destruction on every level -- economic, political, social and ideological -- may well ensue. In such times, questions of policy are, of course, uppermost and in the forefront of attention: economic, political, social and international policy. But within these questions, behind them and through them are woven moral and religious issues of vast import to every political, economic and social decision.

It is, then, to the moral and religious issues of this coming time of troubles -- appearing already but promising more to come! -- that Christian theology and preaching (as well as academic reflection) must also address themselves. For not only are we theologians and our universities part of this common cultural world and so responsible to address it, but our churches and classrooms are in that world, too. It is the people in the churches and in the classes who will share in these common decisions, and it is their communities that will make those decisions.

Theology and preaching must, therefore, address their responsible Word to the world, as well as adapt their Word to it. This Word is, of course, Christian in its sources. But it is worldly, timely and deeply public in its relevance, and it must be said and be heard: a word of. obligation in relation to each public moral issue as it arises; a word of the retrieval of the culture’s most creative ideals and institutions; a world of judgment on the culture’s present and potential sins; a word of forgiveness whenever it is repentant; a word of promise and so of confidence (in God, if not in itself) for the future.

Clearly, more than an expertise in theological or hermeneutical method is here required. Ethical issues of justice, liberation and sharing come starkly to the fore in all relevant reflection and speaking. The question of God’s providence as the principle of historical judgment on the one hand and of new future possibilities on the other is a requirement for any theology fit for the time. And the confidence in the divine mercy and care for a world in agony -- known through the incarnation and the cross -- must be continually reiterated.

As a final note, let us recall how important it was that Augustine, contemplating the dismemberment of the glorious Roman Imperium, conceived of the gospel in such terms that it transcended that Hellenistic culture to which he had also so deftly and profoundly adapted it. It was precisely out of that transcendence effected by Augustine’s work that there arose new and seemingly endless cultural and ecclesiastical possibilities for other historical epochs, the medieval and our own included -- possibilities of which he could not then conceivably have dreamed.

An Uncharted Sea

The long-term trends that define our cultural epoch set for us the form of our major theological problems. They do not give us our symbols: the biblical and Christian traditions do that. But they do determine what we worry and think about, and how we go about that concerned reflection. These same long-term trends have set before us one more problem that must be mentioned -- namely, the question of the relation of Christianity to other religions. This is by no means a new problem for Christianity; nevertheless, it appears now in a radically new way. Theologically, therefore, it represents a quite uncharted sea, one where even the major rocks, let alone the clear channels, are as yet completely unknown. This question of the relation of Christianity to other religions has been raised both at home (as noted above) and in the now close encounter of cultures in the wider world.

Certainly it has been the sociological reality of one world" that has brought the wide variety of religions of the world into continual and intimate contact with one another, both abroad and here at home. But it has been the sharp decline of Western dominance that has recently made that contact qualitatively different. For that decline has set these religions into a situation of equality as they meet one another, rather than a situation characterized by the clear dominance of one over the others. (In fact, here in the U.S. the aura of dominance, of a preponderance of illuminating and healing power, seems now to hover about the newcomers!)

Whenever religions encounter one another as equals, the sparks of theological problems -- important for each -- immediately shower out in all directions. If there is truth and grace in this other religion -- and how can I now deny that? -- how am I now to interpret the truth and grace I experience or hope to experience in my own? Am I to deny the latter, my own "stance" in my own faith, in order to recognize the former, the truth of the other’s stance -- and thus to have a dialogue among equals? Possibly -- but then, having scuttled my own position, are we now in any sense equal? And what if my Buddhist friend does the same? Then neither of us represents a religious tradition, and no dialogue ensues; in fact, we have both joined a common "secular" tradition, and all we can now discuss are methods for the study of the religion of others.

Surely, then, I must continue to affirm the truth and grace in my own tradition and continue to stand there, if we are to speak meaningfully with one another; and yet at the same time I cannot, for the same reason, deny the truth and grace in his or her position. At that point, I am forced to try to understand theologically how to make sense of such a weird amalgam of an "absolute" position in my own faith with a "relative" view of it in relation to his "faith" -- an amalgam that characterizes both of us in the dialogue.

As is evident, these questions raise all sorts of fundamental issues for Christian theology: about God, about "revelation," about the decisiveness of the event of Christ -- and corresponding questions for members of each of the other faiths (e.g., how veridical or "absolute" in this context is the ‘higher level of consciousness" of the Buddhists?). That few know answers to these new theological issues, or even how to approach them, is obvious. But that this new situation of encounter calls for a new sort of theological discussion, and that this represents another very significant task of theology, seems to me unquestioned.

Requirements of a Risky Situation

I said at the start that I felt myself to be in a radically new situation in theology, encountering theological issues that seemed quite new and about which I felt little present clarity or as yet little real hint of an answer. And more mystifying still, while the one (the necessity of a Christian Word to a culture in mortal distress) seems to call for a sure, a clear and a well-founded Christian theology of history, the other (the necessity of dialogue with other religions) seems to relativize, though it cannot in the end dissolve, any particular religion’s answer to culture’s problems.

Nevertheless, these two new issues, arising as implications of the same worldwide trends, interweave and support as well as oppose or contend with each other. The ecological center of our culture’s agony calls for a new view of nature -- and therefore for Christians as well as secular humanists to listen carefully and receptively to the attitudes toward nature characteristic of other religious traditions. Meanwhile, the problem of a theological understanding of history -- necessary if we in the west or those in Asia are to address either the ecological issue or the new shape of world culture -- is precisely that element in our tradition for which other religions have the greatest respect and for which, on their own admission, they in turn have the greatest present need.

And, to sum this up; it is the hermeneutical problem with which we began which all modern religious traditions share in common, for which they each offer their own unique procedures, and so about which they can endlessly dialogue creatively with one another. For all of us alike face the same issue of understanding our own tradition in the light of our modem cultural and social situations -- only let us, in assaying that problem, not forget the present precariousness, the moral temptations and the religious requirements of that infinitely risky modern situation!

Ordering the Soul: Augustine’s Manifold Legacy

Augustine of Hippo was converted to Christianity just over 1,600 years ago. Except perhaps for Paul, he is of unsurpassed importance for the entire Western Christian church; and, surprisingly, he is almost equally significant for understanding the entirety of subsequent Western culture.

The element of surprise derives from the fact that Augustine is, in many ways, a distant figure. After all, he was not a medieval Christian -- even an early medieval Christian -- but a member of the preceding culture: the classical world of Rome, whose formative principles derived from the even earlier Hellenic or Greek culture. He wrote, thought and especially spoke as a cultured Roman; he was a teacher of rhetoric and a leading candidate for high Roman honors in that role. His was the last great classical mind.

Amid the shifting intellectual and spiritual currents of his time he was an intellectual, a mild bon vivant, an early yuppie interested in advancement and fame, and an earnest "seeker" of intellectual wisdom and personal wholeness. Like not a few other serious 30-year-olds, he passed into and out of many of the important philosophical and religious options then available ---Manichaeism, Skepticism, Platonism -- all the while aware of the powerful presence of Christianity. (The empire had officially become Christian 60 years earlier, his mother was Christian, and many serious seekers were becoming Christian.)

Despite his external success, Augustine found his inner life breaking down. He felt in desperate need of rescue. Even when he was intellectually satisfied, and believed his mind was able to see the truth, he found that his will could not will the truth he saw -- he could not by his will control his will.

Rescue came in his conversion, and in his immersion in a quite different stream of spiritual and intellectual influences: the grace he found in the Christian church, the truth he adopted through its tradition, and the life of discipline (the Law) he embraced as a serious convert, priest and, later, bishop. His breakdown amid the variety of Roman alternatives was cured by the new Christian alternative, his intellectual doubts as a late antique philosopher were resolved by Hebrew and Christian truth, his dissatisfaction with professional advancement in Rome was rechanneled into an enthusiasm for the new society of the ecclesia.

Breakdown and rescue constituted not only an inward saga for Augustine but the story of the cultural epoch that spanned his life. At Adrianople in 375, two decades after his birth (354), Gothic tribes entered the imperial regions in force, in 410 Alaric sacked Rome, to the terror and the horror of all; in 428, two years before he died, the Vandals surrounded and besieged Hippo, and in 476 the last remnant of the Western Empire at Ravenna left Italy entirely and moved east to Constantinople. Militarily, politically and economically, imperial Rome collapsed. It, too, needed rescuing by new spiritual, moral and intellectual forces, and by a new uniting and empowering community. These came, however slowly, from the small Christian church. Its truth, its law, its community and its grace guided and empowered the new medieval world, which united the inheritance from Greece and Rome with new biblical and catholic forms.

Augustine, with an astounding sensitivity and self-awareness, powerfully expressed both the breakdown and the rescue of classical culture. Hence, appropriately, it was in the terms of his own synthesis of classical and biblical forms that the new edifice of culture was established and continually reformed -- four, five, six, even seven centuries later. Augustine's life and thought became a symbol of the union of classical culture and Hebrew-Christian religion. What transpired inwardly in him and was expressed by him was on a different scale embodied in the development of medieval culture.

It is impossible even to conceive of medieval Catholicism without its Augustinian beginning. Augustine's massive footprints are everywhere (80 per cent of Thomas Aquinas's references to "the fathers" are to Augustine). Augustine's understanding of the ecclesia as a sacramental community in whom Christ is, despite the blemishes of the worldly institution, eternally and effectively present, dominated the medieval period. So did his understanding of intellect as incapable of full truth unless grounded in divine revelation. Credo ut intelligam, believe in order that you may understand, was the motto of most medieval philosophy and theology, even of late scholasticism.

Significant, too, was Augustine's conviction that the soul is refashioned by the graces resident in the community of Christ. By itself the soul loves itself and the world; and the "power of love is such that what the mind has long and lovingly thought over will stick to it like glue" (On the Trinity). As gravity carries a stone downward, so the love of the world carries the soul down, losing God, itself and its neighbor. But in grace God's love can flood the soul with a different love, caritas, enabling it to rise again, find itself and God and become what it really seeks to be. Through humility, faith, obedience and love, a Christian can live in time and yet hope for eternity. The image of the Christian as a humble pilgrim on earth, seeking above all to incarnate love, is a gift of Augustine's vision.

Strangely enough, it is also impossible to understand the Reformation without understanding Augustine. He is specifically cited in Reformation arguments, especially by Calvin, and both Luther and Calvin recognized that the themes they emphasized as the essential gospel had been stressed earlier by Augustine: the universality and depth of the problem of sin; the consequent incapacity of even the "best" persons to follow the law commanding inward love, the possibility of salvation -- of escaping condemnation and of gaining blessedness -- through God's grace alone. No one can come to God with any merits or any claims, thus all righteousness and so every basis for hope are from God alone. This was Augustine's great case against the Pelagians; quite naturally it became the central Reformation argument against the compromises, the relative means and the "spiritual barter system" of the late medieval church.

I am sure that Augustine would have urged the "Protestants, " as he did the Donatists, to stay inside the one Mystical Body of Christ so as not to break the bonds of unity in Christ. Nevertheless, generations of Protestants (until the rise of liberalism) have with good reason regarded Augustine as almost "one of us," and have read him in that way, as have the neo-orthodox. (However, Thomist Catholics since 1860 have also had equally good reason to read Augustine as a brilliant but not quite reliable and mature precursor to Thomas.)

The strangest aspect of Augustine's significance is that he can also be called the first modern spirit, one of the founders of modern Western consciousness. Can the bishop of Hippo, the establisher of orthodox dogma and ecclesial authority, really be linked with Machiavelli, Newton, Descartes, Gibbon, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Marx and Darwin, to name a few shapers of the modern spirit? Indeed he can -- because modern consciousness has important roots in the culture that preceded the Renaissance and the rise of modern science, as well as the rise of historical consciousness. Important presuppositions of modern culture, which were only latent in medieval culture, can be discerned in Augustine.

To begin with, his thought gave priority to self-consciousness. For him, not only certainty and truth but even more, the sense of reality and of value were established through self-consciousness. This approach has engendered a number of fundamental features of modern Western life: its critical spirit; its emphasis on free assent-, its focus on the self as constructing its world and legislating its own values, and hence all the various modes of personal, sociological and historical relativism. Attention to self-consciousness has also established the certainty of the self's reality, of the person's intrinsic and ultimate value, and the almost infinite possibilities latent in each self.

What exactly has Augustine to do with this inheritance? In his search for truth, Augustine was genuinely troubled by the Skeptics' arguments that one can be certain of nothing, and that careful thinking in no way provides a reliable guide to a wiser life. Here the Platonists, especially Plotinus, came to his rescue. Turn inside, they said, away from the variable senses and the ambiguities of the world, and you will discover what you cannot doubt, namely the changeless and universal Truth present to but above the fickle mind -- the truth of mathematics, of beauty and of good and evil. Augustine frequently used this argument, but gave it a new twist. In turning inward, he says, I find that I am, that I know that I am, and that I delight in that being and that knowing. This knowledge I cannot doubt: for if I doubt, then I am, I know that I am, and I delight in that. At least, then, I know one truth: that I doubt, and that in doubting I am. And so knowing a truth, I cannot doubt Truth.

Here Platonism is brought down to earth, to the level of the existing self and one's self-awareness. In Augustine a new consciousness takes shape, one that finds the originating and firm center of certainty in the self-awareness of the self as existing, thinking and willing.

One result of this new self-consciousness was a new concentration on the relation of the self to God. Christian doctrine had heretofore concerned itself largely with the cosmic drama of creation, fall, incarnation and rescue, and had only briefly touched on the career of the soul or the self in relation to that drama. Augustine made the self's journey into sin and then grace through the leading of providence the great new theme. He focused on what can be known, and known of God, by "nature," without faith and grace, and what can be known with them; on what the bondage of the will actually means in experience; and, as we have noted, on the effects of grace on our willing, loving and knowing. These psychological and behavioral concerns dominate Western theology from then on.

Behind these concerns was a new sense of the reality and importance of the historical self -- its career over time and in community, the way its memory and expectation unite time into a present, its anxiety and guilt, and its hope of healing. This concentration on the historical self, though later shorn of the emphasis on the self's relation to God, has been fundamental to Western philosophy, politics, literature and psychology.

A second major Augustinian element in modern consciousness, clearly connected with this concentration on the historical self, is the confidence that time is real, linear (its moments unrepeatable), and going somewhere; i.e., it is potentially and even increasingly filled with meaningful content. The modem West's two important ideologies, those of liberal progress and Marxist revolution, both reflect and depend upon these assumptions about time. Such assumptions began, of course, in Hebrew culture and were continued, more as presuppositions than explicit affirmations, in the New Testament. But it was Augustine who first elaborated them carefully and, just as important, who first applied the Christian symbols of the cosmic drama -- creation, fall, incarnation, ecclesia and eschatological end -- to the structure and meaning of history, particularly of the history of the rise and fall of empires. It is widely recognized that Augustine was the first speculative philosopher of history: the first to envisage a unified interpretation of all of history.

Since, however, his interpretation set God's power, and will in the very center of history, and since he saw secular empires as stumbling inexorably through sin, rather than as representing progressive steps toward modernity, he was regarded until the mid-20th century as too archaic to be of help. His characterization of the world as aiming for justice but creating injustice, as seeking peace but failing because it is our peace we seek (the world's peace, he said, is only a lull in a continuing conflict for power), was regarded as too pessimistic: "the typical gloom of a premodern, prescientific and pretechnological mind. "

As realistic as any moral realist in political and international affairs, Augustine yet insisted that an inordinate self-interest leads to self-destruction, as the evidence clearly shows. Therefore, moral norms, while never incarnated easily in history, still represent its inexorable structure; defiance of them by the great empires leads to destruction. Hence these norms are illustrated, rather than disproved, in history's turmoils -- specifically, of course, in the fall of Rome.

On the face of it, these points seem as relevant to America's current travails as they were to Rome's fall and certainly more so than either the utopianism of much modern political theory, or its opposite: a frankly self-interested perspective concerned only with national interests and national security. For Augustine, to seek for security alone is to banish the possibility of its appearance, and hence to increase the very insecurity we are intent on avoiding.

In Augustine's epoch the cyclical understanding of time was still common. Events, it was thought, endlessly repeat themselves so that no historical occurrence is in any way definitive; all will pass away, and all will again return. On a more immediate level, events were determined by Fate, Tyche and Fortuna; what happens to us is determined by transpersonal forces far beyond our control -- by "principalities and powers," by the stars, by demonic powers. This was an increasingly popular view in the political chaos of the late Hellenistic age.

But to moderns who believe that history is progress, a sense of the cycles of history and of the workings of fate seems bizarre and naive, barely worthy of intellectual argument. As a result, to them Augustine's powerful answer to these nightmares has appeared irrelevant.

Augustine said that God had created time along with a moving world; time is, therefore, not a power over God but an instrument in the divine hand. Thus while time and history as creaturely can become corrupted -- an arena of sin as well as of "nature," of injustice and conflict as well as of justice and peace, nevertheless through the divine power and grace, history contains a meaning for those within it. Through grace and the love that accompanies it, humans can, not only participate in the historical ecclesia that represents the beginnings (only the beginnings!) of an eternal community, but in being made perfect through grace they may hope for eternal participation in that community with God. As the Mystical Body of Christ in which truth and grace dwell, the ecclesia represents the thread of transcendent meaning that runs through the moments of time.

Why was Augustine so sure that time is irreversible, is moving to a permanent and unassailable fulfillment? He pointed to two events in time in which eternity dwells, so to speak -- events which cannot be subject to the cycles of time. One is each believer's experience of salvation and the promise of new life. If this " new- creation" were to be undone in the future, then experience and promise are both delusions -- but we know this not to be the case. The other is the life and death of Christ. "Once he died for our sins, and with that he dieth not again -- nor do we." Eternity has entered time in incarnation and in grace; time is thus held firm, as it were, and made decisive by the presence of eternity, and directed toward its goal. Hence time has meaning for all those who relate their moments to eternity in this way.

Moderns have found Augustine's transcendent basis for temporal meaning incredible, and have believed instead that time is meaningful because the human powers of science, reason and morals will progressively lead toward a perfection that cannot be lost. Now that this modern affirmation itself appears illusory, perhaps even a presumptuous myth, time seems unanchored, unstopped and undirected. Seeing temporal sequence falling apart or careening heedlessly toward a demonic apocalypse, we realize that we, even we, may not have understood the possibilities and pitfalls of history as well as did Augustine.

We have seen that the modern emphases on persons and their own past and future, on self-consciousness and self-awareness as the beginning of understanding, on a linear time and a hopeful history all begin with Augustine. Many of his deepest insights have in recent times come to the fore, including the notion that loving and willing are the basis of true knowledge ("we can know only that which we love") and that all thought depends on presuppositions (credo ut intelligam). Clearly, much in the fields of depth and personality psychology, in the new philosophy of science and in hermeneutics, can in this sense be termed Augustinian.

At the same time, moderns have jettisoned (not merely mislaid) a vast amount of Augustine's legacy. One of his most frequently quoted remarks, "Only two things will I seek to know, God and the soul, the soul and God (from the Soliloquies), is frequently cited to show the absurdity of such religious priorities, and to suggest that this emphasis on the irrelevant or the unreal prompted civilization's descent into the darkest ages. Only with the late medieval period's renewed interest in the external world, in the laws of the natural world and in control over the forces of nature did civilization get back on track. This is the role most of the children of Augustine would assign to him, insofar as they "believe in history" and insofar as they understand (from him) the meaningfulness of time.

Also problematic for moderns is Augustine's conviction that all knowledge begins within. To know the soul is, paradoxically, to know the possibility of a world outside the soul, for here lie the conditions of knowledge and so of science itself. Modern empiricism, on the other hand, which locates the possibilities of science in the brain (as if the brain and its patterns of order were not also in part a construction of the scientist's mind), precisely reverses this: the outside world known by the senses is alone the seat of what is -- if anything is -- universal, objective, real and certain. What is "inside," in self-awareness, is only subjectivity and so illusion, projection, at best mere preference.

Furthermore, what transpires within the soul determines for Augustine the way human powers are used. To "know thyself" is the first order of cognitive business, for to know the order of the soul, and through that knowledge to achieve control of one's life, is wisdom. Here Augustine is "Greek - -and though we like to think we continue that latter tradition, we do not. To us, knowledge of the soul and its order is important only for those afflicted with neuroses; our first order of business is knowledge of the external world, and thus the power to control that world.

Augustine disagreed. Knowledge of the world, unless ruled by knowledge and control of the self, in the end means self-destruction. For our unordered soul is filled with unlimited striving (concupiscence) for the world, striving, which can dominate not only the world but, even more, the self, the same self that through reason rules the world. Unless the self knows itself, and unless it loves something more than the world and itself, the self will, to be sure, rule the world, but it will itself be governed and driven by the spiritual hunger we call greed, the desire to possess and enjoy infinite abundance. In this situation both world and self are destroyed. On this point, Augustine seems more modern than many modern theorists of learning. For, in the end, knowledge of the soul seems crucial for preserving both nature and ourselves.

In Augustine, all things point to God because all things depend on God: self, mind, will, order, time, history, fulfillment. God is in all things as the source of their being, as the power behind and within their power, and as the order that regulates them. Augustine said: I am, I know that I am, and I delight in my being and my knowing. I am, I know, I love. Correspondingly, I know that my being depends on Eternal Being; that my truth is a dim reflection of the divine light that shines within, and that my loving is God's love present in the heart. God, therefore, is eternity, truth and love, the ground of all temporal being, its order and its goodness. As each creature is, knows and wills in dependence on God, so its good is to cleave in love to God, to know God and to be in God. Without God, all that is quickly becomes nothing, all order disorder, all temporality a vanishing present, and all love conflict. Augustine is God-centered; our world is not. Yet his diagnosis of the need for God, as for the soul, seems far more credible today than much that is written today about today.

Secularism’s Impact on Contemporary Theology

The peculiar character of the current theological situation lies in the fact that it is dominated by the massive influence of secularism. Secularism is, so to speak, the cultural Geist within which all forms of thought, including the theological, must operate if they are to be relevant and creative. It functions in our period much as idealistic dualism functioned in the Hellenistic world, providing basic attitudes to reality, categories of thought and evaluations of meaning and goodness.

This is not to argue that all of the implications of secularism must or could be accepted by theology, any more than all the implications of idealistic dualism were accepted by the thinkers of the early Church. But there is no question that the creative forms of patristic thought, as well as the "heresies," were set within the fundamental structures of Hellenism. My own feeling is that our theological relation to secularism as the basic mood of our age is roughly analogous, and that our task is in this sense similar to theirs.

Secularism is not so much a philosophy as the pre-rational basis of all potent contemporary philosophies. Like all fundamental cultural moods or historical forms of consciousness, it exists on the level of what are called presuppositions and thus is expressed in the variant forms of a given culture’s life rather than being one of these forms. It is, therefore, not easy to characterize briefly.

Four terms seem to me helpful in describing it: naturalism, temporalism, relativism and autonomy. These words express an attitude that finds reality in the temporal flux immediately around us, effectiveness solely in the physical and historical (or human) causes in that process, knowledge possible only of that passing flux from the position of one within it, and value only in the fulfillment of its moments. This attitude emphasizes the here and now, the tangible, the manipulatable, the sensible, the relative and the this-worldly.

This cultural or historical viewpoint, practically synonymous with the modern mind, has been expressed with progressive radicality in a wide variety of philosophies beginning roughly 200 years ago: empiricism, Kantian criticism, Hegelianism, evolutionism and process thought, pragmatic naturalism, and now existentialism and positivism. What is significant about the historical development of this Geist is that all the elements of what we might call "ultimacy," with which it began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have steadily vanished from it: The sense of an ultimate order or coherence in the passage of things, of a final purpose or direction in their movement, and of a fundamental goodness or meaning to the wholeness of being.

We are thus left with a kind of "raw" or radical secularity in which no ultimate order or meaning appears. This is expressed both by positivism and by secular existentialism, especially in the latter’s literary forms. However different these two points of view may be, each in its own way reflects a concentration solely on immediate knowledge or value, and asserts either the meaninglessness of ultimate metaphysical or religious questions (positivism), or the complete absence or irrelevance of ultimate answers (existentialism). Man is no longer felt to be set within an ultimate order or context, from which he draws not only his being but the meanings, standards and values of his life; he is alone and alien in the flux of reality and quite autonomous with regard to meaning and value.

This is almost as vast a departure from the "secular" evolutionary philosophies of a century ago as it is from the classical Christian world-view. It is no accident that the phrase "God is dead" is taken as the symbol of present-day secularism. But since for this mood existence also "is the absurd," we should add that all the gods are dead—that is, all those structures of coherence, order and value in the wider environment of man’s life. Darwin and Nietzsche, not Marx and Kierkegaard, are the real fathers of the present mood.

This developing modern mood has, of course, had increasing influence on the theology of the last two hundred years. At first this was largely confined to (I) the acceptance of naturalistic causality and, by extension, the methods and results of science with regard to spatio-temporal facts; (2) the appropriation of the attitudes of historical inquiry, resulting in at least a qualified relativism with regard to both scriptural writings and doctrines; (3) the emphasis on religion as of value for this life and on ethics as having relevance only for one’s concern for his neighbor’s welfare. In the nineteenth century these and other elements of the modern mentality began to transform traditional theology completely.

Liberalism succeeded in relating itself to the earlier forms of this secular mood by using the remaining elements of ultimacy (an ultimate order of process, the progressive direction of change, etc.) as the ontological bases for its theological elaborations; but this broke down in the twentieth century with the general loss of faith in these immanent structures of ultimate meaning.

Neo-orthodoxy rejected these "secular" ways of talking of God and used the older non-secular biblical categories, while accepting the whole modern understanding of the spatio-temporal process now de-sacralized of all ultimacy. Out of this came an uneasy dualism, with a naturalistically interpreted world and a biblically understood God giving meaning and coherence thereto.

The developing problem of this God’s historical activity—where the two diverse worlds were joined in his "mighty acts"—became more and more evident. One might say that, not unlike today’s Roman Catholics, the neo-orthodox thought they could accept secularism secularly," i.e., as exclusively an attitude toward ordinary history and nature, without compromise to the autonomous biblical superstructure that was set upon that secular base. The present crisis in theology illustrates the increasing difficulty of that strange marriage of heaven and earth, of Heilsgesclzichte and Geschichte.

What is the form of this crisis? In theology the crisis has revealed itself in the virtual disappearance of discourse about God, surely a crisis in that discipline if there ever was one! This was first evident in the aforementioned difficulty of relating the biblical God to a naturalistically interpreted process. Then in Bultmannian theology, where the problem was made explicit, God was shoved farther and farther into the never never land of sheer kerygmatic proclamation.

Theological understanding contented itself with an existential analysis of man and a hermeneutical analysis of a relativized Scripture and experienced "word-events"—though why such analyses should be called "theological" without the inclusion of God remains problematic at best. For if only the effects of divine activity in history, documents and experience can be spoken of—but not that activity itself—one is very near to sheer secularism.

It is not surprising that at this point a "religionless Christianity" should appear powerfully in our midst, a Christianity that seeks to understand itself in some terms other than man’s dependence upon God, and to realize itself totally in the "secular," in the service to the neighbor in the world. The end result has been the appearance of the "God is dead" theologies, which openly proclaim the truth of the new secularity described above, reject for a variety of reasons all language about God, and in a thoroughly secular way concentrate on life and action in the modern world. The power of secularism is vividly revealed here; for in these most recent theologies secular presuppositions and attitudes have utterly infected those formerly inoculated against them.

Probably, however, the purely intellectual difficulties of neo-orthodoxy did not themselves lead to its sudden demise but were reflections of a more basic problem: the fundamental mood of secularism in all of us with which neo-orthodoxy was in the end unable to cope. Apparently what has happened has been that the trans-natural reality that neo-orthodoxy proclaimed—the transcendent God, his mighty acts and his Word of revelation—became more and more unreal and incredible to those who had learned to speak this language. Younger enthusiasts began to wonder if they were talking about anything they themselves knew about when they spoke about God, of encounter, of the eschatological event and of faith. Do these words point to anything, or are they just words, traditional symbols referring more to hopes than experienced realities?

Because of this experience of the unreality, or at least the elusiveness, of the divine, younger theologians began to listen anew to positivist accusations of "meaninglessness" and existentialist affirmations of the death of God. And since, it seems to me, this sense of elusiveness remains the predominant reality of the present religious situation, the questions of the reality of God and the possibility of language about him are our most pressing current theological problems, prior to all other theological issues.

I say this for two reasons. (1) The effort to interpret Christian theology without God is a failure. Such efforts have had vast significance in revealing the power of secularism inside as well as outside the Christian community. But they show themselves to be halfway houses to humanism and thus unable to maintain, without some category of deity, any peculiarly Christian elements.

(2) Other contemporary theological problems—for example, the question of the Christ of faith, the historical Jesus and their relation to the words of Scripture, or the issues centering around the Word of revelation, our reception of it and its relation to Scripture and to the modern mind (i.e., the currently popular "hermeneutical problems")— are clearly secondary to the problem of God. While the Bible remains in any theological atmosphere a book of immense historical, literary and linguistic interest, it is of direct theological concern only if it is first presupposed that through it a divine word comes to man. Only if we know already that the Bible is the word of God can theology unfold its concepts without further prolegomena from its contents. And only then does the question of the meaning of its message for our day become the logically primary theological question.

At present, however, serious questions are being asked about the reality of God, and all the more about the reality of any revelation, let alone one through these documents. In such a situation these questions must be settled before we can treat the Bible as the source of truth and, therefore, of theological truth.

Of course it is possible that the question of the reality of God may be answered in relation to our hearing of the biblical word—but then that "word-event" becomes a category in philosophical theology and not merely in hermeneutics. That is to say, "word-event" becomes the argued basis for our assurance that we have here met something real we must call "God"—and such an argument has infinitely transcended the hermeneutical question of interpretation into the philosophical-theological question of what ultimate reality is.

One result of this change of theological concentration will be a separation for the next few years between biblical studies and theological concerns. No longer can the theologian or biblical scholar merely appeal to the "biblical view" as an assumed theological authority, since the questions of whether there be a revelation or a revealer at all are the ones he must deal with. And it surely begs these questions to cite only what the Bible says about them! This may seem to take the zip out of biblical studies—but a goodly number of eminent scholars will welcome for a while this cooler atmosphere in which to do their work.

Above all, dealing with the question of God in the radically secular atmosphere we have described will not be easy. For if the starting point of "biblical faith" is under question., so are the other two starting points of recent theology. In the first case the effort is to begin with "the stance of Christian faith" and to unravel theological conceptions from an encounter or faith situation" of some sort. But secular acids have touched this foundation too, and rendered the questions "Do I have such faith?" "Have I experienced an encounter ?" pressing questions for contemporary theologians. No one can start from a faith that is itself in question; the felt unreality of faith is an inevitable correlate to the felt unreality of God, and thus is also an aspect of our secularism.

The other starting point has been metaphysical inquiry à la process philosophy. But such a metaphysical knowledge of God itself presupposed the coherence of reality and the correlation of our thought to that orderly reality—else the metaphysical enterprise has no ground or legitimacy. Clearly radical secularism, whether in its positivistic or its existentialist forms, doubts that coherence and the relevance of our thought to such ultimate questions as firmly as it doubts "God" and the reality of faith. I do not pretend to know where the new theology will go; but I am sure that in dealing with the question of God, as it must, it can now neither be purely biblical nor simply metaphysical. This means a very new day for all of us.

I said initially that theology must reflect the secular consciousness of our time if it is to be relevant. This means that whatever language it uses must be both discovered in and related to the experiences of man’s natural, temporal and communal life in this world. It is true that the latter-day secular denial of all categories of ultimacy makes theology impossible. But I also think it reflects a false analysis of man’s secular experience, of nature, of himself, of community and of historical existence. A more valid analysis, probably of a phenomenological sort, of those realms of ordinary experience that we call secular will reveal dimensions for which only language about God is sufficient and thus will manifest the meaningfulness of that language. Such a prolegomena to discourse about revelation, word-event, Christ-event and Church is necessary if these forms of theological discussion are to be meaningful in our secular age.