THE THEOLOGICAL RELEVANCE OF THE
HISTORICAL JESUS: A DEBATE AND A THESIS

Introduction: The Recent Past as Historical Context for the
Question

I

N AN EARLY STAGE of his theological investigating,
Karl Rahner surveyed the state of the then current
christology and found cause to bemoan its lack of vitality,
using a most interesting standard: " How few really living and
passionate controversies there are in Catholic christology today
which engage the existential concern of the faithful (is there a
single one ?) ." 1 In his judgment, one of the primary reasons
for christology's stagnation was the lack of noteworthy influence exercised by modern biblical theology upon the farmer's
traditional neo-scholastic structure and content. According to
the teaching of the Church, the Scriptures are the inexhaustible
source of truth about Christ, but " is this conviction noticeable
as an active force and holy disquiet in the ordinary practice of
christology today ? " 2 Rather than incorporate the new knowledge surfacing in the biblical :field, dogmatic christology seemed
content simply to go on as before, quoting certain Scripture
texts which were necessary to prove theses already laid down in
advance. Nor was dogmatic christology doing justice to the
best of its own tradition as embodied in Aquinas, Suarez, and
others, for it showed little interest in Christ's life-his baptism,
his prayer, his concrete passion and abandonment by God on
the cross, leaving these Scriptural "mysteries" to the considerations of piety. What remained of christology was a pallid
version of its former self.
1" Current Problems in Christology,"
Theological Investigations
Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 152.
2 Ibid., 155.

1

I, tr. C.

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

Rather than yield to discouragement in the face of such inertia, Rahner committed himself to the hope that Scripture
studies could and would contribute renewing power to the prevalent neo-scholastic christology. In an eerily prescient remark he prophesied:
Let no one say that nothing more is really possible in this field any
longer. Something is possible, because something must be possible,
if it is a matter of the inexhaustible riches of God's presence with
us ... 3

It was not until over a decade later, when Roman Catholic
biblical scholarship was firmly validated by the Second Vatican Council (and when among Protestant exegetes the 'new
quest' for the historical Jesus was already well launched), that
insights and questions from the biblical perspective began to
penetrate this quiescent christology. 4 The first wave of discussion, generated by recognition of the genuine differences between biblical and prevailing Catholic christology, treated the
issue under the rubric of the tension between exegesis and dogmatic theology, the latter understood as the christology of the
s Op. cit.
a sketch of the history and for summaries of the major documents
of the Roman Catholic Church on biblical study during the last century, see
T. A. Collins and R. Brown," Church Pronouncements," Jerome Biblical Commentary II (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1968), 624-632.
The classic survey and assessment of the 'old quest' is Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from
Reimarus to Wrede, tr. W. Montgomery (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1961). The 'new
quest ' was intiated by Ernst Kasemann's lecture, "The Problem of the Historical Jesus," Essays on New Testament Themes, tr. Vv. Montague (Naperville, Ill.: Alec. R. Allenson, Inc., 1964), 15-47, and its principles delineated
clearly by James Robinson, A New Quest for the Historical Jesiis (London:
SCM Press Ltd., 1959). For an eminently readable summary and evaluation
of the 'old quest', see James Mackey, Jesus-the Man and the Myth (N.Y.:
Paulist Press, 1979), 10-51. For one synopsis of the life of Jesus research,
cf. Gustaf Aulen, Jesus in Contemporary Historical Research, tr. I. Hjelm
(Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1976). For an excellent discussion of the
whole issue from Reimarus to the new questers (including annotated bibliography), see Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the '.l'eaching of Jesus (NY.:
Harper and Row, 1967), 207-48, 262-66.
4 For

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

3

manuals." Indeed there was tension, for biblical scholarship, in
spite of its variety of approaches and plethora of disputed
issues, had enough of an operational consensus to challenge the
proof-tcxting, literalist mode of interpretation, and almost exclusive preoccupation with the Johannine image of Jesus Christ
which characterized manualist christology. For a time the
theory of the sen.m,s plenior or fuller sense of the Scriptures was
advocated as a possible bridge between the two fields: the biblical text is capable of an increment in meaning, an increment
which could transcend the conscious intent of the biblical
author and could be grasped only in the course of the later experience and dogmatic teaching of the church. 6 Such a theory,
if accepted, would obviate the conflict at its root.
But while this attempt at reconciliation was being developed,
largely from the side of the exegetes, a second, more potentially
far-reaching development began on the part of different dogmatic theologians in the Roman Catholic communion. It was
nothing less than the incorporation of the results of critical
biblical scholarship into the very re-thinking of manualist
written by Henrico Petri, Exegese und Dogmatik in der
5 The dissertation
Sicht der katholischen 'I'heologie (Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Rome,
1965) laid out the issue in detail and with extensive bibliography. Particular
clarifying essays were written by many others; cf. Edward Schillebeeckx,
"Exegesis, Dogmatics, and the Development of Dogma," Dogmatic vs. Biblical Theology, H. Vorgrimler, ed. (London: Burns and Oates, 1964), 115-45;
Karl Rahner, "Exegesis and Dogmatic Theology," Theological Investir1ations
5, tr. K. Kruger (N.Y.: Seabury, 1975), 67-93, as well as "The Position of
Christology in the Church between Exegesis and Dogmatics," T.I. 11, tr. D.
Bourke (N.Y.: Seabury, 1975), 185-214; G. Thils and R. Brown, eds. Exegese
et Theologie, Les Saintes Ecritures et leur interpretation theologique (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1968).
a Raymond Brown, who gave this theory new currency through his dissertation The Sensus Plenior of Sacred Scripture (St. Mary's University, Baltimore, 1955), and who reviewed its progress in "The 'Sensus Plenior' in the
Last Ten Years," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 ( 1963), 262-85, has come to
the position that "because of the scholastic and peculiarly Catholic origins
and formulation of this theory, I think that it cannot in its present form
meet the problems that confront it;" rather it must be reformulated and become part of a wider hermeneutical movement; in "The Problems of the
"Sensus Plenior," Thils and Brown (n. 5), 81.

4

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

christology itself. Throughout the decade of the 1970's a continuous stream of works by theologians such as Kasper, Kiing,
Sobrino, Bofl', Mackey, Lane, Schillebeeckx, and the later
Rahner (to mention some of the more widely-read in the English-speaking world) suggested new and varied theological interpretations of Jesus Christ with obvious reliance on the results of critical exegesis.1 Not that these "experiments" in
christology were shaped by biblical scholarship alone; they also
drew heavily and variously from renewed scholarship of the
early Christian centuries, from analysis of the cultural situation
of the contemporary world and from the pluralism of contemporary philosophies. 8 But that the results of biblical research have played an intrinsic role in the formation, content,
and conclusions of these and other recent Roman Catholic
christologies is virtually beyond dispute. As one sympathetic
observer of the Roman Catholic scene characterized the fundamental shift taking place, " the traditional procedure of interpreting the Bible in the light of dogma is reversed; instead,
dogma is interpreted in terms of Scripture." 9

The Historical Jesus
One particular result of biblical research which has emerged
with an influential role in recent systematic Roman Catholic
7 Walter
Kasper, Jesus the Ghrist, tr. V. Green (N.Y.: Paulist Press,
1976); Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, tr. E. Quinn (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday & Co., 1976) ; Jon Sobrino, Ohristology at the Crossroads, tr. J.
Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1978); Leonardo Boff, Jesus Ghrist
Liberator, tr. P. Hughes (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1978); James
Mackey, Jesus-The Man and The Myth (n. 4); Dermot Lane, The Reality
of Jesus (N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1975); Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus-An Experiment in Ohristology, tr. H. Hoskins (N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1979), and
Christ-The Experienoe of Jesus as Lord, tr. J. Bowden (N.Y.: Seabury,
1980); Karl Rahner, ]l'oundations of Christian Faith, tr. W. Dych (N.Y.:
Seabury Press, 1978).
s Oommunio-International
Oatholio Review 6 ( 1979) presents seven different methodological
options operative today in its issue entitled "Approaches to the Study of Theology."
9 George Lindbeck, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology
(Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1970), 111.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

5

christologies and which is the focus of this essay is the image of
what is called the "historical Jesus." This image is arrived at
through the use of historical-critical methods operating on the
limited sources of our information about Jesus of Nazareth: a
few extra-biblical writings, the apocryphal gospels, the New
Testament outside of the gospels, and primarily the canonical
gospels themselves perceived as embodying some authentic historical traditions. Operating on the assumption that Jesus
of Nazareth can be recognized from his historical influence on
the circle of disciples, exegetes work methodologically backwards from the written text, shaped according to the theology
of the writer, through the mainly oral preaching tradition about
Jesus which existed in the post-resurrection communities and
on which the writers drew, to (with great caution) the death
and characteristic teaching and behavior of the originator of
that tradition. The ' historical Jesus ', as operative in recent
christologies and as used here, refers to that image of Jesus
of Nazareth reconstructed by way of inference from our present sources with the tools of historical criticism. 10
This image needs to be distinguished in principle from three
other possible referents of the term 'historical Jesus '. 11 It is
not, first of all, to be identified with Jesus "as he really was",
the actual man who lived
years ago and had quite definite
patterns of behavior and relationship. That actual Jesus who
lived is not fully recoverable by historical methods not only because of the selective character of early Christian memories
which omitted much biographical and psychological information, and not only because of the confessional nature of the
gospels as sources, but more profoundly (as Schillebeeckx has
recently argued 12 ) because the " secret " of a concrete individual is in principle inaccessible to a purely scientific approach
and consequently eludes detection. The image of the historical
10 For

synopsis of these tools, see Perrin (n. 4), 15-53.
A. Harvey has described these referents in a clarifying way; cf.
The Historian and the Believer (N.Y.: Macmillan Co., 1966), 266-68.
12 Jesus (n. 7), 68-69.
11 Van

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON,

c.s.J.

Jesus, then, is not equatable with and does not exhaust the total
reality of the actual Jesus who lived. This is not to say that
the reconstructed image of the historical Jesus has no relation
to that Jesus. It is produced by historical critical researching
into the sources, the aim of which is to identify, in Lonergan's
formulation,
where (places and territories) and when (dates, periods) who (persons, peoples) did what (public life, external acts) to enjoy what
successes, suffer what reverses, exert what influence ... 13

Given the near unanimity among biblical scholars on the point
that some historical tradition lies behind the gospels, the image,
when carefully reconstructed after redaction, form, and source
criticism have done their work, approximates, however asymptotically, the actual Jesus who lived. There is a true although
incomplete coherence between the two.
A second differentiation exists between the historical Jesus
and the memory impressions of Jesus held by the earliest Christian communities. The two images are arrived at in vastly
different ways, the latter being due to the testimony of original
disciples and those near to them, the former the result of historical reconstruction. The memories of Jesus held by the
earliest Christian communities, furthermore, were highly selective ones which preserved what was vital to the ongoing experience of particular groups and deleted what was judged from
their perspective to be unimportant. Highly dependent on these
disparate memory impressions, the reconstructed ima.ge of the
historical Jesus takes into account the total New Testament
tradition and thus presents a more comprehensive picture than
any individual tradition taken alone.
A third distinction should be made between the historical
Jesus and the biblical picture of Christ brought about by the
transformation of the early communities' memories through
continued theological reflection. This later picture, while in
13 Bernard

128.

Lonergan, Method in Theology

(N.Y.: Herder & Herder, 1972),

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

7

continuity with the earlier memories, contains ever deeper
insights into and more refined interpretations of Jesus of
Nazareth confessed as the Christ. 14 Neither Jesus as he actually lived, nor as remembered by the early Christian communities, nor as transformed by theological interpretation, the historical Jesus is the fruit of contemporary biblical scholarship
which has reconstructed through historical critical methods a
picture of the one who stands at the origin of the Christian
tradition. While arrived at largely through inference, and in
that sense an abstraction, it carries the connotation that by
critical appropriation of the witness of the early communities,
we today can have some assured knowledge of the concrete contours of the human historical life of Jesus of Nazareth.
What elements properly belong to this image of the historical
Jesus ? After more than a century of intense disputes there
are still many basic unsolved questions, some of which may
remain forever unresolved. There is, however, a growing consensus among interpreters of the New Testament, both Roman
Catholic and those of the Reformation tradition, about what
can be known in an historically tmstworthy fashion of ,Tesus
of Nazareth. This minimum of knowledge, while allowing no
even nearly complete biography, does yield the typical basic
features and outlines of Jesus's teaching, behavior, and eventual ·
death. In bare outline, it includes knowledge that Jesus was a
member of the Jewish race, hailing from the town of Nazareth,
who in his adult life started a ministry of preaching and healing centered in Galilee. He proclaimed the nearness of the
reign of God and called for conversion of heart in the light of
the coming of that reign. He taught in parables; addressed God
as " Abba"; gathered a group of disciples; chose the marginalized people of society as the particular recipients of his minis14 Several studies which meticulously
but differently trace this development
are Reginald Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Ohristology ( N.Y.:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965); Edward Schweizer, Jesus, tr. D. Green (Richmond, Va: John Knox Press, 1971) ; James Dunn, Ohristolog'!J in the M akinlJ
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980),

8

lDLIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

tering activity. The freedom of his behavior and the authority
with which he taught raised at least implicitly a claim as to his
own agency in the coming of the reign of God. Although his
own perceptions were shaped by contemporary Jewish ethical
and religious thought, he came into conflict with other Jewish
teachers particularly with regard to interpretations of the Law
and its traditions. Going to Jerusalem at the time of Passover
he was arrested, tried, crucified and buried. Some time later,
his followers began to proclaim that he had been raised from
the dead.
This core of information about Jesus of Nazareth, along with
the concomitant awareness that it is critically probable and
that therefore it closely approximates in however minimal a
fashion Jesus as he actually lived, has only recently gained
entrance to Roman Catholic consciousness. That it has become
a significant factor to be grappled with is reflected in the fact
that the International Theological Commission treated the
complex of questions surrounding it as the first of its selected
questions in christology:
Jesus Christ, the object-referent of the Church's faith, is neither
a myth nor any sort of abstract notion. He is a man who lived in
a concrete milieu, and who dies after having lived his own life
within the unfolding of a historical process. It follows that historical research concerning Jesus Christ is demanded by the Christian faith itself ... " 15

Noting the difficulties that such research entails, the Commission nevertheless affirms the legitimacy of the task of bringing
to light and testing the historicity of certain facts relative to
the historical existence of Jesus. Furthermore, the results of
this research should not be confined to the field of Scripture
studies alone, for within the broad framework of the living
15 International
Theological Commission, Select Questions on Christology
(Washington, DC: USCC, 1980), 1. See also Brian McDermott, "Roman
Catholic Christology: Two Recurring Themes," Theological Studies 41 (1980),
339-67, where one of the
is th() theological significance of the earthly

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

9

faith of the Christian community, "a return to the earthly
Jesus is beneficial and indispensable today in the field of dogmatic theology." 16
The Commission in these statements was affirming the direction already taken by various constructive christologies of the
past decade which had begun to incorporate the historical Jesus
of biblical research into their systematic reflection on Jesus
Christ's saving significance and ultimate identity. The eschatological prophet announcing God's nearness in the midst of
suffering and embodying the joy of this in his liberating lifestyle (Schillebeeckx); the critical reformer proclaiming God's
will to be human well-being in the face of institution, hierarchy
and law (Kling) ; the Spirit-filled man of faith and obedience
mediating the Spirit of freedom to others (Kasper); the opposer of injustice in the name of God whose call to discipleship involves the faithful follower in the same suffering fate
(Sobrino) ;-these and other designations cast the critically
assured minimum into particular interpretative frameworks
which serve each christology's larger intentions. But each
theologian is in fact utilizjng basically the same elements which
comprise the image of the historical Jesus reconstructed from
Christian texts. The historical Jesus is never the sole content
of these systematic christologies. There is much of essential importance which cannot be got at through historical research,
in particular the understanding of the presence and initiative of
God in the whole Christ event. Even to do justice to the biblical texts themselves, the historical critical method by which
the historical Jesus is arrived at needs to be complemented by
other approaches (language analysis, social analysis, etc.) , interpreted through hermeneutical moves, and continually refined and corrected. Yet, however much this method needs to
be contextualized, it remains the most fruitful way in which
16 I.T.C., ibid., 4. One of the most compact synopses of knowledge of the
earthly Jesus is given in question-and-answer
format by Joseph Fitzmyer,
A Ohristological Oateohi.qm: New Testament Answers (N.Y.: Paulist Press,
1982).

10

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

the historical content of the word "Jesus" can be got at, and
by commonly accepted criteria. 17 Although admittedly an extrapolation and never totally adequate, the image of Jesus
which it produces inevitably brings in its wake some renewed
appreciation of the concrete contours of the human historical
life of Jes us of Nazareth. However variously related to the
Christ of the Church's confession, and whether functioning as
norm and criterion, starting point, critical standard, or one
validating ground of christology itself and of Christian discipleship,18 the historica] Jesus has become a new factor in
Roman Catholic christology, one of the clearest results of the
interfacing of systematic thought with biblical exegesis.

Critique from One Hermeneutical Perspective
In the face of the emergence of wide-spread incorporation of
the historical Jesus into contemporary Roman Catholic christology, a massive caution has recently been uttered by David
Tracy against the theological pre-eminence accorded to this
image. Since his argument is explicitly and cogently presented,
it provides an occasion for dialogue over a matter of critical
importance. 19
Although Tracy agrees that it is possible through the use of
historical critical methods to gain some historically probable
knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, and although his own synopsis
of the critically assured minimum is in broad agreement with
the consensus of exegetes outlined above, he maintains that
the acquiring of such knowledge is neither necessary nor im11 Leander Keck, A Future for the Historical Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1981), 270; the whole work is a coherent and vigorous argument for
this position.
18 E.g., respectively, Kasper ( 35) and Kung ( 540-53) ; Sobrino ( 1-16) ;
Schillebeeckx Jesus, (41-76); Rahner (228-64); seen. 7.
19 David Tracy, :J'he Analogical
Imagination-Christian
Theology and the
Culture of PluraliBm (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1981), hereafter cited as A.I. The
immediate context for Tracy's critique is provided in "A Methodological Preface," 233-47; the argument itself is mounted in a running series of footnotes extending through the second section of the book, making the argument
a bit disjointed but nonetheless vigorous.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

11

portant, for "it is not the 'historical Jesus' but the confessed,
witnessed Jesus that is theologically relevant." 20 Who is this
confessed, witnessed Jesus? It is the Jesus remembered by the
original apostles and attested to in the proclamation, narrative,
symbol and reflective thought of the New Testament texts; it
is "the Jesus remembered by the tradition which mediates the
event in the present through word, sacrament, and action; the
.Jesus remembered as the Christ, the presence among us of
God's own self." 21 Consciously aligning himself with the
Kahler-Bultmannian position on this question, 22 Tracy argues
that it is this confessed Jesus Christ in the New Testament
which is important for christology and not the historical Jesus
reconstructed from New Testament texts and given ·such
prominence in the recent christologies of Schillebeeckx, Kling,
Boff, Sobrino, et al. Particularly inappropriate, in Tracy's
view, is the recent theological use of the historical quest for
Jesus, namely the use of historically assured knowledge of Jesus
to ground, validate, adjudicate the Christian faith claim. Such
attempts to ground christology on the historical Jesus, along
with the usual concomitant claim that the historical Jesus is
the standard or norm for the christological tradition, are nothing less than an "obsession" 23 of present christologies, an obsession not in keeping with the internal norm of the living tradition which has mediated the event of Jesus Christ to the present day. Christian faith is faith in Jesus with the apostolic witnesses. Its ground, therefore, is not the historical Jesus but the
tradition from the earliest apostolic witness to Jesus to the
present community's memory of Jesus. According to that tradition's own inner criterion, the norm for fidelity to the event
of Jesus Christ is the later tradition's fidelity to the original
apostolic witness to that event.u What is immediately assured
301, n. 97.
234.
22 A.I., 245, n. 23; and 301, n. 97.
2aA.I., 335, n. 17.
24 As far as I can determine, Tracy equates the original apostolic witness
with the Jesus-kerygma of the earliest apostolic witnesses, reconstructed by
20 A.I.,

21 A.I.,

12

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON,

o.s.J.

if the original apostolic witness is given priority is a christology
' from above ', however low, for the earliest apostles witnessed
to the event of Jesus Christ as an event from God and by God's
power, an event happening now. More to the point here, recognition of the authoritative role of the original apostolic witness for the whole tradition has the effect of shifting the christological center of gravity to the actual Jesus remembered by
the community and confessed in the narratives, leaving the historical Jesus "at best a relatively external and secondary criterion of appropriateness for certain necessary assumptions or
presuppositions of that witness to Jesus." 25
Tracy assumes, as he is sure the original apostolic witnesses
did, that their understanding is faithful to the actual Jesus who
lived. If one should wish to test their memory against the
image of Jesus reconstructed through historical critical methods,
then a legitimate historical enterprise is going forward. It can
even yield results in terms of an image of the historical Jesus
that could actually function theologically as a continuation of
the original apostolic witness, keeping alive in the community
today the dangerous memory of Jesus and thereby being appropriate to the tradition's own internal criterion. But in no
way can the historical Jesus be claimed as the norm of the
tradition itself. Rather, the tradition's own norm of apostolicity
renders the quest and its resultant reconstructed historical
Jesus "not theologically necessary to the Christian affirmation
of Jesus Christ," indeed, even " theologically inappropriate." 26
The quest may he of historical interest but it can never be constitutive for Christian theology as such. Neither can the historical Jesus which is its fruit, for "it is not the 'historical
Jesus' but the confessed witnessed Jesus that is theologically
relevant." 21
form critics like Marxsen from Q and early Markan narratives.
246, n. 25, and 269-75, especially 273.
25 A.I., 238.
2s A.I., 245, n. 23; 295, n. 68.
21 A.I., 301, n. 97.

Cf. A..I.,

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Admittedly a minority viewpoint, Tracy's position is all too
easily misunderstood, and it is important to be clear about what
he is not saying. In no way is he calling into question the actual
existence of Jesus of Nazareth, or the intrinsic relevance of
Jesus for the Christian faith. Quite the contrary: Christianity
without Jesus is no longer Christianity; the Christ-principle
without Jesus is always in danger of falling captive to a personal or cultural mood. Every christology must affirm the actual Jesus who lived and admit the intrinsic connection of every
present experience of the Christ event to the person Jesus of
Nazareth. In no way, either, is Tracy denigrating historical
critical methodology; rather, he assigns this method at least
three distinct and contributing tasks. By historically reconstructing the central texts of Christian self-understanding, it
provides the raw material upon which the methods of literary
criticism can play to elucidate and explain the sense, the religious-existential meanings expressed therein. It can also show
continuity between various stages of the kerygma from the
original witnesses through the Synoptics to John, Paul, and
early Catholicism and beyond, thus providing warrants for
the interpreter's trust of the tradition, (although it is interesting to note that the task of showing continuity between the
actual Jesus who lived and the original apostolic witnesses as
a basis for trust in the tradition is not considered important) .
In the context of the major constitutive realities for theology of
tradition, community and the personal venture of faith, these
methods can furthermore contribute to both the development
of the tradition and the exposure and correction of distortions
in the tradition. 28
What then is at the heart of Tracy's critique of the utilization of the historical Jesus in contemporary christology? It
2s A.I., 237-38; 246, n. 25; 262. See also Tracy's Blessed Rage for OrderThe New Pluralism in Theology (N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1975), 50-51 (hereafter cited as B.R.O.) ; and " Particular Questions Within General Consensus,"
Consensus in Theology? ed. Leonard Swidler (Philadelphia:
Westminster
Press, 1980), 36-39.

14

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

is the practice of adjudicating the Christian faith claim by historical critical inquiry into what lies behind the texts; it is the
claim of Kling, Sobrino, Schillebeeckx and others that they are
"grounding" christology in the historical Jesus; it is the theological importance ;assigned to this Jesus reconstructed by
empirical methods in lieu of the Jesus confessed by the original
apostolic witness (also reconstructed) .29 In Tracy's judgment,
such practice or claim or assignation comes close to being disastrous, for it reduces the classic Christian texts and symbols
to a tenuous reconstruction, and in the end is " nothing less
than a choice of the wrong religious classic to interpret when
interpreting Christianity as a religion." 30 The historical Jesus
is too fragile a base from which to make the Christian interpretation; rather, the personal faith response to the event Jesus
Christ along with and within the mediating realities of tradition and community (themselves normed by the original
apostolic witness to that event) alone provide the firm and
constitutive foundation.
Underlying this difference in judgment are obviously deep
differences over questions of fundamental theology, questions
which concern the nature of revelation and faith, the nature of
history and its significance for faith, the relation of a tradition
to its originating events, the assessment of the contemporary
situation in which the Christian message needs to be set forth,
the nature of systematic theology itself. Since Tracy's position
on the particular question of the theological relevance of the
historical Jesus is shaped by his foundational understanding
of the hermeneutical nature of the task of systematic theology,
a delineation of that understanding will serve to highlight what
is at stake in the debate. For such a hermeneutical approach,
tradition is the all-encompassing horizon and, along with the
mediating reality of community and the personal venture of
faith in Jesus Christ, the chief constitutive element of Christian theology:
29 David Tracy, "Author's
Response," in review symposium on A.I. in
Horizons S ( 1981), 329-39; A.I. 301; 334, n. 15.
ao "Author's Response," 338.

'!'HE HISTORICAL JESUS

15

If we are to know Jes us as he was and is, we must know him

through the mediation of the whole tradition as witness to him and
immediately as we have ourselves experienced him either individually or communally in our experience of the Christ event as from
God and happening now.31
Given the centrality of tradition as the major constitutive
mediating reality of the event of Jesus Christ, the central
theological task is that of interpretation, or "translation carried on within the effective history of a tradition to retrieve its
sometimes strange, sometimes familiar meanings." 32 Those
meanings are more often than not present in the classic texts of
a tradition. In authentic conversation with any classic text, a
realized experience of understanding " happens ", in which the
interpreter's present understanding is provoked, challenged,
transformed by the meaning mediated through the text. As
with artistic and literary classics, so too with the Christian
classic (the event and person of Jesus Christ expressed in the
New Testament texts): theology's authentic conversation with
it can disclose a new and transformative understanding of a
unique way of being-in-the-world, in this case, since Jesus is
the presence among us of God's own self, the particular human
possibility of being-in-the-world, in the presence of a gracious
God. In this perspective, christological statements have primarily a religious-existential character; they are affirmations
which bear the character of a response. Consistent with this,
Jesus Christ is seen not primarily as the actualization of the
possibility of authentic human existence but as the great representative sign, symbolizing with powerful existential import
the real human possibility for genuine relation to God. 33
31 A.I.,

236.
99. Tracy's own creative use of contemporary interpretation theory,
especially that of Gadamer and Ricoeur, can be seen as one of the most
valuable aspects of his project.
33 B.R.O., Ch .. 9. In response to reviewers, Tracy maintains
that a continuity between this earlier work on fundamental theology and the later
A.I. does exist: "Author's Response,'' 335-39. However, in A.I. he does conItect the religious mode of being-in-the-world disclosed by the text more explicitly with the memory of Jesus, e.g. 275-81; 298, n, 85.
32 A.I.,

16

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

This approach clearly favors a" reversal of priority from the
'historicity' of religious texts to their 'logicity' ", 34 not to
the exclusion of concern for historicity but to its completion in
more religiously meaningful interpretation. To cite one example of its actual application: the meaning of a parable of
Jesus is not yet rightly understood when one has understood
the situation in Jesus's ministry in which it was originally
spoken, nor the situation of the early community in which it
was remembered and interpreted, nor the theology of the
authors who wove it into their gospels (the three levels retrieved through historical critical methods). Only when the
hermeneutical move has been made, aided by the employment
of literary critical methods, is an adequate interpretation given
as the contemporary religious-existential meaning of the parable is disclosed in all of its disorienting claim and transformative power. It is with this understanding of the hermeneutical
task of systematic theology that Tracy himself engages in the
interpretation of the proclamation, narrative, symbol, and reflective thought of New Testament texts, with beautiful, at
times almost homiletic, results. 35 It is also from this perspective
that he mounts his consistent critique of the theological preeminence recently given to the historical Jesus in contemporary
christology.
Tracy's total project is making undoubtedly valuable contributions to significant areas of the discipline of theology; one
could cite his concern for the public character of theological
speech, his analysis of the classic and the application of that
category to theological method, and his championing of literary
critical methods in the interpretation of the Scriptures. On
this particular question, however, as his fundamental position
leads him to critique the theological relevance of the historical
34 B.R.O., 78.
35 A.I., 248-304; 329-32. It is, I think, one of the ironies of Tracy's work
that in spite of the density of his own prose, his stress on and demonstration
ot the hermeneutical task has such potential for application to the ministry
of preaching, so sorely in need of attention in the Church today.

TlIE HISTORICAL JESUS

17

Jesus, one can raise the question of whether there is not more
to be said in order to do justice to all aspects of the issue.
Diverse arguments could be brought to bear against his critique
from different systemic approaches, but, since the fundamental
issues are so disputed, more fruitful perhaps will be the posing
of counter-questions regarding the very values of tradition and
its hermeneutic to which Tracy assigns pre-eminence.

Question: The Nature of the Gospel Tradition Itself
The Bultmannian position on this question, with which Tracy
explicitly aligns himself (although for vastly differing reasons 36 ) , perceives the gospel tradition from the form critical
perspective, i.e., as a tradition primarily confessional in nature
and primarily reflective of the situation-in-life of the early
Christian communities. While that insight has remained virtually unassailable in subsequent scholarship, the conclusions
which Bultmann drew from it have not. He maintained that
although the actual Jesus who lived was a necessary pre-condition for the k:erygma, and indeed could even be partially portrayed, 37 his figure remained a piece of pre-history continuous
36 Bultmann
was strongly influenced by the Lutheran understanding of
faith, an event of believing response evoked by the proclamation of the Word
of God. The present happening of the Word of God has priority; investigation into its historically past origins is a misguided attempt to validate the
kerygma by human means. What was called for was faith in the Word of
God proclaimed in the present apart from any buttressing by reason or history. This is in effect "a radical application of the doctrine of justification by
faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought," Bultmann, Jesus Christ and
lJf ythology
( N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 84. Tracy's stance, on
the other hand, proceeds not from the Lutheran understanding of faith but
from his overarching purpose of delineating and advocating the hermeneutical nature of the theological task.
37 "Hence with a bit of caution we can say the following concerning Jesus's
activity: Characteristic for him are exorcisms, the breach of the Sabbath commandment, the abandonment of ritual purifications, polemic against Jewish
legalism, fellowship with outcasts such as publicans and harlots, sympathy
for women and children; it can also be seen that Jesus was not an ascetic
Eke the John the Baptist, but gladly ate and drank a glass of wine. Perhaps
we may add that he called disciples and assembled a.bout himself a small com·

18

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON,

c.s ..r.

with the kerygma in a 'historical' but not a 'material' way.
The kerygma itself was not interested in the knowledge of the
Jesus of history who remains in the past, but in the proclamation of the crucified and risen Lord as the genesis of faith here
and now.
Reaction to this radical separation between the actual Jesus
who lived and the confessed, witnessed Christ, between history
and the kerygma, has led after three decades of post-Bultmannian scholarship to a substantially new perception of the nature of the gospel tradition's relation to the actual Jesus who
lived, one more positive in its correlation of the two. 38 It is
seen in the new suggestion that although Easter faith is foundational to the Christian kerygma, it is not the only source of
its content. The apostolic witnesses realized that God had acted
in a revelatory way in Jesus of Nazareth, and testified to this
by incapsulating the earthly history of Jesus, however minimally, into their proclamation. As the witnessing, proclaiming gospel tradition developed, it stayed in close relationship
with authentic historical tradition about Jesus, preserving some
characteristic features of Jesus's message and ministry and perforce even assimilating its proclamation to them. The very
pany of followers, men and women." Bultmann, " The Primitive Christian
Kerygma and the Historical Jesus," The Historical Jesus and the J(erygmatic
Ghrist, eds. C. Braaten and R. Harrisville (N.Y.: Abingdon Press, 1964), 22·
23.
as As indicated in n. 4, the shift to the 'new quest' was triggered by Ernst
Kiisemann's lecture on the problem of the historical Jesus, called by Stephen
Neill "one of the turning points in theological thinking in this century,"
[Jesus Through Many Eyes (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1976), 167].
Peter Stuhlmacher provides an overview of the rise and fall of the Bultman·
nian program in Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation, tr. R.
Harrisville (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 51-91. Roman Catholic in·
terpretation joined the discussion at the time of the new quest; while differing from the new questers in significant fundamental ways, it has largely
been in accord with the search for continuity between history and the faith
confession. Cf. Raymond Brown, "After Bultmann, What? An Introduction
to the Post-Bultmannians,"
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 26 ( 1964), 1-30;
,Josep11 Cahill, " Rudolf Bultmann and Post-Bultmannian Tendencies," ibid.,
and Catholic Theology, tr. L.
153-78; Heinrich Fries, Bultmann-Barth
Swidler (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Unive.rsity Press, 1967).

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

19

existence of the gospel genre, coming chronologically as it did
after kerygmatizing and mythologizing tendencies had taken
root in Christian consciousness, points to the Christian communities' concern not only for the presence of the glorified
Lord but also with the actual history of Jesus of Nazareth, in
whom God was believed to have acted, and acted before there
ever were believers. In the gospel genre, an historical account
of a past event is precisely the form that the Church's word
takes. The very existence of the gospels shows the abiding interest of the Christian community in what happened "once
upon a time", interest which perdured because of the identification made in their experience and insight between the Jesus
who actually lived and the Christ of faith. So mutually correlative are the historical actual Jesus who lived and the Christian kerygma that the question as to whether the New Testament includes the actual Jesus who lived among the criteria
of its own validity can be answered in the affirmative. 39 Precisely as thoroughly imbued with faith conviction, the gospel
tradition is interested in the history of Jesus and points back
behind itself to that history. Fidelity to that tradition, then,
requires theological inquiry to do likewise. Theology is interested in historical information about Jesus of Nazareth because the gospel tradition itself considers this important.
That these post-Bultmannian insights can be made fruitful
for christology in a way that does not necessarily result in a
simplistic "grounding" of christology in the Jesus of history
has been recently demonstrated by (among others) Edward
Schillebeeckx, who among Roman Catholic systematicians has
given most careful attention to the relation between the history
of Jesus and the gospel tradition. 40 In his judgment there is an
aspect of the truth in Bultmann's refusal to attach any theological significance to the historical Jesus, for no reconstruction
can show that he is the Christ. But the difficulty lies in Bult39 Ernst Kasemann, "Blind Alleys in the 'Jesus of History' Controversy,"
New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 48.
40 Jesus, Part One, 41-104; see also his Interim Report on the Books' Jesus'
and 'Christ', tr. J. Bowden (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1981).

20

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

mann's equating a theological interest in the historical Jesus
with the attempt to validate or prove the truth of the kerygma,
and his consequent option for the centrality of the Christian
witness alone. Such an option ignores the fact that Jesus and
his first believing disciples were a single phenomenon: " Neither
Jesus nor the earliest' church community' constitutes the font
and origin of Christianity, but both together as offer and response." 41 Jesus of Nazareth in his whole historical realityhis actual person, message, way of life-was experienced as
constituting an 'offer' to which Christian faith and its expression in titles and other categories taken from the socio-cultural
context were a 'response'. 'l'he response is not purely projective on the part of the Christian witnesses, but is evoked and
partly determined by the reality that was offered in Jesus.
However varied the credal trends, they are related to particular
aspects of the actual Jesus who lived (as teacher, wonderworker, crucified and risen one, etc.) ; however culturally conditioned the titles, their meaning is modified by the history of
Jesus to whom they are attributed; however creative the responses, they are intrinsically limited by the historical offer itself. Thus the ' objective ', evocative element and the 'subjective ', projective element, while not totally distinguishable,
exist as intrinsically related correlatives at the origin of the
tradition. The original apostolic witness does not exclude historical concern for Jesus, but rather includes it as part of the
matrix out of which Christian faith is born. Consequently, the
Bultmannian position which negates the idea that the primitive Christian tradition enshrined an interest in the history of
Jesus has been widely abandoned by modern exegesis. Rather,
the " confession of the crucified-and-risen One manifestly embraces the recollected substance of his earthly life: the kerygma
is itself meant, on the ground of its own self-understanding, to
refer back to the past events involving Jesus." 42
41 Jesus, 58. Hence, SchiUebeeckx is more nuanced on the question of the
historical Jesus as ground of faith than Tracy would allow (cf. A.I., 334, n.
15).
•2 J efJU6 1 72.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

21

The post-Bultmannian understanding of the nature of the
gospel tradition seems to have in principle undercut the Bultmannian division between the history of Jesus and Christian
faith at its root. It furthermore makes an option for one to
the exclusion of the other appear inadequate to the sources
themselves. Certainly, as Tracy mentions, the original apostolic
witness is normative for the faith tradition. Yet this original
apostolic witness, far from making inquiry into the history of
Jesus "inappropriate", has as part of its own content specific
and concrete references to the actual historical life and death
of Jesus of Nazareth, distinct from although mediated through
this witness, a reference furthermore which entails not only
historical continuity but also material continuity between them
both.
This then remains a question to the position which would
undervalue the importance of interest in the history of Jesus
and the reconstruction of that history in lieu of the normativity
of the original apostolic witness: whether the valuable move
into hermeneutical concerns does not lead to less than justice
being done to the full nature of the classic Christian texts and
the tradition which produced them, and this according to the
totality of their own inner criteria.

Question: The Referent of New Testament Texts
A second area of concern regarding a completely hermeneutical approach has to do with the adequacy of an exclusively
existential hermeneutic of New Testament texts carried out on
the supposition that all of those texts, even explicitly christological utterances, refer primarily to Christian self-understanding. Again, Bultmann's perception of the hermeneutical circle
required this supposition in order_that the result of theological
interpretation of the texts be the disclosing of possibilities of
authentic existence for human beings in the present. Tracy
too hews closely, though with significant nuancing, to this line
of thought, invoking Bultmann's understanding at several key

il:LIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

points. 43 The christological sections of both his major worirn
focus on the existential religious significance of christological
utterances; in the first, the fact of Jesus Christ is envisioned not
as the actualization of a possibility but as the re-presentative
Christian fact re-presenting the possibility of human existence
in genuine relation to God; in the second, literary critical analysis of the proclamation, narrative, symbol, and reflective
thought of the New Testament serves primarily to disclose the
existential meaning carried in these texts. What is of first importance is to know the " existential meaning and truths represented for our present human experience by the christological affirmations." 44 It is logically coherent, if theology's primary task is seen as the hermeneutical one of explicating the
religious mode of being-in-the-world which the New Testament ,
texts express, to maintain that questions about the internal
relation of that understanding of human existence to the concrete history of the actual Jesus who lived insofar as we can
reconstruct it are relatively unimportant.
Although the value and importance of the concern for the
existential meaningfulness of the Christian witness can in no
way be denied, an existential hermeneutic taken alone is open
to the critique that it cannot adequately encompass the entire
theological task, and that judgment is made on the basis of the
classic Christian texts themselves. Those texts do indeed make
explicit statements about self-understanding, especially in the
Pauline and in a more limited way in the Johannine writings,
but such statements do not appear in every New Testament
author's work. More to the point, the diverse self-understandings which are implicit in various texts (the early apocalyptic,
Hellenistic enthusiastic, community of the Epistle of James,
etc.) can hardly be synthesized to one understanding of human
existence. To Braun's classic formulation, endorsed by Tracy,
that "the constant is the self-understanding of the believer;
43 A.I.,

256, 260-61, 269-70,

•4 B.R.O., 218.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

christology is the variable," 45 Kasemann has responded, " I
hold this judgment to be, quite simply, false ... the range of
variations (in Christian self-understanding) could hardly be
wider." 46
Not only is there no unified implicit or explicit understanding
of human existence expressed in the texts, but these texts on
the face of it deal with many matters other than the understanding of human existence, although all things dealt with do
indeed reflect the author's self-understanding. Statements are
made which refer directly to God and God's work in the events
of the ·world, to Jesus and the events of his life, statements
whose obvious intention is to refer to realities not reducible to
though not unrelated to the possibilities of human existence.
In debate with the Bultmannian position, a substantial body of
thought now argues that theological interpretation cannot focus
exclusively on a text's existential meaning and ignore other
aspects of its reality. Insistence on the understanding of existence as the ultimate hermeneutical principle unduly restricts
actual New Testament speech; by means of it, speech about the
history of Jesus Christ" is changed into a network of significant
ideas; it is dissolved into a mere 'signi:ficat' and has lost the
force of the' est'." 47 In the face of such existentialist constriction, it is no longer apparent why any reference to the person
of Jesus is essentially necessary, although Bultmann is convinced that it is. A more adequate position would be to maintain that if the Christian texts are a response to the fullness of
the event of the man Jesus Christ in his living, dying and rising, then along with existential concerns (and not without
them) interpretation of christological texts has to maintain
emphasis on Jesus Christ's person and the history narrated in
connection with him.
45 Herbert Braun, "The Meaning of New Testament Christology," God and
Ghrist: Existence and Providence, Ro·bert Funk ed. (N.Y.: Harper and Row,
1968), 115.
•a " Blind Alleys," 37-38.
47 Gunther Bornkamm, " Myth and Gospel: A Discussion of the Problem
of Demythologizing the New Testament Message," Kerygma and History, eds.
C. Braaten and R. Harrisville (N.Y.: Abingdon Press, 1962), 187.

ELIZABETH A. J01INSON, c.s.J.

Tracy's widening the horizon of human existence to include
the social dimensions of the individual, the reality of community experience, and the need for orthopraxis immeasurably enriches this position, but does not in the end counter the basic
critique of the Bultmannian way of proceeding. 48 Valuable as
it is as a hermeneutic for the gospel, the possibility of human
existence disclosed in the Christian texts does not exhaust the
totality of the referent of these texts. This then remains a second question to the position which would focus on the existential significance of the Christian texts to the diminishment of
the importance of other referents of the texts: whether the
valuable and much-needed concentration on the existential
religious significance of christological texts does not lead to less
than justice being done to the full nature of the classic Christian texts and the hermeneutical methods needed to mediate
their meaning, and this according to the totality of their own
referent.

The Historical Jesus or the Memory of the Tradition:
A False Dilemma
The problem of the historical Jesus is a genuinely disputed
issue in contemporary theology, one which is far from being resolved. Surfacing some arguable insufficiencies of any particular approach still leaves the positive theological relevance
of this image unexplored. To that end, the following thesis regarding the nature of the reconstructed image of the historical
Jesus in the faith of the Church today is proposed:
48 Langdon Gilkey brings the same critique to bear against Tracy on this
point as Bornkamm et al. bring against Bultmann; Reaping the Whirlwind
(N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1976), 377, n. 23. With regard to both this question
and the previous one it can be pointed out that Tracy, in his alliance with
Bultmann, does not deal with serious readjustments which have been made
in the Bultmaunian position by subsequent thought. There is nothing wrong
in itself, of course, with disagreeing with a solidifying and substantiated body
of opinion, this being the way scholarship moves forward; but if one does so,
the option should be backed by warrants which are clear or convincing enough
to engage and overcome the developing position. Tracy leaves many questions
unanswered in this respect.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

25

Thesis: The reconstructed image of the historical Jesus not only
functions today as the equivalent of the memory impression of
Jesus in the early Church, but actually is the equivalent of it, i.e.
is the means by which significant segments of the present generation of believers remember Jesus who is confessed as the Christ.
As such, it is an element of the living tradition of the present
Church.

The community of believers has always, from the beginning
until now, had its memory image of Jesus. 49 As a memory
image of a concrete historical person held by a community of
faith, it has carried that community's consciousness of the
brandnewness which came into the world with Jesus, the drawing near of the transcendent in him, and the specialness attaching to his person as a result. Although the contours of that
memory image have changed over the centuries, the image
itself has continuously served as a symbol mediating the reality
and mystery of what is at the heart of Christian belief, namely, (in broad terms) that at a certain point in time God's
graciousness was shown in the coming to be of this member of
our race, whose life, death and resurrection redound to our
benefit, and in whom we have to do with the one God who
is really and truly God. 50 In so doing, the memory image has
been essential to the identity of the community, for it has always referred the living reality of the community and its tradition beyond itself to the one who lived and operated before
there ever was a Christian tradition, the one without whom
there would be no tradition (which is not to say that this one
would be known today without the Christian tradition) . The
memory image of Jesus in the community has contributed to
the formation and content of the Church's confession, liturgi49 Cf. Harvey, 246-91, for discussion
of the memory image in a faith context; also David Schindler, "Theology and the historical-critical
claims of
modernity: on the need for metaphysics," Oommunio 6 (1979), 73-94, for
critique of Harvey's own proposal in this regard.
\Ve are prescinding here from the recent debates about the meaning of
Incarnation (Hick et al.) and the uniqueness of Christ (Knitter et al.),
focusing for the moment on what can be identified as mainline Catholic position.

26

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

cal practice, preaching, ethical stance, and choice of life values
and, as symbol, gives rise to thought, to teaching and doctrine.
In a circle of mutual influence, it has also been shaped by the
confession and practice of the Church as well as the culture in
which the Church exists. As the Church "hands on to all
generations all that she herself is, all that she believes " 51 the
memory image of Jesus is also handed on, an irreplaceable element in the living tradition.
For the earliest communities, the memory of Jesus was
shaped by the original disciples' first-hand experience of the
actual Jesus who lived. These women and men had followed
Jesus during his ministry, listened to his preaching, observed
his behavior, been attracted to his manner of life. Their witness to his resurrection after the desolation of his crucifixion
was informed by their personal memories communally shared. 52
Whether one follows the Pesch/Schillebeeckx understanding of
original multiple communities with various and distinct memories issuing in confessions coherent with those memories, or sees
the tradition originating solely with witness to the resurrection,
the same phenomenon is at hand: the calling upon the disciples'
memories of Jesus's ministry and death in the fashioning of the
Christian proclamation.
Even before the end of the first century, the earliest images
of Jesus had changed under the impact of the community's ong;oing experience of the gifts of the Spirit and confrontation
with new cultural settings. -Newer images, including the theological idea of pre-existence, transformed and altered the earlier
memories into what we call now the biblical picture of Christ.
51 Dei Verbum #8, Documents of Vatican II, W. Abbott, ed. (N.Y.: America
Press, 1966) .
52 For recent argumentation
that women functioned as original disciples,
cf. Roeemary R. Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit:
]l'emale Leadership in the .Jewish and Christian 'l'raditions (N.Y.: Simon and
Schuster, 1979); and Elisabeth Schlissler, Fiorenza," Women in the Early
Christian Movement," Womanspirit Rising, C. Christ and J. Plaskow eds.
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 84-92, as well as In Memory of Her
(N.Y.: Crossroad, 1983), by the same author.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Through the long march of centuries the memory image of ·
J·esus, now developed with reference to the total picture of
Christ in the New Testament, continued to be intrinsic to the
Church's consciousness, interacting with the whole of the
Church's life. Contrasting memory images lay behind the clash
between the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools, one focusing
on Christ's identity as Logos, the other remembering his fully
functioning humanity, while both were influenced by the
ascendency of the Church under Christian civil power. The
medieval image was shaped by insight into Jesus Christ's personal identity in dialogue with the newly re-discovered ideal
of Greek anthropology; elements of superior knowledge and
power were incorporated into the image and held in tension
with the memory of his suffering. Post-Reformation and postEnlightenment efforts to defend the faith resulted in a restriction of the rich memory image of Jesus in official theory, a
restriction which was compensated for in the flourishing of certain types of spirituality (School of Berulle, Exercises of Ignatius, devotion to the Sacred Heart, etc.). The complex memory
image which resulted in this later period continued to mediate
to those generations under the suppositions of their cultural
contexts the reality at the center of the Christian tradition:
God's gracious presence in Jesus Christ calling forth human
response. That this particular image has become less and less
successful in doing so for believers who inhabit and are inhabited by a world ever more historically conscious, scientifically oriented, and aware of the magnitude of evil is one of the
major concerns of contemporary christology.
The Church is never without its memory image of Jesus; this
is an essential element passed on in the living tradition. In the
present situation, the memory image of Jesus passed on by our
immediate forebears in the faith is once again being transformed, this time under the impact of biblical scholarship's historical critical investigation into the Christian texts. The image
of the historical Jesus reconstructed from those texts, whether
directly for those who study and ponder it, or indirectly for

28

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

those who absorb it through catechesis, preaching, liturgical
practice, experiences of ministry, etc., is the way Jesus is being
remembered by significant numbers of the present generation of
believers. As was pointed out above, it is as an image not exhaustive of the actual Jesus who lived, nor exactly the same as
that held by the original apostolic witnesses. But given the
critical tools by which it was arrived at, it arguably approaches
however asymptotically the historical actuality of the earthly
Jesus, and approximates more closely the original disciples'
memory of Jesus than the memory of the Church has done for
many generations.
Reception of this particular memory image, precisely because
of the significant role which the memory of Jesus has played
all through the tradition, has significant implications for all of
the Church's life. If Jesus lived a life passionately devoted to
God his 'Abba'; if he made a preferential option for the poor
and marginalized of his society in the name of this God; if his
preaching of the coming reign of this God limned a new vision
of reality in which the old classifications made on the basis
of race, sex, and class lost their meaning; if he himself _was no
stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity but had to
discern his life decisions, learning obedience through what he
suffered; if his rejection and death came about as a consequence
of fidelity to his mission (which mission can be said after
Easter to cohere in the very depths of his being with what he
is), then the call to follow as a disciple, both individually and
collectively, takes on certain characteristics and understandings
different in significant ways from that of the recent past.
Roman Catholics now have a sufficient share of "passionate
and living controversies in Christology which engage the existential concern of the faithful," whether the faithful be theologically educated or not, and this fact can be directly linked
to the work of historical biblical criticism, so potent in its consequences because it is resulting in nothing less than the reshaping of the memory image of Jesus held by the Church.
As David Tracy has rightly insisted, it is imperative that the

THE 1US'r01UCAL JESUS

actual Jesus who lived be affirmed in every christology. He
much prefers that this be done through the memory of the tradition rather than through the reconstruction of the historical
Jesus. 53 Perhaps a benevolent interpretation of his insistence
on this distinction would view it as analogous to the distinction
made by Karl Rahner between na.ture and grace: hypothetically necessary for the preservation of certain values, but not
functionally operative in the concrete historical order of
things. 54 It seems to me, however, that the stringent posing of
such a definitive contrast between the tradition and the historical Jesus sets up a choice which is basically a false dilemma.
In the present cultural context, when the historical Jesus is
quested for and received within the faith consciousness of the
Church (and never without reference to the original memory
impressions), the reconstructed image of the historical Jesus is
not separate from, opposed to, or a potential replacement for
the memory of Jesus in the tradition. Rather, it is the form
that memory is taking in the present moment of the living
tradition.
This is not to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is in
principle theologically necessary for christology; christology has
existed for centuries without it. But the Church's memory
image of Jesus is theologically necessary for christology and,
as the quest has concretely affected the way Jesus is remembered in the Church, the quest and its results have assumed
theological pertinence not only for the correction of the distortions of the tradition (although certainly for that), but also
for the constitution of the tradition insofar as it includes remembering.55 Wha.t is constitutive is what is essential to a
reality's constitution or make-up, missing which that reality
53 A.I.,

245, n. 20.

the Relationship between Nature and Grace," Theological
Investigations I, 297-317.
55 In distinction
to D. Tracy, "Particular Questions within General Consensus," n. 39. Tracy, however, does recognize the possibility of the positive
function of the image in the present community-A.I., 239.
54 "Concerning

so

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON,

c.s.j

i

would not be what it is. The memory of Jesus has always been
constitutive for the Church's confession (without it, the content of Jesus in the event of Jesus Christ would be reduced to
a cipher or a projection). As informing the present memory of
Jesus in the community, therefore, the historical Jesus has constitutive value for christology. The image of the historical
Jesus mediates to present believers the reality and mystery at
the heart of the Christian tradition, and refers that tradition
beyond itself to what is strange, challenging, even" dangerous"
at its core, one Jesus of Nazareth. Because this image self-consciously contains what is historically reliable, it brings to consciousness in a striking way after centuries of forgetting the
genuine humanity in the concrete historical contours of the
Jew from Nazareth confessed as Lord and Christ-the paradox
of Incarnation. Insofar as this image of the historical Jesus is
relatively recently discovered, insofar as its manner of discovery and its content are congruent with the historical consciousness of contemporary believers, and insofar as it has had and is
having widespread influence on systematic thought done in
faith, what is most likely taking place in contemporary christology, however lurchingly, is a genuine development in the
living tradition of the Church, a theological development which
could well issue in a development of doctrine. 56 Most fundamentally, therefore, the theological importance of the image of
the historical Jesus devolves from its constituting in part the
Church's memory of Jesus in this new moment of the living
tradition.
What effective application might this thesis have when
brought to bear on the understanding of Christian faith itself
and on theological reflection done within a faith context? In
other words, in what ways is the historical Jesus in the memory
of the present Church affecting Christian faith and its seeking
56 Cf. Karl
Rahner, "Considerations
on the Development of Dogma,"
Theological Investigations IV, tr. K. Smyth (London: Darton, Longman &
Todd, 1966), 3-35, for relation between theological activity and the develop·
ment of doctrine.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Sl

of understanding ? Delineating the relation of the historical
Jesus to Christian faith and, by way of example, the effect of
this image in two key areas of systematic theology (christology
and soteriology) can serve to highlight the power of this image.
Theological Relevance of the Historical Jesus for Christian
Faith

In spite of deep differences over this genuinely disputed issue
in contemporary theology, there is fundamental agreement
among most theologians and exegetes on the basic point that
the early Church made an identification, even an absolute
identification, between the ministering and crucified Jesus who
actually lived and died and the Christ experienced in the Spirit:
one is the other. 57 The identification is rooted in the early communities' experience of past and present, of anamnesis and
pneuma, as a single reality, and is articulated in their preservation of both stories remembered about and hymns and creeds
witnessing to Jesus Christ. On the basis of this identification,
the Christian affirmation "I believe in Jesus Christ" contains
an internal reference to history, to a real historical man of the
past, as well as to the present experience of him as the Christ
of God through the Holy Spirit in the Church, both of which
ground hope for the coming of the reign of God.
Christian faith affirms the saving activity of God in the person of Jesus Christ; it is (and this is not exhaustive) responsive trust in God who self-manifested in the person Jesus Christ.
The center of faith is not a message, law, or set of principles,
but the person of Jesus of Nazareth confessed as the Christ,
the self-revelation of God. Christian faith in God, then, precisely as Christian, retains an essential link with the man from
Nazareth; the link with his history forms an inner dimension of
Christian faith. 58 This is not to say that history constitutes the
57 This is true of theologians as diverse as Tracy (A.I., 272) and Schille·
beeckx (Jesus, 81); the latter considers the identification to be the hermeneu·
tical key to the gospels.
ss This understanding, while divergent from the classic position of Bultmann, is in accord with the consensus emanating from the new questers,

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

whole of what is essential for faith, nor that faith depends upon
history alone. Faith is a response to the total revelatory event
which occurs not only in the earthly history of Jesus but in the
continuing life of the Church. But it is to say that knowledge
of Jesus in his past actuality materially informs faith: Jesus
is the Christ. As the present form of the Church's knowledge
of Jesus in his past actuality, the historical Jesus is intrinsically
related to Christian faith and functions in that relationship in
several ways.
First of all, knowledge of Jesus reconstructed from Christian
texts contributes to the faith image of Jesus which believers
have, and to this extent can be a source of the necessary content of faith. 59 It is not the only source, for the proclamation
of the Church arising out of the experience of the risen Lord
is the ultimate origin of faith. But who is Jesus who is the
Christ? Historical knowledge contributes concrete content to
the name" Jesus," gives a particular cast to the memory image
of this person, and is thereby a "subordinate but necessary
medium to image forth this Jesus to whom we respond in
faith." 60 The historical Jesus functions positively by providing
the Christian faith image with important content.
In a second, more critical function, the historical Jesus can
be used to test competing representations of Jesus and to judge
the validity of claims made in his name. Was Jesus a humanist,
as 19th century liberals held, or an all-knowing being as presented in the manualist tradition, or a revolutionary as might
be claimed today ? Most likely not. Legitimate appeal can be
made to the limited but assured historical knowledge of Jesus
Protestant systematicians such as Pannenberg, and most Roman Catholic
christologians.
Cf. Gerald O'Collins, Foimdations of Theology (Chicago:
Loyola University Press, 1970), 66.
59 Norman Perrin conducts a seminal discussion of the positive and negative functions of the historical Jesus-n. 4, "'The Significance of Knowledge
of the Historical Jesus and His Teaching," 207-48.
ao Michael Cook, The Jesus of Faith ( N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1981), 27. See
also by the same author, " The Call to Faith of the Historical Jesus," Theological Studies 39 ( 1978), 679-700.

THE· HISTORICAL JESUS

33

in order to test any faith image for consistency with that
knowledge. In this way the faith image can be kept free from
manipulation or simple projection, and allowed to embody the
powerful figure of the gospels. To this limited extent, as
Norman Perrin articulates it, " the historical Jesus validates
the kerygma: not as kerygma, but as Christian." 61
In addition to the positive and negative function of the historical Jesus with regard to the Christian faith image, there is
an even more properly theological function which it exercises
for Christian faith in the light of the above thesis: it connotes,
in and through its specific denotation set within a dynamic of
faith, the actuality of God's saving gift to humanity in our history, the reality of Incarnation. In an era of heightened historical consciousness amounting almost to a revolution in the way
human beings perceive reality, strong emphasis on the kerygma
in the case of the Protestant tradition, or on dogma in the case
of the Roman Catholic, has had the unwanted effect of at least
leaving Christian faith open to the charge that it springs from
mythological, ideological, or self-delusionary tendencies. 62 With
historical understanding a given in the western world, most
contemporary believers cannot avoid the historical question
of whether something happened and, in fact, of what happened,
cannot schizophrenically divide the logical from the existential in their awareness. Prescinding here from the range of
specific questions germane to fundamental theology in this regard, reclamation of the historical appears as a basic element
affecting the faith of contemporary believers. Far from being
an inert and powerless figment of historical reconstruction (as
it appears in Tracy's work), the historical Jesus when received
within the dynamic of faith becomes a powerful warrant for
the connection of faith with reality in all of its dimensions.
01 Perrin, n. 4, 244. There is agreement about the positive and negative
functions of the historical Jesus within faith from the most divergent
quarters; cf. Tracy, "Particular Questions," 36-39; and Schillebeeckx, Jesus
62-71.
62 Whole systems of theology have been developed with this critique in
mind, e.g. those of Rabner and Pannenberg.

34

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

Faith thrives on this historically reconstructed image precisely
out of the conviction that in Jesus, his words and deeds and
destiny, the decisive act of God for our salvation was being
accomplished in our world and at the same time extra nos,
freely,' objectively', evocatively. The historical Jesus connotes
the reality of God's initiative and self-gift; while, as Ferdinand
Hahn has argued, " renunciation of the theological relevance of
the factual signifies something like a loss or privation of
reality ... " 63
Christian faith is concerned with a symbol system, a message,
a possibility of self-understanding, but neither solely nor even
primarily so. Each of these aspects of the faith experience has
a primary reference to the person Jesus Christ in whom God is
believed to have approached the world in a definite time and
place, in a definite life. The centrality of this historical person
evokes particular responses and checks the tendency to symbolize him in such a way that he presents particular possibilities of human life regardless of his own historical characteristics,
as is sometimes done with other historical figures. If God has
actually self-manifested in history in the person of Jesus, then
this human life is not just a re-presentative symbol which opens
people up to their own deepest existential possibilities. Rather,
it is the locus of God's address. Therefore, it is theologically
important to know who this man really was in history. 64 Chris63 "Probleme
historischer Kritik," Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentlich
Wissenschaft 63 (1972), 1-17. See also K. Rahner, "Intellectual Honesty and
the Christian Faith," Theological Investigations VII, tr. D. Bourke (N.Y.:
Seabury Press, 1977), 52; and John Collins, "Biblical Scholarship and the
Church," Chicago Studies 20 (1981), 121-35.
64 As Schillebeeckx
argues, " God does not sanction a cultural or anthropological model or process, but this man Jesus," Interim Report, 28. In the
Report S. explicitly critiques the position which Tracy espoused in B.R.O.,
holding that it cast Jesus in too completely and representatively symbolic a
role divorced from his history, Likewise, he questions the sole use of purely
literary critical exegesis which is interested only in texts. The specific
datum of Christianity is the Jew Jesus Christ, and so literary criticism is
untenable religiously if it is meant to be definitive ( 28-9; 144, n. 6). In
A.I., Tracy has concentrated more attention on the 'dangerous memory' of

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

35

tian faith has (though not exhaustively so) an historical content; that content is the factuality of the history of Jesus as
the history of God's self-manifestation. Because the event of
salvation is intrinsically related to the irreducible concreteness
of Jesus, for Christian faith "at this point what is most historical is what is most essential." 65
The image of the historical Jesus, formed by the coalescence
of historical knowledge about him, is not properly utilized if it
becomes a verification or proof of faith. It is, however, theologically relevant for faith in that it gives concrete content to
the faith confession, corrects faith images of Jesus, and, most
crucially, carries the element of the free, divine ' given' in the
Christ event, the actuality of God's self-gift in history to which
Christian faith is a response.
Theological Relevance of the Historical Jesus for Christological
Doctrine
The christological doctrine of the Church, crystalized in the
formulation of the Council of Chalcedon, stressed the centrality
of the insight that Jesus Christ's identity involved a double
relationality: with God (" one in being with the Father ")
and with the whole human race (" one in being with us ") . In
the context of the Eutychean effort once again to transform
Jesus into a divine man, the import of Chalcedon's incorporation of the " two natures " terminology was to secure a nonnegotiable place in the Church's doctrine for the full humanity
of the incarnate Word. The very reality of the Incarnation demanded the full participation of the " Christ, Son, Lord " in
human nature and the structures of human existence. So too
did the effecting of salvation since, in the judgment of those
championing the two natures doctrine, " what was not assumed
Jesus than was evident in B.R.O., and to powerful effect. Still, insofar as he
claims fundamental continuity between the two works, uses literary critical
methods alone in the christological chapters, and explicitly warns against
attempts to incorporate the historical in a constitutive way, the questions
from S. would still be pertinent.
65 Rahner, Foundations, 176.

36

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

was not redeemed ". In the words of Leo, which the Council in
substance affirmed, " it is as dangerous an evil to deny the
truth of the human nature of Christ as to refuse to believe
that his glory is equal to the Father " (Sermon 27) .
Chalcedon notwithstanding, the humanity of Christ has consistently proved difficult for the Church to come to terms with
and has often in oblique ways been suppressed or lost from
view. This can be the case, as Rahner has pointed out, in a
particularly ironic way in so-called orthodox christology; such
christology has a " mysterious monophysite undercurrent "
running through it, a secretly docetic tendency which pervades
it despite protestations to the contrary. This comes to expression in the ordinary understanding that a mark of the true
believer is the confession of Jesus as God, while at the same
time equal importance is not attached to the fact that "Jesus
is a real, genuine, and finite human being with his experience, in
obedient human being, like us in all things." 66 The historical
Jesus, this image which emphasizes the actual and the concrete,
gives the Church a rather reliable picture of Jesus the man.
To this extent it helps to break through the docetism which
tends again and again to assume dominance in the Church and
leads to a fuller appropriation of the full humanity of Jesus
Christ. A plausible case can in fact be made that the controversy over the historical Jesus is but the modern form of
the old christological dispute of docetism, the ancient and apparently ingrained tendency to absorb the humanity of Jesus
into the current perception of the divine in such a way that
Jesus becomes a mere construct. 67
66 K. Rahner, "I believe in Jesus Christ: Interpreting
an Article of Faith,"
Theological Investigations IX, tr. G. Harrison (London: Darton, Longmans
and Todd, 1972), 166. See also n. 1.
67 The case is made by Keck, 127-28 and Reinhard
Slenczka, Geschichtlichkeit und Personsein J esu Christi ( Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1967), 19, among others. It is important to note that the charge is not being
made here that anyone who does not stress the importance of the historical
Jesus is tending toward docetism, since such a one may either be assuming

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

:37

The humanity of a historical figure is recognized when that
figure is seen in concrete relationship to real, particular situations and people. By situating Jesus of Nazareth against the
background of his political, cultural and religious milieu and
by delineating his characteristically personal stances, teaching,
and manner of behaving, the image of the historical Jesus insures that the human nature of Jesus (Chalcedon's 'vere
homo ') is understood not as an abstract notion but as involving a concrete history, one not subsumed by the 'vere Deus'
which is an equally essential element of the Church's confession. Just as important, the exegetical methods which produce
the historical Jesus preclude certain systematic conclusions
which may weaken the full humanity, e.g. regarding Jesus's
knowledge, and so insure that the humanity of the Son of God
remains recognizable in the context of contemporary anthropological presuppositions. In the present climate of questioning and criticism, as Donald Baillie described it for the Protestant tradition, " the redicovery of the human historical personality of Jesus came as a new realization of the historical
content of the dogmas;" 68 for those in the Catholic communion,
such a recognition is in fact still coming.
The historical Jesus is constitutively bound up with christology, insofar as christology aims to make intelligible the
Christian confession that Jesus is the Christ. Its presence in
the Church's memory enables the working out of a christology
which corrects the monophysite distortion characteristic of
ordinary christology of the recent past, and advances the understanding of the radical assertion that the one Christ, Son,
Lord, is "one in being with us as to his humanity" by giving
to that humanity concrete historical content. Its theological
importance lies precisely in this-that it delineates the history
the humanity of Jesus or attempting to insure its place by other means. But
it is being said here that there is a relationship between the historical Jesus
and the correction of docetism.
ss Donald Baillie, God Was in Christ (N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948),
52.

SS

ELIZAllElTH A • .TOlINSON, c.s ..r.

of God with us, and leads to the rejection of docetism in any
form.
Theological Relevance of the Historical Jesus for Understanding Salvation and the Christian Way of Life
What God has done for our benefit in Jesus has from the
beginning been at the heart of the Christian proclamation of
the good news as well as at the heart of the way of response in
prayer and praise, in moral choices, in the whole Christian life
of faith. In recent centuries soteriology tended to narrow the
focus of Jesus's salvific activity to his death on the cross. The
redemption effected there was a freeing from sin, understood
primarily as a grace-less condition of the individual's soul, and
·a freeing from death, in such a way that the fruits of salvation were to be experienced for the most part in the world to
come. The gap between that traditional soteriology and the
quest for meaning and wholeness in the contemporary era has
led theology to the discovery that the salvific dimensions of the
life of Jesus Christ for believers and indeed for the whole world
are richer than the Church has remembered for a long time.
The initial move in this direction came in the early 1960's with
biblical scholars reappropriating the unmitigated importance
of the resurrection of the crucified one in the New Testament
witness. Continued historical critical investigating has uncovered another intrinsic link vital for understanding salvation:
the relation between the ministry and death of Jesus. Jesus's
death was the historical consequence of his fidelity to his
ministry of preaching and healing; it is just this Jesus who did
and said these things and not some crucified man who is the
Redeemer. I£ we ask what is meant by the salvation given to
us in him, " to give substance and content to this we have to
point to Jesus of Nazareth himself, his person and his whole
career and course of action up to and including his death." 69
As the Church's present memory of the actual Jesus who
69 Schillebeeckx,

Jesus, 52.

THE IDSTORICAL JESUS

89

lived, the historical Jesus is theologically relevant for the understanding of salvation. Informed by some historically assured knowledge of the ministry of Jesus, including in particular his preaching the coming reign of God with all the richness that symbol carried in the Jewish tradition, his association with the tax collectors and sinners, and his liberal attitude
toward the legal tradition within his basically law-abiding life,
newer theological approaches to the meaning of salvation have
introduced the ancient category of "liberation " to signify the
height and breadth and depth of human salvation effected in
him. 70 Against the tendency to overspiritualize and to privatize,
these approaches claim earthly salvation in both personal and
corporate dimensions to be inner components of Christian redemption. It is seen, for example, that it was precisely Jesus's
desire for human wholeness which led him to heal on the sabbath rather than wait for the first day of the week. Opposition to this choice and others similar to it created the conflict
which ultimately led to his death. If then the cross was a
consequence of Jesus's pattern of ministry, it cannot be used
(as sometimes happens) to legitimate passivity and toleration
of the suffering which is rooted in human injustice. It is, rather,
"the abiding sign of the determination of God and of Jesus to
free us as individuals and the human race as a whole." 71 Incorporating the memory of the prophetic life and healing work
of Jesus into the interpretation of his death is resulting in an
understanding of salvation critical of ideology and oriented toward the promotion of human well-being.
Interpretation of soteriology as full human liberation (integrity, wholeness in all dimensions) is closely woven with
growing appreciation of Christian life as a way of discipleship,
of following the one who is the Way. Following consists in
10 See survey by Francis Schussler
Fiorenza, " Critical Social Theory and
Christology: Toward an Understanding of Atonement and Redemption as
Emancipatory Solidarity," OTSA Proceedings 30 ( 1975), 63-110.
71 Dietrich Wiederkehr, Belief in Redemption, tr. J. Moiser (Atlanta:
.Johll
Knox Press, 1979) , 32.

40

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

hearing the word of God and acting upon it (Lk 8: 21), which
translates concretely into a life of faith and suffering love based
on the adoption of the values of Jesus, not in slavish imitation
but by the power of his Spirit in one's own circumstances. In
ways newly appreciated, discipleship may well mandate one to
question critically the given order of things, to oppose what is
oppressive to human well-being, to reconstruct creatively systems in keeping with the vision of the reign of God, and to do
so in the name of the crucified Jesus who is proclaimed as Lord
and Christ. 72 In the life of discipleship, mystical activity (i.e.
prayerful experience of God's immediacy in absence) and political activity (i.e. action on behalf of justice) belong together.
It is not by accident, then, that liberation theologies are virtually unanimous in some sort of appeal to the historical Jesus
and his prophetic ministry as one keystone of their critical reworking of the Christian tradition. Jesus's teaching and liberating praxis, known through historical reconstruction, is at the
heart of the transforming vision of a redeemed humanity from
which these theologies proceed and toward which they struggle
in hope to move the Church and the world. Two brief examples: Latin American theologians find in the historical
Jesus's option for the poor and marginalized of his society the
warrant for the critical, liberating way of discipleship in socially oppressive situations. The concreteness of his life guarantees
the truth of their perceptions:
No authority can decree that everything is permitted, for justice
and exploitation are not so indistinguishable. And Christ died so
that we might know that not everything is permitted. But not any
Christ. The Christ that cannot be co-opted by accommodationists
and opportunists is the historical Jesus. 73
12 Cf. Johannes
Metz, Followers of Christ, tr. T. Linton (N.Y.: Paulist
Press, 978); Thomas Clarke, ed., A.bove Every Name: The Lordship of Christ
and Social Systems (N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1980).
1aJ. Miranda, Being and the Messiah (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,
1977), 9. In Sobrino (n. 7), 15-16, n. 25 there is a partial listing of leading
Latin American theologianlil who appeal to the historical Jesus in their cri·
ti cal a pproac!l,
·
·

THE filSTORICAL JESUS

41

Reformist feminist theologians likewise appeal to the historical Jesus who discloses transforming patterns of relationship
between people through his own personal style of relating. During his ministry he associated with women as friends and disciples; women were witnesses of his death and burial, and commissioned witnesses of the resurrection. This reality is so deeply rooted that it survived the androcentric tendencies of the
tradition and is still perceptible in the texts. 74 Beside Jesus's
personal attitude and behavior toward women, feminist theology also finds valuable Jesus's stance toward the poor and oppressed, among whom outcast women are at the bottom of the
list (recall the Samaritan and Syro-Phoenician women, the
widows, the prostitutes) . Jesus's rejection, implicit and explicit, of relationships patterned on domination-subjection, and
his vision of a new humanity of service and mutual empowerment give the lie to those who would perpetuate sexist structures and modes of relationship in his name.
The historical Jesus, remembered-with assurance-as actually being one kind of man and not another, teaching particular things about God and humanity and not something else,
living this kind of life and being put to this kind of death and
not another, calling human beings to this kind of response and
not another, this historical Jesus is contributing to the reshaping of the understanding of salvation effected in him and the
way of discipleship which is the Christian response.

Conclusi,on
The importance of the image of the historical Jesus pertains
to many more areas of study than have been discussed here; it
has relevance for Christian anthropology, ecclesiology, escha74 Elisabeth
Schussler Fiorenza, "Interpreting
Patriarchal Traditions,"
The Liberating Word, Letty Russell, ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1976). For an overview of this perspective, see Anne Carr, "Is a Christian
Feminist Theology Possible ? " Theological Studies 43 ( 1982), 279-97. For
particular example, see Rosemary R. Ruether, To Change the World:
Ohristology and Cultural Oritiosm (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1981), especially Ch.
IV, "Christology and Feminism: Can a Male Savior Save Women?", 45-56.

42

ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON, c.s.J.

tology and theology of God, as well as for fundamental, moral,
and spiritual theologies as they are related to systematic theological thought. The areas described here were set out briefly
to illustrate the impact which the historical Jesus, informing
the memory of the Church, is having on theological renewal.
Indeed, if one could imagine the removal of this image from
the present consciousness of the Church, the theology of the
last two decades would look significantly different. Shifting the
basic image of Jesus cannot but have vast implications for all
areas of the Church's life and thought. Hence, the living and
passionate controversies swirling around Roman Catholic
christologies today.
A popular axiom used in ecumenical discussion holds that
people are more usually right in what they affirm than in what
they deny. Tracy's hermeneutical project, which seeks to make
manifest the existential religious meanings inherent in the
classic Christian texts while at the same time critiquing those
christologies which incorporate the historical Jesus in theologically relevant ways, would seem to be a good case in point. His
own positive insights and in particular his own interpretative
moves are penetrating and pertinent; yet what he negates is
counted by the majority of contemporary christologies to be
among what is essential. It would seem that the totality of
the theological task encompasses more than the hermeneutical
approach focused primarily on texts would allow, valuable as
that approach is in itself. Even if one would agree that it is a
misuse of the historical Jesus to employ it to ground or validate
in whole or in part the kerygma, there still remains the further
question of whether the rejection of that function should diminish the importance of other functions of the historical Jesus
in present christology. Tracy allows subsidiary corrective and
developmental roles; the argument here has been that there is
an even more primary, constitutive ro]e, insofar as the historical Jesus informs the present memory of the Church. Even if
one would agree that the mediation of tradition and community
ground faith, there still remains the further question of what

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

43

grounds the tradition. Apostolicity is certainly a normative
element, but what is the relation of the original apostolic witness to that to which it witnesses ? Stopping the theologically
relevant line of inquiry at the witnesses and their memory has
the effect of leaving one in the minds and experiences of those
people and not leading ad rem, to Jesus Christ in his own
reality which, however, is never known apart from the witnesses. Even if one would agree that criteria of appropriateness are of great importance, are not criteria of intelligibility at
least equally crucial in this age of historical consciousness, when
faith must render an account of its hope to a reason gone historical? Even if one would agree that it is the actual Jesus
remembered and confessed by the community which must bear
the theological weight, can that Jesus be so radically distinguished from the historical Jesus known by empirical methods
in the present community? The thesis put forward here is that
such a divorce is not legitimate.
The suggestion has been made that moments of renewed care
in scholarly study of the Bible are correlated with and may even
be responsible for sparking moments of great power and originality in the history of theology. 75 To judge from the evidence
of the last two decades, such a moment is once again present.
Biblical criticism is a work of the Church; historical biblical
criticism in particular is renewing the memory of Jesus Chrst
in the Church. If present-day Roman Catholic christologies are
"obsessed" with the historical Jesus, it is with good reason.
After so long a season of forgetting, the Church is once again .
perceiving the actual historical contours of the one confessed as
its Lord and Christ, is once again glimpsing the ' human face
of God'. It is a picture too valuable to be eclipsed by its undoubted existential import.
ELIZABETH
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.O.

A. JOHNSON, C.S.J.

1n Krister Stendahl, "Biblical Theology, Contemporary," The Interpreter's
Dictionary of the Bible ( N.Y.: Abingdon Preas, 1962), 418-32.

GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE

AND IMMUTABILITY

HERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS of attacking theologial beliefs. One is to show that there are mistakes in
he rational arguments used to support them; another is
to show that they do not fit the facts; yet another is to claim
that since they cannot be falsified they are vacuous; and,
fourthly, one can attempt to show that they are mutually inconsistent.
Attacks oi the fourth type will be discussed here, attacks
which pertain primarily to God's omnipotence and immutability. It will be argued that there are ways that the theist
can meet these attacks without abandoning any essential beliefs. Thus, in what follows, my sole purpose is to establish the
mutual consistency of certain theological beliefs and I shall not
try to prove that they can meet criticisms of types 1, 2 and 3.
Th·e Paradox of Omnipotence

In "Evil and Omnipotence", J. L. Mackie presents the
"paradox of omnipotence": "can an omnipotent being make
rules which then bind himself?" 1 Mackie's argument for the
paradox, in essence, is this: if a being cannot make rules which
are binding on himself, then, in this respect, he is not omnipotent; if he can, and does, then he is no longer omnipotent. 2
Thus, if God, say, creates beings with free will (i.e., whom he
can no longer completely control) He loses His omnipotence,
yet, if He cannot, He is not omnipotent. The analysis of
" omnipotent", therefore, appears to disclose that this concept
is self-contradictory or paradoxical.
1 J. L. Mackie," Evil and Omnipotence",
in God and Evil: Readings on the
Theological Problem of Evil, edited by Nelson Pike, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs: 1964), p. 57.
2 Mackie, " Evil and Omnipotence ", pp. 57-58.

44

GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE

AND IMMUTABILITY

45

The Paradox of Immutability
The traditional conception of a perfect being, a conception
which has its roots in classical Greek philosophy, is that a
perfect being is eternal and unchanging. It is thought that a
perfect being is immutable because any change would have to
be for the better or for the worse. If for the better, then the
being in question was not, prior to the change, perfect; if. for
the worse, then, upon changing, it would no longer be perfect.
In itself the claim that God is immutable does not appear to
pose any problems, but when God's specific attributes are considered problems do arise. Here I shall confine my attention
to the attempt to reconcile immutability with omniscience.
Let it be supposed that there is a sequence of events, A, B, C,
D ... and that corresponding to this sequence of events there
is a sequence of mental ' bits ' of information, a, b, c, d . . .
One need not think of these ' bits ' as ' mirroring ' or ' picturing ' their corresponding events; rather one is committed only to
the claim that, if X knows, say, A, then X has a as a mental
content. Let us imagine further that the kind of knowledge involved is direct as opposed to inferred knowledge. E.g., I know
directly that my glasses are on the table before me and directly
(through memory) that they were there a moment ago, but I
only know through inference or indirectly events of which I
have knowledge but which I have not witnessed and am not
witnessing. One might argue against this distinction (which
bears some resemblance to Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description) that even
knowledge that my glasses are before me requires inferences
since I must ' infer ', on the basis of sight, touch, and so on,
that my glasses are, in fact, before me. However, problems of
this sort need not detain us, for even if we must make such
inferences, God, given His omniscience, does not. Given God's
omniscience, all events, even future events, are directly known
by Him. Also, given His omniscience, His direct knowledge of these events is generally, if not always, fuller than ours;
it is complete. We can say, then, that, corresponding to events,
A, B, C, D ... God has ' bits ' of knowledge or mental contents

46

ROBERT CARR-WIGGIN

a, b, c, d ... Let us now suppose further that A, B, C, D ...
occur sequentially over time, such that A occurs at t 1 , B at
t2, and so on. Let us suppose it is now t 3 • A human being who
had knowledge of all the events in the sequence which had occurred or were occurring, therefore, would have knowledge
a, b and c (and would know all three at ta). He would know
about C through apprehension or present experience and A and
B would be remembered.
God, on the other hand, from all eternity would know the
entire sequence, A, B, C, D ... , that is, He would not be limited
to a knowledge of present and past events.
But let it be supposed further that at t 3 there are two people,
X and Y, both of whom know A, B, C (have knowledge a, b, c)
except that X knows that a and b are memories (i.e., that A
and B are past events) and that C is a present event, whereas
Y, while knowing that A, B, C occurred sequentially and while
knowing that A preceded B and B preceded A, does not know
when A, B and C occurred in relation to his own temporal position. In this case, all other things being equal, we would say
that X knows more than Y.
But time advances. Say it is now t,. If X is to continue to
know when each event occurred, not only in relation to the
sequence of events in question, but also in relation to the present, c must change to a memory. Thus, as time passes, X
changes, that is, his memories increase.
If we now turn to God, we can see that His position differs
somewhat from X's, for although X at any time only knows all
the events which have occurred in the sequence up to and including that time, God, at any time, knows the entire sequence.
But does God know when each member of the sequence occurs,
not only in relation to the other members of the sequence, but
in relation to the present? If so, then, as time passes, His
memories must increase, that is, He is not immutable. But if
He cannot know when A, B, C, D ... occur in relation to the
present then, in this respect, His position is analogous to Y's,
who, obviously, knows less than X. Therefore, if God's memories do not increase, He is not omniscient.

GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE

AND IMMUTABILITY

47

Incidentally, claiming that God is eternal and hence 'outside' time will not help solve this problem; it will, rather, reduce one to claiming that God's knowledge of temporal events
is a ' mystery '. The ' mystery ' claim should only be made
when all else fails.

Resolving the Paradoxes
The problems at issue here are problems of consistency and
I intend to resolve them by rendering the claims that God is
omnipotent and immutable consistent with certain other central theistic beliefs; the principal one being the belief that it is
possible that God exists.
In New Essays on Human Understanding Leibniz suggests
that the ontological argument will go through only if it can be
shown that God's attributes are not contradictory. 3 In stating
this Leibniz may simply be making the point that from p and
not-p any conclusion follows. However, there is another, more
interesting, way of construing his remark.
The ontological argument assumes that God is that than
which nothing greater can be conceived, or, to use Descartes's
version, that God has every perfection. I do not wish to defend the ontological argument, but its fault, if it has one, surely lies in the premise that a perfect being must exist (i.e., that
it is greater to exist than not to exist) and not in the premise
that God is the greatest conceivable being.
But what is such a being? Even if it is not the case that X, to
be perfect, must exist, surely, as ' perfection ' is being used here,
such a being must possibly exist. It is true, of course, that a
perfect round square cannot possibly exist, but its non-existence
does not follow simply from its perfection. That is, there is
nothing intrinsic to the nature of perfection such that, if X is
perfect, X, solely by virtue of being perfect, cannot exist. In
reply to this one might attempt to define ' perfect ' in such a
way that no perfect X could .exist, but my point is not that
a G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, translated and
edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge University Press.
(Cambridge: 1981), pp. 437-438.

48

ROBERT CARR-WIGGIN

' perfect ' cannot (even stipulatively) be defined in such a
manner; my point, rather, is that when (most) theists claim
that God is perfect, however it is they define ' perfect ', they
do not define it in such a way that God, by virtue of being perfect, cannot exist. At the very least, His being perfect must be
compatible with the possibility of his existence. Thus, it can
be said that an essential theistic belief is the minimal belief
that God's existence must be possible. All other claims concerning God, including claims concerning his various perfections, must be rendered consistent with this claim.
Let us return now to the specific perfection, omnipotence.
Clearly, here, too, the theist is committed to a definition of
'omnipotence' which, minimally, does not entail the impossibility of God's existence. Thus, he is committed to a definition
of ' omnipotence ', if one can be found, which is not self-contradictory or paradoxical. Consequently, if conceptual analysis
of ' omnipotence ' leads to the paradox Mackie describes, the
term' omnipotence' (as applied to God) must be amended in
such a way that the paradox disappears. Mackie himself suggests that the paradox could be resolved by distinguishing:
between first order omnipotence (omnipotence (1)), that is unlimited power to act, and second order omnipotence (omnipotence
(2)), that is unlimited power to determine what powers to act
things shall have. Then we could consistently say that God all the
time has omnipotence (1), but if so no beings at any time have
powers to act independently of God. Or we could say that God at
one time had omnipotence (2), and used it to assign independent
powers to act to certain things, so that God thereafter did not
have omnipotence (1) .4

What the theist can say then is that since omnipotence (0),
(that is, a conception of omnipotence which includes omnipotences (1) and (2)) is self-contradictory, neither God (nor
any being) could possibly exist and yet have omnipotence (0).
4 Mackie also proposes an alternative
solution to the paradox, viz., ' deny
that God is a continuing being .. .' But this solution would be unacceptable
to the theist, and Mackie himself points out that 'on this assumption ...
no meaning can be given to the assertion that God made men with . . .
[free will]. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence", p. 59.

GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE

AND IMMUTABILITY

49

Since it is an essential theistic belief that God at least possibly
exist, His omnipotence, therefore, is not omnipotence (0) .
Further, since an omnipotence which renders one's existence
impossible is a queer sort of omnipotence, the theist can further claim that God's lack of omnipotence (0) does not in itself render Him less than omnipotent (in some non-queer sense
of the term) . The non-queer senses appear to be omnipotence
(1) and omnipotence (2). Therefore, God's omnipotence is
either omnipotence (1) or omnipotence (2).
But which form of omnipotence does God have, (1) or (2)?
Here, there are two possible solutions. Since God is (ex hypothesi) 'truly' omnipotent, an attempt might be made to compare omnipotence (1) and omnipotence (2) to determine
which is greater. That is, we could suppose that there are two
beings, equal in all other respects, except that one had omnipotence (1) and the other omnipotence (2). Which is the
greater ? If these two forms of omnipotence are amenable to
such comparison we can know which form of omnipotence God
has. 5 However, let us suppose that there are no conclusive
grounds for choosing, on the basis of direct comparison, between omnipotence (1) and omnipotence (2). In that case we
can still decide which form of omnipotence God has on other
grounds. The free will issue provides one such ground, and,
indeed, Mackie raises the paradox of omnipotence while discussing the issue of man's free will.
Let us imagine that the theist who is trying to determine
which type of omnipotence God has also holds as an essential
tenet of his beliefs that God gave man free will. Such a theist,
knowing that omnipotence (2) is compatible with free will
and knowing that omnipotence (1) is not, will declare then that
omnipotence (2) must be the kind of omnipotence God possesses and that, since God is the greatest possible being, omnipotence (2) must be a 'greater' form of potency than omnipotence (1). Similarly, a theist who holds that man does not
have free will would opt for omnipotence (1).
G For more on this way of resolving the paradoxes, see my treatment below
of omniscience.

50

ROBERT CARR-WIGGIN

Thus (to confine our attention to the free will theist) it appears that he can consistently hold that: a) it is possible that
God exists; b) no being can exist and have attribute omnipotence (0); c) therefore God does not have omnipotence (0);
d) however, it is possible for a being to exist and have omnipotence (1) or omnipotence (2); e) omnipotence (1) is incompatible with man's free will; omnipotence (2) compatible;
f) man has free will; g) therefore, God has omnipotence (2);
h) God is the greatest conceivable being; i) consequently,
omnipotence (2) must be ' true ' omnipotence.
The determinist theist would hold a to e and h and f 1 ) man
does not have free will; g1 ) therefore God has omnipotence
(1); and ii) consequently, omnipotence (1) must be 'true'
omnipotence.

Immutability and Omniscience
With respect to immutability and ommsc1ence it appears
that one can decide, without considering other beliefs, which
form of omniscience is ' true ' omniscience and, therefore, attributable to God. One's problem, then, is to reconcile God's
omniscience with his immutability. This, I think, can be done.
Let us call omniscience without memories omniscience (1)
and omniscience with memories omniscience (2). Let us
imagine that there are two computers, X and Y, which contain identical knowledge of events A, B, C, D ... except that
X does not know when A, B, C, D ... occur in relation to the
present while Y does. Let us imagine further that this is all
the knowledge that they have. In such a case I think it is clear
that Y knows more than X because Y knows everything that
X does and, in addition, it knows something more. Thus, if Y
knows everything, Y is omniscient, but X cannot know everything because it knows less than Y. Consequently, omniscience
(1) cannot be 'true' omniscience and if God is truly omniscient, God has omniscience (2).
But this entails that God has memories and how is this claim
be reconciled with God's immutability?
Let us reexamine the reasons for claiming that God is immutable:

Goo's OMNIPOTENCE AND IMMUTABILITY

51

1) Change must be for the better or worse:
2) If God changes for the worse, He will no longer be perfect;
3) If God changes for the better, He was not perfect;
4) But God is always perfect;
5) Therefore, God does not change.
But must change necessarily be for the better or worse (1)?
In the case of our computer which gains memories as time
progresses this clearly is not the case. At ti it knows everything and at t2 it still knows everything. The content of its
knowledge has changed, but this must change if it is to continue to know everything. In this case failure to change would
be for the worse since it would know less than it had· known
previously. The same reasoning can be applied to God.
However, even if we must allow that God changes, there remains an important sense in which God is immutable; i.e., at
ti God is omniscient and at t2 He is still omniscient. Hence, a
precondition of His immutability in this sense (call it immutability (2) ) is that He undergo change in another sense. And
yet it seems to me that immutability (2) gets at the essential
sense in which we want to claim that God is unchanging; i.e.,
we want to claim that a) He does not go from' better to worse'
or 'worse to better'. Since this sense of immutability is consistent with a) , nothing essential is given up if it is admitted
that there is a sense (call it immutability (1)) in which God
is not unchanging.
Conclusion
Throughout I have attempted to argue not for the truth or
falsity of certain theistic beliefs, but for their consistency.
Rendering theistic beliefs consistent, quite obviously, makes
them immune to charges of inconsistency, but, additionally,
this project aids in the clarification of the theists' position.
ROBERT CARR-WIGGIN
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Oanada

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

W

E SHALL PROPOSE AN ONTOLOGY based on
wo primitive notions expressed in two primitive loutions: "A is an (actuated) attribute," and "A is
identical with (some) B," together with the customary logical
operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction, implication,
and quantification. We shall also make use of the primitive
logical concept of necessity as an alethic propositional modality
and construct an ontological cognate by means of it.
It is our opinion that with these primitives we can deal
with certain other entities such as events, states of affairs,
propositions, and intentional objects-many of which are primitive to other ontologies-by means of attribution, actuation,
and identity. Let us begin with the concept of an attribute.
By an attribute we shall understand whatever can be said
of anything as a property of that thing. Thus the properties
of being green, of being actually existing, of being such that
George III was a Hanoverian, and of being such that two and
two are not five, are all attributes in our inclusive sense.
Some attributes appear to be primitive and irreduciblesuch as the attribute of being one or singular-while others
would appear to be composites of attributes themselves more
simple-such as the attribute of being either red or blue or the
attribute of being if a violinist then a musician. Whether there
exist perfectly atomic attributes and whether attributes may
form a calculus subject to combination and reduction to attributive simples are questions beyond the scope of the present
essay. The crucial essential characteristic of an attribute is its
capacity for being predicated of, asserted in connexion with,
ascribed positively or negatively to some entity.

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

The crucial existential characteristic of an attribute is its
actuation. By actuation we understand the making real or actual of an attribute. We might describe actuation as analogous
to instantiation or exemplification. The preference for a special term is at length arbitrary but it does express something of
importance. Exemplification, instantiation, and inherence all
characterize an attribute in relation to another-some subject
of attribution. While it is undoubtedly the case that most actuations are exemplifications-perhaps only a philosopher could
think of one which is not-it is better, for our purposes, to deal
with the realization of attributes as such. Thus many attributes
will always be actuated, many will be actuated variably, and
many will never be and can never be actuated at all.
Accordingly, actuation is distinct from existence or self-identity insofar as there may be existent but unactua.ted attributes.
We shall hold, in fact, that all attributes exist simply by virtue
of their being attributes-even those which are neither actuated
nor actuable. It should therefore be clear that we embrace an
extreme form of Platonic Realism. Whitehead, for example,
said much the same of propositions-whether true or false they
exist etemally. 1 Husserl has said of states of affairs (Sachverhalten.) that, whether possible or not, they all maintain ideal
unities. 2 Even St. Thomas Aquinas, for all his Aristotelianism,
seems to allow a kind of qualified existence to unexempli:f:ied
ideas and unrealized forms as types in God's speculative knowledge.3
1 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan:
1937)' pp. 227 -8.
2 E. Husserl, Logical Investigations,
Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1970), pp. 284-5. Also Cartesian Meditations
(Hague: M. Nijhoff,
1960), Meditation II, pp. 50-53.
a St. Thomas Aquinas. Truth (translated from the Leonine edition of
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, by J. McGlynn, S.J. Chicago: Regnery,
953), Q. III, I. Compare the more concise account in Summa Theologiae I,
15, 3 (Rome: Marietti, 1950). This is not to suggest that St. Thomas would
accept the in se or per se existence of such eternal objects as attributes. But
it is noteworthy that the Platonic tradition is not so foreign to this great
Ari§totelian as some wight urge.

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

We shall say, further, that an entity has an attribute or is
qualified by an attribute only in terms of a coincidence of that
entity's identity and the actuation of the attribute. These ways
of speaking, aside from primitive locutions, are descriptive and
are not intended to carry any ontological implications which
we shall not explicate in other ways.
We may now consider the first or primitive state of any attribute, its existence, from whose explication we may derive the
concept of a state (of affairs).
D.l

P is the existence (act of existing) of the attribute Q =
( df) i) P and Q are attributes; ii) necessarily P is actuated
if and only if there is something identical with Q.4

Two matters are to be initially noted. First, since P is actuated with the existence of anything identical with Q, it is
legitimate to say that, although existence and actuation are
distinct, every existing is expressed by an act; second, since the
actuation of P is equivalent to Q's self-identity, P may be regarded the ' act ' of Q. Thus the term " act of existence " is
neither vague nor metaphorical. From D.1 we may characterize
the more generic notion of a state of affairs.
D.2

Pis a state (of a:ffairs)=(df)
attribute.

Pis the existing of some

Although some philosophers have drawn a close connexion between an attribute and a state of affairs, no one-to our lmowledge-has gone so far as to identify a state of affairs as the
very existence of an attribute and to characterize states of
affairs not merely as possible objects or contents of thought,
acceptance, or consideration, but as existences. 5 For this rea4 Thus if every attribute must have a positive identity, we have the right
to enquire whether such dubious ' attributes ' as "being not an attribute of
itself" exist at all except in terms of some specification of " itself."
5 For views which effectively regard states of affairs or their equivalents
as primarily objects of thought see A. Marty, Untersuchung zur Grundlegung
(Halle: M. Niemeyer,
der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie
1908), pp. 288-362; N. Hartmann. Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie, 3rd ed.
(Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1948), pp. 88-126. R. M.
Per·
son and Object (La Salle: Open Court, 1976), pp. 114-137,

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

55

son to say of a state of affairs that it may be the object or
content of an intentional attitude is in effect to maintain the
intelligibility of acts of existence; hence the following axiom:
A.1 Every state of affairs is such that it may be considered, entertained, accepted, or not accepted.

We may consider the relation between attributes and states
of affairs more concretely by a few examples. Take a relatively simple attribute, that of being red. The state of affairs
which is the existence of this attribute would be one we might
express in words by the phrase ' there being red ' or by the
dependent clause ' that there is red.' To the attribute of being
round squareness or of being golden mountainousness would
correspond the states of affairs of there being round squareness
and golden mountainousness. By contrast to the attributes of
being round and square or golden and mountainous would correspond the respective states of affairs of there being round
squares and there being golden mountains. 6
Clearly, then, some states of affairs-those which are the
existences of actuated attributes-not only exist 1 but occur
or obtain as well.
D.3

P is an obtaining state of affairs= (df) i) P is the existing
of some attribute Q; ii) Q is actuated.
D.4 P is a non-obtaining state of affairs= (df) i) P is the existing of some attribute Q; ii) Q is not actuated.
s We might say, in general, that the attribute of being A-and-actual (real,
existent, identical-with-something)
was the same as the attribute of beingan-A. We would then be justified in saying (pace Meinong) that the golden
mountain might be golden without having to conclude that the existent
golden mountain existed. Being golden, mountainous, and existent (i.e., being
a golden mountain) would ahvays 'include' being golden. But being golden,
mountainous, and existent (i.e., being a golden mountain) would not 'include' existing. Thus there is a sense in which existence is a real predicate
and adds to an attribute and there is an equally important sense in which
it does not add.
1 Lest it seem odd that a state of affairs " exist," we should recall that by
D.l states "f affairs, too, are attributes-attributes
whose being implies the
actuation of an identity.

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

And from the above we may characterise the parasitic notion
of a negative state of affairs. For we might say that to the
attribute of being such that 'there being F's' is a non-obtaining state of affairs would correspond the state of affairs of
there being no F's. Clearly, too, states of affairs are of three
basic types. Any state of affairs whose corresponding attribute
belongs to an attribute obtains ipso facto. Any state of affairs
whose corresponding attribute is impossible fails to obtain; and
any state of affairs which is the existing of an attribute whose
actuation is variable obtains variably.
D.6

P is a necessary state of affairs= (df) i) P is a state of
affairs; ii) necessarily P is a state of affairs if and only if P
obtains.
D.7 P is an impossible state of affairs= (df) i) P is a state of
affairs; ii) necessarily P is a state of affairs if and only if P
does not obtain.
D.8 P is a contingent state of affairs= ( df) i) P is a state of
affairs; ii) P is neither necessary nor impossible.

Finally let us address the fundamental philosophical problem
of identity and individuation in regard to attributes and states
of affairs. Since we have maintained the very strongest connexion between the two, we may distinguish attributes and
states of affairs among themselves in one of two ways. We
may take identity and diversity among attributes as primitive
and define the identity and diversity of states of affairs accordingly. Two states of affairs are identical when existences of a
single attribute. Or we may go the other way. We may take
states of affairs as primitively identical and distinct and define
identity and diversity among attributes by reference to them.
Two attributes are two when their acts of existence are two;
one when their acts are one. There are two advantages to the
second alternative. First, since by D.I states are themselves
attributes, a preference for individuation by states would allow us to individuate all attributes by reference to a subclass of
them. This economy is not possible on the first alternative
nor even plausible if states of affairs, as attributes, are already
identical and distinct. Second, since we have already assumed

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

57

m A.I the intelligibility of existences, we can give an intentional (epistemological) criterion of identity and diversity
among attrbutes if we individuate in the second way. Let us
state such a criterion:
For any two states of affairs P and Q, they are identical if
and only if whoever considers the one considers the other.
Thus if anyone might consider P without considering Q or Q
without considering P, P and Q are distinct acts of existence.
We may turn now to the analysis of propositions and events.
In dealing with propositions-and a fortiori in dealing with
events-we should note that there is no uniform doctrine of
either which has won unanimous acceptance. To some extent,
then, our analysis of the two in terms of attributes and acts
must balance philosophic considerations against those of common sense.
Propositions are not uncommonly held to have the following properties: a) they are either true or false but not both.
Some have urged that their truth and falsity are eternal; but
this view is sufficiently idiosyncratic that we may limit our
consideration to truth and falsity alone, leaving open the question of eternity. 8 b) They are the objects of attitudes or the
contents of beliefs, expressing states of affairs; perhaps they are
actually identical with states of affairs as thought or considered.
Since we have taken states of affairs as existences, we shall prefer the weaker position which holds that propositions are intentional entities which express or assert states of affairs. 9 So
if we hold that propositions represent or are products of acts
of judgment, we will be accepting that a judgment-in terms of
s For views of propositions which stress respectively their truth and falsity
and their eternity see A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica
to *56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 4-12; Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World, p. 227.
9 For a view which identifies
propositions as a subspecies of states of
affairs, see R. M. Chisholm, Person and Object, p. 123; for a contrasting view
which seems to make of them intentional constructs, see St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae I, 14, 15.

58

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

the proposition produced by it-is an assertion or a denial of
existence, the existence which is the state expressed in the
proposition. Indeed, there is some plausibility in favor of the
position that propositions express judgments of existence, since
they usually say that things are or are not in a certain way. 10
c) Some appear to regard propositions, like attributes, as
eternal not only in their truth and falsity but in their existence,
too. However, two considerations seem to be appropriate here.
First, propositions appear to depend on states of affairs in a
way which does not suggest reciprocal dependence. It is entirely conceivable that there might be a world without propositions replete with states of affairs, unless we beg the question
and assimilate the two. Second, there is some case for arguing
that propositions only come to be when thought and pass away
when not thought or come to be when first thought and remain
testaments of thought ever thereafter. The difficulty with the
latter view is that it is manifestly arbitrary. The difficulty with
the former is that if we allow a single proposition to come to be
when thought and then to pass away when not thought, we run
the risk of encouraging the existence of entities with multiple
comings to be and passings away. We may, however, still express the dependency of propositions on states of affairs without deciding whether their existences are eternal or not.
D.9

P is a proposition= ( df) i) There is a state of affairs Q such
that a) it is
for Q to be and for P not to be; b)
necessarily P is true if and only if P exists and Q obtains and
false if and only if P exists and Q does not obtain; ii) it is
possible that someone asserts or denies P.

The above definition, though complex, satisfies our three important criteria. Propositions are either true or false; they are
possible contents or products of judgment; they assert or express or name states of affairs in such wise that their truth and
falsity depends on a connexion with the obtaining and non-ob10 For a view that propositions
are essentially possible objects or contents
of thought see W. E. Johnson, Logic, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 921), pp. 3 and ff.

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

59

taining of states of affairs. 11 • 12 Thus it seems possible, in principle, to analyse propositions in terms of states of affairs while
maintaining our earlier contention that states of affairs are the
existences of attributes. So let us turn to events and conclude
this section with a treatment of the kinds of entities our
ontology enables us to deal with, in terms merely of attribution
and actuation.
Of the three basic intentional concepts: state of affairs,
proposition, event, the third is by far the most diffuse in focus;
the term itself has grown loose. For this reason, rather than attempt
define an event, we shall find it more worth our while
to set out a scheme for considering how statements appearing
to employ such entities as events may be paraphrased in favor
of statements which require only attributes and their existences. Our treatment of events will differ in its strategy from
our treatment of propositions. Where we have assumed propositions and explained their truth and falsity in terms of attributes and their acts of existence, we shall proceed to eliminate the distinct notion of an event altogether, treating it as
no more than a facon de penser.
In order to do this simply, though, we must introduce the
concept of attribute coactuation.
D.10

A and Bare coactuated in P=(df) i) A and Bare attributes; ii) P is a state of affairs: iii) Necessarilv P obtains if
and onlv if A and B are both actuated: (iv) P obtains.
D .11 A and B are coactuated bv the same Q = ( df) i) A a nil B
are coactuated in some P; ii) Necessarilv P obtains if and
only if there is something identical with Q; iii) P obtains.
11 If we did wish to accept propositions
as states of affairs insofar as they
were considered, we might substitute the following for D.9.
D.!l' P is a proposition /df /i) P is a state of affairs which iR entertainf'd: ii) it is nossible that P is a Rfate of affairR without bf'ing
entPrtained · iii\ P is true if and onlv if P iR entertained and P obtains, and false if and only if P is entertained and does not obtain.
12 For views which purport to dispense
completely with -propositions as
entities see A. N. Prior. Objeefa of Thonght (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971), pp. ll-13; 28-30: W. V. Quine. Word and Objeet (Cambridge:
MIT Press. 1960) , pp. 216 and ff; Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard,
Belknap Press, 1981), µp. 43-54.

60

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

We could, of course, make coactuation even more specific by
appending temporal indices. But we shall save the treatment
of times until the second part.
We may apply this now to what all would consider an eventan important historical event: Brutus's stabbing Caesar. It is
something which came to be, which lasted for a certain time,
and then ceased. It involved persons, actions by those persons,
and observable locations. It was witnessed, and its being witnessed might also count as an important historical event.
Can we re-express the content of this putative event in terms
of attributes and their acts ? It should be quite clear that we
can, given all that has been said above. We have only to list
the important attributes involved and state the conditions of
their actuation and coactuation. To illustrate, we would say
that the attributes of being Julius Caesar and of being Marcus
Brutus were coactuated in some state of affairs but not by the
same entity. The attributes of being Caesar and of being
stabbed were coactuated by the same entity. The attribute of
stabbing and the attribute of being Brutus were also coactuated by the same entity. I£ we wished to restrict the description entirely to the wounds dealt by Brutus, to the exclusion of
the actions of other co-conspirators, we might add also that no
other entities coactuated stabbing or being stabbed. 18 Further
qualifiers might include spatiotemporal indices; and a minute
account might be obtainable. But whether or not it is, we
seem to have no difficulty accounting in principle for an event
in terms of a set of actuated attributes. Accordingly, we may
1a It might be objected that in addition to Caesar's being stabbed, his chest
was also stabbed and that something else besides Caesar coactuated being
stabbed. Three replies subvert this difficulty. First, we might urge that the
only things which coactuated being stabbed were Caesar or parts of Caesar.
Second, we might urge that it would be more correct to say not that his
chest was stabbed but that he was stabbed in the chest. Chests do not die
of wounds; persons do. Third, we might avoid the problem entirely by saying that what was properly coactuated was being Caesar and being a stabbed
person. There seems no reason why any two attributes might not coexist as
a third or why two compossible attributes might not be coactuated as a third.

ATT'EiIBUTE Am> ACT

61

adopt the following axiom which allows us to dispense with
events as such.
A.3 For every putative event E there is a class of attributes (possibly infinite) actuated when and only when E is correctly
considered to have occurred.
This permits us to eliminate events without having to take a
positive position on the question whether they could be defined to accommodate the intuitions of everyone precisely.
We may illustrate the application of our axiom in a case
where one putative event might be thought to have caused or
contributed to the occurrence of another. Let us say that
Brutus's stabbing Caesar was the very event which brought
about Caesar's death, notwithstanding the aggressive endeavors
of others. We might speak of the coactuation by a single entity of the attribute of being Caesar and of the attribute of
losing life as Caesar's dying. To say, then, that Brutus's stabbing caused Caesar's dying would be to say that given appropriate standing conditions, necessarily if being Caesar and being stabbed were coactuated by the same entity and being
Brutus and stabbing were coactuated by the same entity, then
at an appropriate later time being Caesar and losing life were
coactuated by the same entity. More fastidious accounts of the
same cause/effect sequence could be had as we brought in more
and more refined conditions of actuation and coactuation.
We may turn now to a general classification of entities and
conclude this section with the consideration of intentional objects and a stricter concept of ontological necessity than proposed in D.6. Our previous definition of a state of affairs,
D.9l, permits the natural extention of the principle embodied
in D.1 to non-attributes. We can develop a concept of concrete existence.
D.12

P is the existence of X in concreto = (df) i) P is a contingent state of affairs; ii) P obtains if and only if something is identical with X-and necessarily so; iii) P obtains.

And, by contrast, we have abstract existence.

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

D.13 P is the existence of X in abstracto = (df) i) There is an
attribute A necessary such that X is identical with something if and only if A is actuated, ii) P is the existing of A.
Thus the. abstract existence of anything consists in the existence of an attribute whose actuation would coincide with the
existence of the thing. Thus all attributes exist in abstracto,
none in con.creto, and entities existing concretely exist abstractly in terms of the attributes actuated by their concrete existences. If we wished to permit a kind of concretion to attributes,
we might do so in the following way:
D.12'

P is an attribute concretized by a Q = (df) i) P and Q
are attributes; ii) There is an R such that Risa contingent
state of affairs and necessarily R obtains if and only if P
and Q are coactuated by the same entity.

We have spoken of attributes as entities existing by necessity-their existences are necessary states of affairs as defined
in D.6. If there are necessary entities, then there are surely
possible, contingent, and impossible entities.
D.14

X is possible/impossible/ contingent= (df) There is a P
such that i) P is a state of affairs which is the existence of
X in abstracto; ii) P is not impossible/P is impossible/P is
contingent, as a state of affairs.

From the above a number of noteworthy consequences follow. First all attributes exist in abstracto; although they may
be concretized it does not follow that they themselves exist in
concreto. All attributes are necessary entities.
Entities which are not attributes exist in. concreto depending
on whether the states of affairs which are their concrete existences obtain or not. Such entities, by virtue of the variable
obtaining of their states of affairs, are contingent. They also
exist in abstracto in virtue of the attributes whose actuation
would accord them concrete existence. It may seem implausible
to say that attributes, when actuated by contingent entities,
are concretized but not existent in concreto. Recalling that
existence in concreto is a property of something simply by virtue of its existence, we may observe simply that many attrib-

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

63

utes are not actuated simply by virtue of their existence and
that those which are are because they are attributes proper to
other attributes. The concretization or concretion of an attribute might be regarded more correctly as the mode of
being-actuation-acquired
by an attribute from the existence
of an entity whose proper mode is existence in concreto.
Without attempting to give a comprehensive treatment to
the problem of intentionality, we may apply our results to the
analysis of three representative intentional relations, each of
which seems, prima facie, to commit us to the existence of unreal entities as objects of intention.
For present purposes we may take as primitive the relations
of considering and of acting to bring some state of affairs
about. By A.I both these intentional attitudes may take states
of affairs as their second terms.
In order for something to be taken or considered explicitly
as an intentional object, we must have a way of fixing it for
our intention so as to distinguish it effectively from what we do
not hold clearly in our intensive gaze. The individuation criterion in A.2, in enabling us to do this for states of affairs, allows us to do the same for other objects of consideration.
A. S considers Y as an intentional object = ( df) There is some
state of affairs P necessarily such that P obtains if and only
if Y exists; S considers P.

Thus we may say that the primary objects of consideration are
states of affairs and that the consideration of a state of affairs
implies the secondary consideration of whatever would exist
by virtue of its obtaining. An act requiring endeavor has conditions of its own.
In order for someone to act with the intent to bring about a
change in a certain entity-to make some entity Y have a
property Z-it would seem, first, that a subject must be able
to fix his attention on both the entity Y and the attribute to be
acquired, Z. Second, the subject must act to the end that Y
acquires this property. That this may be impossible is of no
consequence, although the subject must clearly refrain from be-

64

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

lieving that it is impossible. No mathematician sets out to
prove a theorem he believes to be false. In terms of what we
have said of attributes above, a subject would act to such an
end by acting with the intent to bring it about that the attribute Z and the attribute of being (identical with) Y are coactuated by the same entity.
B. S acts to make Y (to be) Z = (df) i) S considers both Y and
Z as intentional objects; ii) S does not accept that the state
of affairs which is Y's being Z is impossible; iii) S acts with
the intention of bringing it about that Z and being Y are coactuated by the same entity.
Lastly, we may consider the intentional relation of seeking.
Again in order for a search to take place-even in theory-certain special conditions appear to be required. First, as before,
the subject must be able to fix the sought object in intention,
at least by some partial conception of what he expects to find.
The search for anything in general perishes either of the
abundance of satisfactory objects or of the dearth of satisfactory concepts. Conditions binding on practical reason, similar to those of intentional endeavor, must apply. Thus although the subject need not positively believe in the existence
of the object sought-like Schliemann he might proceed amid
existential ignorance and probable groping-he cannot positively disbelieve in the existence of what he seeks without reducing his search to a sham. Third, he must have some motive or
reason to seek. No one seeks an object whose access may be
had for the asking; no one enquires the whereabouts of a being
whose whereabouts he believes he knows. Thus it cannot be a
sufficient reason to search merely for a subject to intend that
a certain object be discovered. He must also intend that he
discover it either directly or through the agency of another and
without regard to whether anyone else has succeeded in :finding
the object. These considerations might lead us to the following:
C. S seeks Y = (df) i) S considers Y as an intentional object;
ii) S acts to make Y (to be) discovered by himself.

A'l'TRIBUTE AND ACT

65

We may conclude this section by developing an additional
concept of ontological necessity, stronger than that advanced
in D.6, where a state of affairs was deemed necessary when
strictly equivalent to its own obtaining. Such necessity, however, is not complete. D.6 permits necessary states of affairs
to be non-existent and non-obtaining. Although we have assumed that all attributes exist as such we have not granted
them absolute necessity, one equivalent to inalienability of
existence. And this makes the very necessity of attributes subject to a certain contingency. 14 But it may be possible that
there are attributes, perhaps divine attributes, whose existence
is not merely equivalent to their actuation but absolute; such
attributes would be not merely eternal but incapable of nonexistence. Such an absolute attribute, if any there are, would
depend on an absolute state of affairs:
D.14

P is an absolute state of affairs= (df) i) P is a necessary
state of affairs; ii) Necessarily something is identical with
p,15

D.15

A is an absolute attribute= (df) i) A is an attribute; ii)
there is some P which is the existing of A; iii) P is an
an absolute state of affairs. 16

II
If we now augment our ontology with times, considered as
the limits of temporal intervals, we may propose two concepts
of change, a loose and a strict concept. Loose change, change
in the very widest sense, is mere state succession. It is the kind
of change which even a classical theist would allow God to undergo. Anything whatever is such that today is Tuesday
14 For a somewhat similar view of "contingent"
necessity see "The Fall
of Satan," in Truth, Freedom, and Evil: Three Philosophical Dialogues by
Anselm of Ganterb'ury. J. Hopkins and H. Richardson, eds. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 168-172.
15 It should be noted that the occurrences of "necessity"
in clauses i) and
ii) are neither univocal nor equivocal; "necessarily" in clause ii) is alethic
logical necessity; "necessary" in clause i) is defined in D.6.
1s Compare the somewhat different notion of an absolute attribute
in A.
Bressan. A General Interpreted Modal Calculus (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1971).

66

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

(whenever it is Tuesday) and tomorrow will be such that' today' is Wednesday. Some have called mere state succession a
" Cambridge change." 11 State change includes all change, both
Cambridge changes and changes so intimate that we might
have difficulty recognizing the entity after them. Leibniz appears to have favored the view that all change is best regarded
under the umbrella of loose change-state alteration with or
without true passive affection by an external ca.use.18
Intimate change-change in the stricter sense-involves, by
contrast, some alteration in a subject specifically by passive
affection externally caused. Aristotle seems to have thought the
most important changes to be of this kind. 19 Neither concept
is wholly unproblematic. The difficulty with loose change is its
intuitive implausibility. Surely it is very odd to think that
something changes merely because today is today and tomorrow tomorrow. The equally great difficulty with strict or intimate change is that it presupposes a clear boundary between
which state successions involve passive affection and which do
not; accordingly, a theory of strict change also seems to presuppose a very clear understanding of just which entities are
subjects and just wherein their subjectivity lies. Not only is
the line between loose and strict change a thin one, it is hard
to know where to begin drawing it. When is state succession
passive affection and when is it not ?
Without attempting to settle this important critericilogical
question or decide whether a more rigorous or a more latitudinarian position on change is preferable, we shall try to give
an account applicable in either case so as to distinguish the two
without legislating in favor of one rather than the other. We
may begin by characterizing assertions in which change or
state alteration is ascribed to something, directing our atten11Cf. P. T. Geach. Logic Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
is G. W. Leibniz. JJfonadolo,gy, G. Montgomery, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1960), paragraphs 7, 11.
19 Aristotle.
Physics, H. Apostle, trans. (Bloomington and London: Indiana
University Press, 1969), Bk E; 224al-225b9, especially 224a35-224b5.

J\.TTRIBUTE AND ACT

67

tion to those forms of ascription which connect an attribute
with an entity indicated by a definite description.
D.16 The A is B = ( df) i) A and B are attributes coactuated by
some X; ii) whatever A and B are coactuated by is identical
with X.
"\Ve now introduce the notion of a temporal interval-which
may but need not be treated as an attribute.
D.17

The A is B during the interval t-t' = (df) i) A and B are
attributes coactuated by the same X; ii) there is an attribute T actuated by the existence of t-t'; iii) A, B, and T
are coactuated in some P. iv) whatever A and B are coactuated by is identical with X.

We may assume, too, the existence of individual times as the
extremities of continuous temporal intervals. Aristotle has said
that
" ... there is an extremity of time past with no part of the future
lying this side of it, and there is also an extremity of the future
time with no part of the past lying on the other side of it; and this
is, as we said, a limit of both." 20
20 Aristotle,
Physics, Z, 233b35-234a5. Unfortunately Aristotle goes on to
say in conclusion from the above: " That no thing is in motion in a moment
is evident from what follows. For if something fa, the faster and the slower
may be in motion in the same moment .... let the faster traverse the length
AO in the moment M. Then ... the slower will traverse a length less than
AO, say AB. Now ... the faster will move (over AB) in less than that moment. Hence that movement will have been divided. But it is indivisible, as
was shown. No thing, then, can be in motion in a moment." 234a 25-33.
Clearly Aristotle's hypothetical experiment presupposes that motion at a
moment must be finite. For if a faster body, moving at velocity R, and a
slower body, moving at velocity R-N, both exist at an indivisible or unextended instant M, it is enough that at M their velocities are different not
that they cover any distinct distances at all. These respective velocities will
be assigned them not in terms of some distance covered at M but in terms
of their position changes over finite temporal intervals. All Aristotle has
the right to conclude is that a) bodies which cover distinct distances in the
same finite temporal intervals move at distinct velocities; b) the velocity of
a body may be determined by its changes of position over finite time intervals;
c) bodies at unextended times maintain distinct velocities if and only if
during finite temporal intervals containing those unextended times they maintain distinct velocities; d) if motion over a finite distance during an in-

68

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

Immanuel Kant has observed, "Points and instants are only
limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time." 21
Accordingly, we may treat these limiting times as selfsame
boundaries between a past and a future interval-the antecedent limit of the future and the subsequent limit of the past.
t is an earlier limit of a B state of the A= (df) i) A and B
are attributes; ii) there is an interval t-t' such that t' is
earlier than t and such that for any interval between t' and
t, the A is B during that interval.
D.19 tis a later limit of a B state of the A= (df) i) A and Bare
attributes; ii) there is an interval t-t' such that t is earlier
than t' and such that for any interval between t and t', the
A is B during that interval.

D.18

And from these two we may derive the notion of an entity's
having an attribute at a given temporal instant.
D.QO The A is B at t = ( df) t is either an earlier or a later limit
of a B state of the A.

Now it is easy to characterize gain and loss of attributes,
whence we may derive a generalized conception of change. 22
D.21

The A begins to be B at t = ( df) t is a later but not an
earlier limit of a B state of the A.

divisible moment implies the divisibility of the moment, then either the
moment is always divisible or no motion over a finite distance occurs at an
indivisible moment. To say, however, that a body at an instant is not in
motion because it does not move over a finite distance is, in effect, to beg
the question.
21 Immanuel
Kant. Critique of P1ire Reason, N. Kemp Smith trans.
(London: Macmillan, 953), p. 204. Unfortunately Kant goes on to say (p.
231) ".All transition from one state to another occurs in a time which is
contained between two instants ... Both instants are, then, limits of the
time of a change." .All that follows is, of course, that state succession occurs
either in a time belonging to neither a preceding nor a following interval
(both instants are limits) or in a time belonging to both. To say, however,
that a single time cannot belong to both-as, say, a limit of both-is to beg
the question.
2!\ .Alternative formulations of what is essential in D. 18-20, specified only
for local motion, however, appear in R. M. Chisholm, " Some Problems Concerning Time and Change,'' in Time and Gause: Essays Preseuted to Richard
Tavlor (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980).

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

69

The A ceases to be B at t = ( df) t is an earlier but not a
later limit of a B state of the A.
D.23 The Changes from being B to being C at t = (df). The A
begins to be C at t and ceases to be B at t. 20
D.22

D.23, we note, permits instantaneous change. So if Zeno's
arrow is in flight and flight is a kind of change, then at any
moment during its flight it is ceasing to be at one position and
beginning to be at another. Thus: we may say, by the above,
that the flying arrow changes at every moment of its flight.
By contrast, if the arrow is not in flight but at rest and rest
denotes absence of change, then at any moment during its rest
it is at rest. Consequently, it is possible for the A to be both
B and Cat an instant t, even if A, B, and C cannot be coactuated over any finite temporal interval. What keeps this paradoxical appearance from becoming a contradictory reality is
the respectively different senses in which the A is B at t and C
at t. The A is B at t only in the sense that it has been B for
some finite interval up to t as a limit; the A is C at t only in
the sense that it will be C for some finite interval proceeding
from t. This is simply to say that the possession by an entity
of an attribute at an instant always derives from its possession
of an attribute during a finite interval. Instantaneous qualification, on our view, is a logical construction upon enduring qualification. Coming to be and passing away can also occur in an
instant.
D.24 The A comes to be at t = (df) t is the later limit of some
B state of the A but not the earlier limit of any B state of
the A.
D.25 The A passes away at t = (df) tis the earlier limit of some
B state of the A but not the later limit of any B state of
the A.
Can we now distinguish strict from loose change ? It should
be clear from the above that we can. We have only to develop
the notion of intimate change by narrowing the scope of concepts applying to change in general. In order to do this let us
consider one initial difficulty connected with D.24-25 and then

70

NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P.

summarize the logical interrelations among the concepts pertinent to change we have just set out.
Our initial difficulty is this: are coming to be and passing
away changes? Since D.23 introduces change only in terms
of state succession, it is unclear whether coming into a first
state or passing from a last should count as a change. Again,
without wishing to adjudicate the question, let us show how we
may define generic change so as to include coming to be and
passing away if we wish and to exclude them if we do not.
What we have said already allows this to be done with the
greatest simplicity. 23
D.26 The A changes (by alteration) at t = (df) The A begins
to be some Batt and ceases to be some Catt.
Change by alteration, presupposing the existence of its subject,
is equivalent to losing and gaining of attributes conjointly.
D.27 The A changes (simply) at t = (df) The A begins to be
some B at t or ceases to be some C at t.
Simple change, not presupposing the existence of a subject of
change, is equivalent to losing or gaining attributes disjointly.
Like other properties, change itself may begin and end. Let
us specify this for simple change. The extension to change by
alteration is left to the reader.
D .28 The A begins to change at t = ( df) i) The A changes simply at t; ii) there is a t' earlier than t such that during no
interval between the two did the A change.
D.29 The A ceases to change at t = (df) i) The A changes simply at t; ii) there is a t' later than t and such that at no
interval between the two does the A change.
That there is change implies, of course, that there may be
i·est.
D.30

The A rests in being at t =

( df)

i) The A is some B at t;

ii) The A neither comes to be nor passes away at t.
za For a view which argues that coming to be and passing away are not
changes, see St. Thomas Aquinas. On the Truth of the Catholic Faith Bk. II:
Creation, translated by J. F. Anderson from Summa Contra Gentiles, II
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1900), Ch. 17, pp. 54-5.

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

71

D.31 The A rests simply at t = (df) i) The A is some Batt.
Thus simple rest is equivalent to existence, while rest in being
pre-supposes existence. Beginning and ceasing to rest are virtual duals of beginning and ceasing to change.
D.32 The A begins to rest at t = ( df) i) The A rest simply at t;
ii) there is a t' earlier than t such that at no interval between the two did the A rest.
D.33 The A ceases to rest at t = ( df) i) The A rests simply at
t; ii) there is a t' later than t and such that at no interval
between the two does the A rest.
Thus to begin to rest is to begin to be and to cease to rest is to
pass away.
We may note in summary all the logical relations holding
among the concepts defined in D.24-25; 27-29; 31-33.
a) X comes to be at t; b) X passes away at t; c) X changes simply
at t; d) X rests simply at t; e) X begins to change at t; f) X
ceases to change at t; g) X begins to rest at t; h) X ceases to rest
at t.
All and only the following relations of logical entailment hold
between any two of a) -h) .
a) entails c), d), and e); and is equivalent to g).
b) entails c), d), and f); and is equivalent to h).
c) entails d).
e) entails c) and d).
f) entails d) and e).
We may now propose a view of change in the strict or intimate sense. Like opinions concerning propositions and events,
those regarding subjective change are so many that it would
be impossible-or at least very unlikely-to find a single comprehensive expression adequate to them all or capable of assuaging the misgivings of every thinker who has written on
change. If, however, we were to attempt to draw a distinction between the strict and the loose, a natural place to begin
would be to regard those changes as strict which somehow involve a certain 'passing away' of a subject and a certain
'coming to be' of the same subject. St. Augustine once said

72

NICHOLAS INGHAM, 0.P.

that " every change is a kind of death." 24 It may be, too, that
every intimate change is a kind of birth.
Three important criteria we should bear in mind in any attempt to find an adequate definition for intimate change would,
then, be, first, that intimate change, is, at least, state alteration;
second, that this alteration must somehow be appropriately restricted or localized in a primary subject; and third, that this
change must reflect a certain coming to be and passing away
in relation to its subject. Bearing these in mind, we might propose the following as a definition of strict or intimate change.
D.34 The A changes strictly or intimately in respect of B at t =
(df) i) A and B are attributes; ii) The A begins or ceases
to be B at t; iii) for any non-attribute X and for any time
t' at which the A neither comes to be nor passes away, if,
when A begins or ceases to be B at t', X exists, then necessarily if the A exists at t, X exists at t.

This definition appears to satisfy our three criteria. Clause i)
specifies strict or intimate change as change in attributes and,
by implication, in states. Clause ii) limits intimate change to
coming to acquire or lose a given attribute. Clause iii) guarantees that the only non-attributes whose existences are implied by strict change are those entities whose existences are
implied simply by the existence of the A over a finite interval.
These would include the A itself, (essential) parts of the A, if
A's actuation results in the existence of an entity with parts,
and other non-attributes dependent on the existence of A for
their own existing. These three conditions limit the attributes
acquired and lost during strict change to those intimately connected with the subject itself. For example, unless you yourself
are the A the property of being thought about by you/or not
thought about by you is not an attribute in respect of which
the A could change strictly. For the actuation of A at the time
of your beginning or ceasing to think of the A does not imply
your existence, while the attribute of being thought of by you
24'

12.

St. Augustine, "Contr(t Max:iminum," in Migne, P L Vol. XLII. Bk. II,

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT

73

does imply your existence, as does a change from being thought
of to not being thought of by you. On the other hand, if the A
were to become blue at t, it would change strictly in respect
of being blue provided that the coactuation of A and being
blue does not imply the existence of anything but other attributes and entities whose existence is implied by the existence of the A.
In an ambiguous case, such as that of local motion, we would
have to say that change of position involved strict change only
insofar as it involved intimate change per D.34. So if it were
possible for an omnipotent agent to alter every spatial relation
'vithout acting to induce intimate change in a located body,
then the body's change of place-as defined by spatial relations-would not be intimate. From D.34 we may generalize:
D.35

The A changes intimately at t = (df) The A changes strictly or intimately at tin respect of some attribute B.

Whether a theory of strict change is actually to be preferred
is not a question on which we wish to pass judgment. It is
enough to indicate how, given our general theory of change,
a strict theory may be sub-theoretically defined.
It is suggested that, in evaluating present views, the reader
do so in part by comparing this theory of attributes and their
acts, in comprehensiveness and theoretical economy, with the
available alternatives.
NICHOLAS INGHAM,

Providence College
Providence, Rhode Tsland

O.P.

BEYOND THE SELF-REFERENTIAL
OF DETERMINISM

CRITIQUE

Introduction

D

URING THE PAST FIFTY YEARS or so, determinism has been frequently under critical fire from
what today is typically styled the "self-referential
The argument is so styled because it purports to
show that determinism must be rejected, not because it fails
to meet the challenge of. an opposing theory, but rather and
more trenchantly because it is intrinsically self-refuting by dint
of self-contradiction: to wit, any attempt to vindicate determinism is eo ipso a vindication of indeterminism.
A salient feature of the self-referential argument is that it
deviates from the normal critical procedure whereby one questions the legitimacy of the evidence adduced in support of a
theory. In fact, the argument alerts us to the fundamental assumption of this procedure, namely, that the proponent of a
given theory can appeal to supporting evidence, even if it turns
out that the proponent's appeal, at least insofar as the critic
is concerned, is unconvincing. It is this fundamental assumption that the argument contests. For implicit in the argument
is the radical contention that the determinist hypothesis cannot invoke evidence in its own behalf.
Shortly, I shall endeavor to show that this radical contention
of the self-referential argument-that determinism cannot cite
supporting evidence-harbors a hitherto undisclosed and even
more devastating critique of determinism than that of the selfreferential argument itself: nothing less than that determinism
is a meaningless theory, and hence actually no theory at all.
However, since the claim as to determinism's ultimate mean74

THE SELF-REFERENTIAL

CRITIQUE OF DETERMINISM

75

inglessness is legitimized in consequence of the self-referential
argument, the justification of such a claim evidently presupposes the justification of this argument. For this reason, it will
be necessary to defend the argument's radical contention, that
determinism cannot cite supporting evidence, before proceeding
to argue that determinism's theoretic meaninglessness is implicit in and thus inferable from this very contention.
"The Self-Referential Argument"
Determinism, we know, amounts essentially to the theory
that one's actions cannot issue from choices based on a deliberative weighing of the options. Choices, determinists insist,
are all of them conditioned and motivated by antecedent hereditary and/or environmental factors, factors which causally
necessitate our every thought, word and deed. 1
Now the determinist cannot but regard the determinist
theory as true. If so, we are naturally driven to inquire into
the probative basis of this theory. What might this be? It
will hardly do merely to assert or stipulate the truth of determinism, since, of course, what is merely asserted is arbitrarily
asserted, and what is arbitrarily asserted may be merely arbitrarily denied. Presumably then the determinist, if he wishes
to convince, must cite evidence, e.g., the scientific principle that
all events are necessarily caused, in behalf of his determinist
theory. That is, the determinist must needs contend that the
1 This description
of determinism is equally applicable to both the "hard
determinist"
camp-the view that determinism precludes moral freedom
and therefore moral responsibility-and
the "soft determinist" camp-the
view that determinism is compatible with moral freedom and therefore
with moral responsibility.
For a brief discussion of these two positions, see
Arthur J. Minton, "Theories About Human Freedom," in Philosophy & Sci·
ence, ed. Frederick E. Mosedale (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 119·
123. For a somewhat more developed discussion of these views, see W. T.
Stace's defense of soft determinism, "The Problem of Free Will," in Philosophy & Contemporary lss'ues, eds. John R. Burr and Milton Goldinger (New
York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 19-26, and Robert Blatchford's defense of hard
determinism, "The Delusion of Free Will," ibid,., pp. 27-34.

76

JOSEPH A. MAGNO

evidence supportive of determinism is rationally more compelling than the evidence critical of determinism.
Clearly, though, such a contention, whereby the determinist
essays to convince, makes sense only on the supposition that
one can deliberate on the evidence, and so find the evidence
for determinism more compelling than the evidence against
determinism. In short, such a contention makes sense only on
the supposition that one is free, since free will theory or indeterminism, in contradistinction to determinism, is essentially
the view that actions can issue from choices based on a deliberative weighing of the alternatives. But if so the determinist
intent on championing the determinist cause is embroiled in a
terrible dilemma: to argue the truth of determinism is implicitly to admit the truth of indeterminism.
What recourse does the determinst have if he would avert
this Scylla-Charybdis-like dilemma? Only one, it would seem:
he must abandon the hope of demonstrating determinism on
evidential grounds, and grant that his own conviction as to the
truth of determinism is itself determined.
But does even this resigned admission redeem the determinist
from the aforesaid dilemma ? In truth, it does not. For we
may assume that the determinist is convinced that his determinist conviction is necessarily determined. (Otherwise, at the
very least, he entertains the veracity of indeterminism) . As
such, the question then shifts to the basis on which the determinist is convinced of his own determinist conviction. And once
again, there seem only two possible responses: mere assertion
or the evidence. Mere assertion, we noticed, relegates determinism to the philosophic netherworld of arbitrariness, so that
the determinist has no alternative but to invoke evidence of
some sort in behalf of his de'.:ermined determinist conviction.
But, as we have also had occasion to notice, any such invocation perforce presupposes the ability to evaluate the merits of
the case, and then to decide on the basis of the merits-again,
a perfectly apposite characterization of indeterminism. And so,
notwithstanding the shifting of the issue from the veracity of

THE SELF-REI<'ERENTIAL

CRITIQUE OF DETERMINISM

77

determinism per se to the veracity of one's determined determinist conviction, the aforementioned dilemma reasserts itself:
to argue determinism is obliquely to argue indeterminism.
Before concluding this section, it is important that we specify
the precise sense in which the self-referential argument proves
determinism self-contradictory. This specification is necessary
in view of an incisive critique to the effect that the argument
begs the question by claiming to prove that one does freely
choose. In fact, the critique continues, such a claim is unwarranted on the basis of the self-referential argument alone. For
this reason, concludes the critique, the self-referential argument
cannot be brought to bear against the determinist hypothesis.
But this critique, it has been shown, does not nullify the
cogency of the self-referential argument; rather, it necessitates
a. semantic qualification thereto. The precise nature of this
qualification has been perceptively disclosed by the authors of
the 1972 Review of Metaphysics -article, " Determinism, Freedom, and Self-Referential Arguments." 2 As the authors point
out, what the self-referential argument actually proves is not
that " anyone does free acts," but " only that someone can
choose freely." 3 This is the specific sense in which determinism
is self-contradictory and as such an implicit vindication of indeterminism. For to contend that determinism is evidentially
supportable is to own by implication that one can weigh alternatives, and therefore that one can freely choose. In this way,
one averts the charge of question-begging, since one asserts no
more and no less than an analysis of determinism itself will
brook-no more, in that one does not purpose to show that
someone actually does choose; no less, in that one does yet
show determinism a self-contradictory vindication of the proposition that one can freely choose.
This specification duly recorded, the self-referential inconsistency of the determinist hypothesis is established: any at2 See Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Germain Grisez and Olaf Tollefsen, 26 (September) , 30-32.
a Ibid., 32.

78

JOSEPH A. MAGNO

tempt to vindicate determinism evidentially necessarily implies
the vindication of indeterminism. But if this is true, then the
argument's radical contention-that determinism cannot supply self-supporting evidence-is likewise established, and the
way is now clear for the presentation of the even more fundamental critique of determinism as theoretically meaningless.
Beyond The Self-Referential Argument
As the task of this section is to show determinism a meaningless theory, it should be initially noted that opponents of determinism generally eschew any such critical claim. They do
so principally because they regard a critique in this vein as
restricted to establishing determinism's definitional meaninglessness. A noteworthy case in point are the authors of the
above mentioned article. Despite their thoroughgoing efforts to
prove determinism self-referentially inconsistent, the authors
are just as dedicated to dissociating formally the question of
determinism's meaninglessness from that of its self-referential
inconsistency. This they set out to do relatively early in their
paper, through examining various charges that determinism is
meaningless by reason of definition. After evaluating these
charges, 4 the authors see fit to dismiss them, stating that their
"clarifications show that determinism is not meaningless; it is
coherently defined." 5
Let me hasten to say that I could not agree more with the
authors' conclusion that attempts to reveal determinism's
meaninglessness on definitional grounds will inevitably fail of
fulfillment. At the same time, however, I must take exception
to their and others' assumption that such attempts exhaust the
available means of so critiquing determinism. That such attempts are in fact not exhaustive will, I submit, be shown in
the subsequent analysis.
4 Ibid.:

5 Ibid.:

8-15.
15.

THE SELF-REFERENTIAL

CRITIQUE OF DETERMINISM

79

Thus far, the self-referential argument has revealed (1) that
any movement on determinism's part to defend itself evidentially necessarily involves the self-contradictory vindication of
indeterminism, and
that this is effectively to say that determinism cannot furnish supporting evidence in its own behal£ (the radical contention).
Now if the radical contention is correct, if determinism is inherently unable to adduce self-supporting evidence, then it follows that determinism is ipso facto beyond the pale of human
experience. And why ? Precisely because if, as must be
granted, evidence is perforce a function of experience, so that
we can only submit as evidential what is in some sense experiential, then to demonstrate that determinism cannot appeal to
evidence is in principle to remove determinism utterly from the
experiential, and so effectively to demonstrate that determinism
cannot invoke experience. 6
But this inference entails two further inferences. The first
is that determinism is effectively an unknowable hypothesis.
This follows from the patent epistemic fact that we cannot
know what we cannot experience, or, positively put, that we
can only know what we can experience.
The second inference follows immediately from the latter.
And this is that determinism is ultimately meaningless. For
meaning presupposes knowability, and since, as we have seen,
determinism is unknowable, we cannot but infer that determinism is meaningless. Whereupon, to argue that determinism
is congenitally unable to furnish self-supporting evidence is
implicitly and at bottom to argue that determinism is meaningless and a fortiori not a veritable theory. Such is the ultimate implication of the self-referential argument's radical
contention.
s In formally syllogistic dress, this argument expresses the following modus
tollens:
If the determinist theory is experientially verifiable, then one can appeal to evidence in support of the determinist theory.
But one cannot appeal to evidence in support of the determinist theory.
Therefore, the determinist theory is not experientially verifiable.

80

JOSEPH A. MAGNO

Concluding Recommendation

If the foregoing analysis rings true, the determinist, it seems,
has nothing further to say as regards determinism. But if the
determinist can say no more, neither shall it be necessary for
us to say more, save perhaps to suggest that the would-be
determinist take to heart Wittgenstein's sage advice in the final
sentence of his Tractatus: " What we cannot speak about we
must pass over in silence.'' 7 Silence, in the last analysis, is the
determinist's sole recourse.
JOSEPH

A. MAGNO

Loras Oollege
Dubuque, Iowa

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears
and B. F. McGuiness, third ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p.
151.

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS:
A REVIEW DISCUSSION*

W

HAT IS A LIBERAL THEORY of social justice,
and what does it have to do with Christian ethics ?
For a helpful preliminary answer to the first question, we can turn to Amy Gutmann's excellent study, Liberal
Equality. Gutmann describes such a theory as being founded
on a view of what makes up an individual's interests, which
include an interest in doing what one chooses without interference from others. A liberal state is justified if and only if it
satisfies these interests, as it also serves to regulate the pursuit of them, given the realities of social conflict. " Conflict "
follows from conditions of economic scarcity, since under such
conditions all interests cannot be simultaneously satisfied, and
from the presence of divergent conceptions of the good pursued by individuals. Thus arises the need for principles of
justice which determine the appropriate division of the benefits
of social cooperation, upon which citizens make competing
claims.1
While I am interested in developing this answer in this essay,
I am more concerned to propose an answer to the second question, regarding the relation between liberal theory and Christian ethical reflection. In doing so I will consider some important current philosophical writings attentive to justice and
liberal thought.
*Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1980); Amy Gutmann, Liberal Equality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980) ; Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the
Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael
Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York:
Basic Books, 1983).
1 Gutmann, pp. 1-7.

81

82

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

My position concerning the second question is to be distinguished from two recent theological appraisals of liberal
justice. The first, powerfully argued by Stanley Hauerwas,
views many contemporary Christian calls for justice as implicitly reinforcing liberal assumptions that undermine the
character-constituting
commitments of the Christian life.
Liberalism is not a social strategy appropriate to the Christian call to conform one's personal story to the particular story
of God's dealing with humanity in Jesus Christ. The liberal
presupposition that persons have no shared conception of the
good yields only " individual interest " and " liberty " as bases
for political life. Such a life, founded on self-interest and conditions of distrust, stands in fact at odds with a community that
trusts in God's promises of redemption and that accordingly
offers hospitality to the stranger. What is more, liberalism's
effort to organize society apart from a particular vision of the
good tempts us to believe that "we are free to make up our
own story." This belief violates the truth that our story is one
of response and conformation to God, and deceives us into uncritically accepting liberal social arrangements in the name of
our "consent" to them. For Hauerwas, the Christian community must resist these tendencies by preserving its internal
distinctiveness in faithfulness to God's promises; it thus stands
as a "contrast model " to all politics that know not God 2 Yet
Hauerwas never clarifies, it seems to me, what Christian warrant there is, if there is any, for working directly toward a national society in which persons' welfare and freedom are supported justly. Does the Church's "being itself" internally exhaust its social ethic? Is there a secondary if still essential task
of securing justice in the secular political community ? How
would this task be related to the primary task in terms of
values supported by each ? Is there any relation between these
values and the values of liberalism ? I want to focus on these
2 Stanley Hauerwas,
A. Community of Character: Toward a Constructive
Christian Ethio (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. l·
2, 11·12, 12-86.

:POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

88

questions, questions which Hauerwas clearly cares about but
seldom addresses in detail.
Gilbert Meilaender's recent work on friendship sensitively
addresses the Christian stance toward political liberalism
through a critique of the ideal of " civic friendship." 3 This
ideal would be realized in a "participatory-communal polity,"
wherein citizens are actively aware of themselves as participants in a free state for the common good. Meilaender proposes, however, that the example of Athens, so heralded by
proponents of the ideal, points to the instability of a political
community framed along these lines. The conditions under
which such an ideal may be realized, in addition, are rare; there
can be no such polity without intimate and voluntary relations
among persons in a small commonwealth. Most important, the
ideal of civic friendship is incoherent, for the political order is
essentially concerned with the good of justice which is realized
through an impersonal bond among citizens; a bond such as this
contradicts the personal character of friendship. Impersonality
is necessary to overcome sinful tendencies generated by our
narrower loves as we seek to insure fairness for all. So politics
is best understood by Christians as the realm which provides a
measure of freedom and justice enabling persons to seek friendship (and other genuinely relational goods) in their private
lives. Politics provides the opportunity to enjoy personal ties
outside of political life, and these ties are intimations of the
family of God; such a "chastened political ideal," according to
Meilaender, is a liberal ideal " in the best sense." 4
This position is deep and important. But the following concerns drive me to propose an alternative. First, Meilaender
oflers little theological warrant for so sharply distinguishing
friendship as a created good intimating a greater good from the
bond of citizenship. The personal-impersonal distinction which
he employs tends to mask the possibility that a shared coma Gilbert C. Meilaender, Jt'riendship: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 68-85.
*Ibid., p. 85.

84

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

mitment to justice and the common good might involve a quality of relation different from friendship but still expressive of
genuine value. Secondly, I am not sure how Meilaender's theological case accounts concretely for the sovereignty of the one
gracious God who creates, preserves, and redeems in Jesus
Christ. He conceives of the liberal state as an order of preservation, an ordinance of God existing for the purpose of preserving fallen creation from sin and for other goods which reflect God's creative and redemptive work. But if it is the one
God in Christ who rules over all creation in its activity as such,
then some " intimation" of that God must be present within
the normative ordering activity of political life. The " opportunity " provided for citizens must in some way include the
opportunity to realize a created good, itself an anticipation of
redemption, in and through political activity itself. Otherwise,
one is at a loss to know how the preserving God is concretely
at one with the God who creates and redeems. My suspicion is
that Meilaender's defense of liberalism cannot meet this requirement. So some theological reassessment seems to be in
order.
My position justifies the Christian effort to secure justice in
the political community in terms of the covenantal character
of political life. God's unity is established in theological talk
about the political order once it is recognized that the political
bond, while not perhaps " friendship " in any straightforward
sense, is distinctively anticipatory of friendship; as such, that
bond is more than merely instrumental to the realization of
genuine creaturely value. Having given some advance notice
of an answer to our second question, I need to consider in some
detail the complexities associated with the first.

Liberal Refinements
The four works considered here can be viewed as attempts
to advance upon or to refine insights about liberal justice most
commonly associated with John Rawls and his magisterial
work, A Theory of Justice. An especially important develop-

POLITICAL

LIBERALISM

AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

85

ment, I hope to show, is an increasing emphasis upon the way
liberal justice is to preserve a citizen's sense of his or her
equal worth. The individual's crucial interest in doing what
one chooses without the interference of others, central to liberal
theory according to Gutmann, gives way to an individual's
interest in being recognized as a being of equal worth, and in
being spared unjust assaults on one's sense of oneself as such a
being. Arguably, one source of this shift in emphasis is Rawl's
stress on self-respect as the most important primary good for
free and equal moral persons. 5 Yet this emphasis fails to
occupy all liberal theorists post-Rawls. Bruce Ackerman,
author of Social Justice in the Liberal State, is a case in point.
According to Ackerman, the essence of liberal thought is
political neutrality over conceptions of the good. The fundamental problem of politics is regulation of the competition for
power in society, and liberalism is the form of political culture
that constrains assertions of power by 1) the requirement that
all such assertions be accompanied by a justifying reason that
does not include reference to one's intrinsic superiority or to
the greater value of one's conception of the good. Ackerman's
ideal of "undominated equality," extending across matters of
genetic make-up, education, wealth, free exchange, and intergenerational justice, is built upon the high valuation of conversation about power; in fact, it is this celebration of dialogue
that, he thinks, distinguishes his version of liberalism from contractarian and utilitarian approaches. Hence the one basic justifying reason for any distribution of resources that would seem
to pass the neutrality requirement is the "' conversational
move " of the form "I am at least as good as you are." This
" liberal assertion of equality " in effect grounds equal concern
and respect for persons upon their status as choosers and
valuers of a life plan. 6
It is difficult to grasp how Ackerman's approach improves
5 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
l'ress, 1971), p. 440.
6 Ackerman, pp. 53-59.

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

upon the central features 0£ current liberal thought. On the
contrary, his vision tends to ignore or obscure such features.
For example, the equality claim is presented as passing a test
0£ "neutrality," when in fact it represents a shared belie£
among citizens that there exists some partial overlap among
conceptions of the good, i.e., in the fact that persons value
their self-determining valuings. This fact would seem to require a precise analysis 0£ what self-determination means and
how it may be best realized in terms 0£ specific social goods.
These are the matters, the shared matters, from which and
about which people in a liberal state are going to talk. Ackerman refuses this route, perhaps because of his conception 0£
conversation as regulating the contest for poiver. But legitimate exercises 0£ power in accord with the neutrality and equality claims may be affirmed only in terms of background beliefs
about self-determination and its social realization. Otherwise,
it is but wishful thinking for Ackerman to believe that practices of justifying power relations to one another establish a
basis for citizen self-respect; 7 for Ackerman's citizen is never
given enough conversational equipment to know in what value
exactly self-respect, a sense of one's worth, consists. He does
propose four bases of justification for neutrality itself. These
include respect for self-determination, the necessity of transcending rather than suppressing doubts in the pursuit of truth,
the fear of authoritarian government, and moral skepticism.
But the first three positions basically collapse into a commendation of an undefined notion of self-determination, and
the fourth conflicts with the commendation, inasmuch as it
would impugn the valuing 0£ self-determination in the first
place. 8
Another problem is Ackerman's approach to a number of
different realms of human activity solely in terms of a contest
for power. A liberal is one willing always and everywhere to
1 Ibid., p. 93.
s Cf. Ronald Dworkin's similar critique of Ackerma.n in The New York
Review of Books 29 (January 20, 1983), 47-50.

POLITICAL LlBEMLISM AND cmns'.l'IAN ETlI!CS

S7

inquire after and defend all aspects of his or her power position in terms of neutrality so as to defend his or her freedom.
Thus childbearing has value in a liberal state only as an instance of the free choices of citizens. Infanticide is a problem
because it may violate the rights of would-be adoptive parents
(infants lack the conversational competence to qualify as liable
to protection). Children wrestle for power with parents, who
stand as potential oppressors, and parental nurturance is justified just because liberal citizenship calls for some quality of
"cultural coherence" (whatever that is) .9
Something is wrong here. Must the liberal "ideal " of power
legitimation extend so erosively into other areas of human activity? Is it conceivable that in a liberal state these areas may
not be comprehended primarily in terms of the struggle for
power among suspicious if vigilant power seekers? Michael
Walzer's Spheres of Justice above all poses a challenge to any
tendency to collapse the variety of human activities and social goods into a uniform distributive process or standard. His
basic assertion is " that principles of justice are pluralistic in
form; that different social goods ought to be distributed for
different reasons, in accordance with different procedures, by
different agents; and that all these differences derive from different understandings of the social goods themselves-the inevitable product of historical and cultural particularism." 10
So Walzer appeals at every turn to our " shared cultural understandings " of different goods realized in different, relatively
autonomous spheres of activity. The distribution of goods associated with security and welfare is one thing, the distribution
of goods linked to money and commodities is quite another.
Distributive criteria vary with the meaning of these goods, and
so also with the meaning of the goods of office, leisure, education, kinship and love, recognition, divine grace, and political
power. Walzer's ideal is a society of " complex equality,"
wherein the criteria for distribution of goods within any one
pp. 128-129, 139-143.
io Walzer, p. 8.

9 Ackerman,

88

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

sphere never dominate the distribution of goods within any
other. Tyranny exists when, for example, money can buy political power or office or a good education, or when the status of
office can bring recognition without proof of worth, or when
market forces dominate family ties. Thus room is made for
understanding justice and social goods in a manner resistant in
principle to the kind of conflation found in Ackerman's study;
and Walzer's attentiveness in describing the diversity of distributive spheres assists us in envisioning a just society far more
than his counterpart's unhelpful reminders of how each one of
us is " at least as good " as anyone else.
Walzer despairs of the "regime of simple equality," in which
justice is gauged in terms of an overall equal distribution of
dominant goods. Efforts to instantiate or to maintain such a
regime will require the concentration of state power, which
then needs to be balanced by the protection of countervailing
private privilege among emerging monopolists of other dominant goods. The ideal of complex equality overcomes the instability of pitting statism against privilege by viewing political power as underwriting boundaries between spheres of
justice, rather than as attaining a general equal distribution of
undifferentiated social goods. For a society such as ours,
Walzer argues, complex equality leads in the direction of a
decentralized democratic socialism. The components include:
a strong welfare state run, in part at least, by local and amateur
officials; a constrained market; an open and demystified civil service; independent public schools; the sharing of hard work and free
time; the protection of religious and familial life; a system of public honoring and dishonoring free from all considerations of rank or
class; workers' control of companies and factories; a politics of
parties, movements, meetings, and public debate. 11
11 Ibid., p. 318. In Radical Principles
(New York: Basic Books, 1980) ,
pp. 37-42, Walzer distinguishes his socialist program from that of "liberal
utilitarianism," which correlates human welfare with the satisfaction of the
interests of an individual " absolutely free to make his own choices and measure his own happiness." Gutmann, however, persuasively shows how democratic socialism can be viewed as the direction of the liberal tradition since

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

89

Now what makes Walzer a liberal is a commitment to a pluralism of freely chosen lifestyles and loyalties, and a suspicion of
moralistic accounts of politics which would jeopardize freedom;
but what makes him an interesting liberal is the conviction that
a just society can be realized only through the vigilance of
self-respecting citizens who view themselves and one another
as empowered and participating members of a common enterprise. In short, Walzer is a liberal committed to something
like a "participatory-communal
polity."
The " ideal subject of the theory of justice " is, therefore, the
self-respecting citizen, who takes responsibility for oneself and
one's actions, and who is recognized by one's fellows as measuring up to the standards of democratic citizenship. Recognition of this sort contributes importantly to a secure sense of
one's equal worth qua citizen. Social arrangements supporting
this ideal include a system of communal provision of security
and welfare attentive and in proportion to needs collectively
understood, and sensitive to the idea of equality of membership. Also required is some public acceptance of communal
standards of citizenship, indicating " a way of being in the
community," and serving as the basis of persons' " recognizing
themselves as mutually recognizing each other." Finally, every
citizen must be ready and empowered to participate in political
life when appropriate or necessary. Deprived at local and national levels of power necessary to take part in the determination of common goals and the maintenance of distributive
boundaries, the citizen is also deprived of self-respect. Powerlessness makes a parody of claims to equal membership, and
renders impossible mutual recognition. 12
Walzer's proposal is weakened by the absence of a determiLocke. See in particular her location of Walzer in that tradition, pp. 105107, 111-118. The features of "liberalism" which Walzer criticizes become
according to this interpretation nagging corruptions of the tradition properly
understood. Hence Gutmann can consider C. B. Macpherson's attack on the
variants of liberal " possessive individualism" as immanent critique; see her
discussion, pp. 145-156.
12 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 272-280, 303-311.

90

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

nate conception of the shared understanding of membership
appropriate for our society. We lack a precise description of
his theory's "ideal subject," or, better, we need a surer sense
of the point of view of this subject in terms of his or her loyalty
to principles expressive of his or her nature and supportive of
the common life. Without the commended point of view, the
character of distributive decisions concerning welfare, recognition, and power remains elusive. The problem is especially
acute given the presence in our society of disagreement about
justice and the meaning of membership, Walzer's hints to the
contrary notwithstanding.
What Walzer requires, it seems to me, is something like John
Rawls's effort to establish a conception of membership in terms
of commitment to principles of justice expressive of free and
equal moral personality. Walzer is critical of Rawls's work,
since he views it, somewhat inaccurately, as a representative
defense of simple equality. But he fails to consider whether a
view like his own can accommodate Rawls's constructivist approach to our shared cultural and historical understandings for
the purpose of acquiring a grasp of the meaning of membership.
Rawls does, at least, offer a method of resolving disagreements
concerning justice, and Walzer needs to move in the same direction if his emphasis on our " shared understandings " of social goods is not to appear sanguine. The social role of a conception of justice regulative of the major institutions of society
is to enable members of a society to justify the arrangement of
those institutions to one another, given their understanding of
who they are and of what social cooperation means. Members
of a society become members of a common political life when
they have publicly acknowledged reasons to share. The practical task of political philosophy is to contribute toward the
achievement of public agreement on a conception of justice for
the major social institutions, and Rawls takes that task seriously while Walzer may fail to indicate as much. 18
1s See John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of
Philosophy, 77 ( 1980), 515-572. I rely on this recent general statement of
Rawls's project in this and the next paragraph.

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

91

Rawls's method involves organizing our fundamental ideas
of freedom and equality, of ideal social cooperation, and of a
moral person into "model-conceptions," which serve as premisses for reaching an acceptable public understanding of justice.
The " original position " is that model-conception which displays the connection between the conception of a moral person
and the principles of justice that regulate relations between
free and equal citizens in society. The connection is displayed
by modeling the way in which these citizens, viewed as moral
persons (i.e., capable of a sense of justice, and of forming and
revising a determinate plan of life according to some conception of the good) , would select normative principles. The outcome represents a specific shared point of view, framed in terms
of a commitment to social justice. Of course, one may call
Rawls's preferred principles of justice into question; but his
method enables one to show how more acceptable views of
personhood and social cooperation would yield different and
preferable principles.
Walzer stresses that just institutions can be realized and
sustained only if they are " inhabited by men and women who
feel at home within them and are prepared to defend them."
Complex equality requires " strenuous defense " and " eternal
vigilance " on the part of members. Without a principled and
publicly available sense of membership as found, perhaps, in
Rawls, there can be none of the strenuous commitment which
Walzer requires. But Michael Sandel argues in Liberalism and
the Limits of Justice that Rawls's theory of justice must interpret the human person as one who can have no" constitutive
attachments," and who therefore cannot be strenuously committed to anything at all. Sandel's fascinating argument goes
as follows. Rawls stands with Kant in advocacy of a form of
" deontological liberalism," the basic tenet of which is that
principles of justice are derived independently of any particular
conception of the good. Principles of this sort are correlated
with a philosophical anthropology that characterizes the human
subject as prior to the relations within which it stands and to

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the ends which it seeks. The values and relations of the self
of the original position do not and cannot define its identity,
for otherwise the self could not escape the web of contingency
\vhich independent derivation transcends. The Rawlsian person
is " individuated antecedently," i.e., is a distinct entity whose
boundaries are assumed to be fixed prior to communal relations with others and to all other experience. As a "subject
of possession," the liberal self is also distanced from the interests it has, and the distance is overcome only by the scope and
reach of naked will. No commitment, according to this vision,
can grip me so fully that I could not comprehend myself without it; and no account of community which takes it to be constitutive of human identity can be acceptable. 14 If all of this
is true, Sandel asserts in triumph, liberal talk about protecting
the sovereignty of self-creating individuals dissolves into nonsense; for the " essentially unencumbered " self of liberalism
cannot participate in the constitution of its own identity. One
can only report and reflect on one's pre-existing desires in terms
of their intensity. But since one just has rather than is this
range of desires, arbitrariness and not self-constitution is the
consequence. There can be no depth or character to a being
with no deep attachments, who stands beyond history and social influence, and for whom fellows can offer no insight concerning who one is. One can only correct this vision by importing features alien to deontological liberalism itself.
Walzer wants nothing to do with this kind of being. Hauerwas no doubt would find in Sandel's well-wrought critique
much to confirm his suspicions. And Rawls does invite Sandel's
interpretation in significant sections of A Theory of Justice.
For example, he compares persons in the original position to
Kantian noumenal selves, and he uses the image of " Archimedean point " to characterize principles of justice. Unfortunately, however, Sandel's critique is distressingly misleading.
His major error is to think that Rawls wants to assert the
14 Sandel,

pp. 47-65, and passim.

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93

priority of justice in terms of an epistemologically independent
derivation. Rawls's patterns of justification of moral principles
precludes this interpretation in principle; he is commited to a
form of holism in which rational principles arise from inference
to the most coherent explanatory account of our model sensibility, following critical testing and revision of the beliefs about
persons, just institutions, etc., comprising that sensibility. 15
The independence of the point of view of justice stands decidedly within our history and traditions, and it is devised
primarily for the purpose of overcoming problems about dis15 I discuss Rawls's justificatory
procedure of "reflective equilibrium" in
"Social Justice, Social Selves: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice and Christian Ethics" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1981). A recent dispute
between Walzer and Ronald Dworkin on the adequacy for a theory of justice
of appeals to our shared understandings is resolved if one properly attends
to this procedure. Dworkin argues against Walzer that "the principles of
justice we use to decide which features of a community are relevant to a
just distribution of its goods and opportunities . . . must be principles we
accept because they seem right rather than because they have been captured
in some conventional practice. Otherwise political theory will be only a
mirror, uselessly reflecting a community's consensus and division back upon
itself." Dworkin fails to reali;i:e that explication of " shared understandings"
may have a thoroughly critical quality. It involves a process of relating
anthropological and other beliefs to distributive principles, and relating both
of these to our more specific intuitions about how things ought to go in a
particular distributive sphere. Some of these beliefs and judgments are more
deeply entrenched in our belief system than others, but none are immune
to revision in light of the rest. Testing our beliefs against one another in
this way may lead us to revise some of them, perhaps drastically, as we come
upon incoherences in the overall account. Principles of justice are justified
when they best cohere with the other features of our critically tested explanatory view. Walzer's project of sorting out the meanings of social goods
for our culture, then, ought not to be a matter of useless reflection on things
we already and unthinkingly know and do, because the account of these meanings must be critically situated in a context inclusive of other beliefs which
would warrant and be warranted by that account. Unfortunately, Walzer
contributes to Dworkin's faulty analysis by failing to emphasize that a particular version of our shared understandings of social goods is an achievement of rational interpretation, and that that version must be argued for in
the midst of disagreement, not merely " read off" our common life. But the
argument still must start from something shared in a particular culture and
tradition, and Walzer sees this far more clearly than Dworkin. The exchange
between the two is in The New York Review of Books 30 (July 21, 1983),
43-46.

WILLIAM WERPEHOWS:Kt

agreement on justice which a society like our own must
confront.
Justice according to Rawls, moreover, does not annul but
rather clarifies the constitutive character of and the partial
similarity among persons' conceptions of the good. Sandel virtually ignores Rawls's refined theory of primary goods, and the
omission severely impairs his analysis, for it is through this account that Rawls puts a number of Sandel's worries to rest.
The primary goods include rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of selfrespect. They are taken to correspond to the higher and highest order interests of moral personality. These include an interest in planning and revising a conception of the good, and an
interest in acting from principles of justice. The connections
between interests and goods sought reflect a conception of the
needs of moral personality, and these needs both constitute and
are shared by persons as they consider various institutional arrangements in terms of justice. 16
Rawls's anthropology is sensitive as well to the complex relation between agency and social shaping. He is concerned to
show how the influences stemming from a realized public conception of justice may nurture or educate persons to take on a
point of view which preserves critical independence from social
influence. Using the terminology of James and Mead, we can
say that Rawls is after making the "I," the point of view of
free and equal moral persons, independent of and yet supported
by the "me " of social influence. Sandel overlooks Rawls's
strong belief that
given our dependence on society, we could not be this sort of person unless institutions developed and encouraged our capacity to
act and others publicly to acknowledge its realization. Peoples' attaining this conception of the person would be the achievement of
social cooperation; for success depends on social forms and mutual
recognition.17
'
16 Rawls,

"Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," pp. 525-527.
Rawls, "The Independence of Moral Theory," Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 48 (1974-75), 13.
11 John

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The last point is reminiscent of Walzer, and further undermines
Sandel's interpretation; for Rawls's conviction that a sense of
one's own worth as free and equal requires the fair recognitions
of others contradicts a claim that he conceives of persons as
individuated antecedently to relationships with others. A successful scheme of recognition, in addition, requires persons'
constitutive commitment to an ideal of self-determination, of
good use of one's capacity to choose for oneself according to
one's own lights and apart from coercion or the pressures of
need.
Rawls explicitly denies that human agency involves gauging
the intensities of our pre-existing desires, precisely because
agents are responsible for their ends. Our wants do not assail
us because we are capable of " standing back " from our commitments in order to discover and determine what we are to
become in terms of our grasp of who we are. Our public identity remains stable over time not because we are above contingency, but because, according to Rawls, our interests in preserving free conditions within which to form our loyalties cut
across our other interests. Finally, Rawls not only provides for
constitutive attachments, but also builds in a constitutive attachment to community through the requirement that agreement to principles of justice within the original position be
unanimous. " Since the self is realized in the activities of many
selves, relations of justice that conform to principles that would
be assented to by all are best fitted to express the nature of
each." 18 To be sure, Rawls does equivocate in his account
of community, and Sandel is at his best in exposing these confusions. But the latter is arguing for a deeper confusion than
equivocation in Rawls's view of the person, and his argument
on that score fails.
To raise questions about Sandel's version of Rawls is not yet
to vindicate the Rawlsian project as an adequate complement
to Walzer's vision of membership. Devotion to principles must
is Rawls, A Theory of Justioe, p. 565.

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carry with it vigilance and effective participation, and Amy
Gutmann is right to challenge Rawls for his tendency to underemphasize or to misunderstand the participatory implications
of his liberal ideal. She worries in particular about Rawls's obscure attempts to relate egalitarian arguments for the redistribution of material goods to the matter of equalizing opportunities for participation in the public business. Rawls's weakness
is but a moment in a tradition of liberal egalitarian thought directed toward the specification and integration of distributive
and participatory dimensions of social justice. In Liberal
Equality, Gutmann astutely tells the story of that tradition,
and shows well the way in which that tradition may both indude and surpass Rawls's basic insights.
A liberal egalitarian, generally speaking, would prescribe
more equal societal distribution of goods, services, and opportunities among persons, given some descriptive claims about
how persons are equal and criteria of relevance appropriate to
the distributed goods in question. The act of choosing a plan
of life according to one's own self-understanding is taken to be
a necessary but not a sufficient condition of individual freedom;
for the alternatives from which to choose must be expansive
and reasonable, and the situation of choice must facilitate the
ability and desire to choose. Attention to the arrangement of
situations and possibilities of choice must encompass relevant
ways in which choosers are taken to be equal, e.g., in the need
for goods supportive of psycho-physical welfare, or in the basic
capacity to take responsibility for one's life and to abide by
canons of mora]ity. 19 In her treatment of Bentham, Mill, the
early and later Fabians, Tawney, Rawls, and others, Gutmann
points out how in each case the execution of these egalitarian
moves fails to integrate distributive or material and participatory equality. So Mill devised an anthropology of self-development congenial to normative stress on participatory opportunities, but maintained a "principled indeterminacy " on
questions of economic distribution. The Fabians compensate
19 Gutmann,

pp. 8-20.

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for Mill's inconclusiveness with their emphasis on the satisfaction of basic material needs; yet their policy proposals called
for a centralization of state power that R. H. Tawney and
G. D. H. Cole resisted in their plea for institutional arrangements supportive of fraternity and self-command. And so forth.
Rawls's attempt to establish priorities for material and participatory values provides the point of departure for Gutmann's
own contribution toward integration. Her just society provides
for distribution of medical and legal services according to need,
and citizens' "welfare rights" to such distribution are to have
maximum stringency, equivalent to that of rights to civic and
political liberties. Here she joins Walzer in the recognition that
certain failures in communal provision of welfare can threaten
persons' sense of equal worth; Rawls perhaps too blithely links
equal worth to equal liberty alone. She follows Rawls in his
requirement of fair equality of opportunity, and offers a helpful interpretation of his " difference principle," according to
which inequalities in income and wealth are justified only if
they maximally benefit the least advantaged representative
person in society. Her point is that the wealthy at any time
may justify their greater advantage in terms of the difference
principle only if no other possible alternative arrangement of
inequality can improve the situation of the worst off. Finally,
she argues concretely for equalization of participatory opportunities in the areas of local and national politics, the workplace, education, and bureaucratic administration. These proposals would correct Rawls's failure to offer clear criteria for
distinguishing between fair and and unfair participatory
chances. Thus she holds that equalized material distribution
appropriately constrains egalitarian participatory opportunity,
and that the latter protects against assaults upon equal worth
and allows for activities where one may have a more vital
sense of one's equal worth. 20
Gutmann's primary rationale for equalizing participatory opportunities is to establish a social basis for equal dignity and
20 Ibid.,

pp. 119-140, 173-217.

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mutual respect among citizens. Without the empowering opportunities, one cannot take the assertion of responsible membership in a democratic political order seriously; with them and
accompanying minimal standards of citizenship, persons may
in their public engagements recognize one another as meeting
those standards, thereby supporting self-respect and respect for
others. This rationale is prominent for Walzer and Rawls as
well. All three have an abiding interest in the social conditions for and the positive meaning of Ackerman's "liberal assertion of equality": "I'm at least as good as you are." The
new focus challenges Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty, on the one hand, and recognition, on
the other. 21 Freedom from the interference of unfair or derisive recognition takes on genuine importance, since " unless
our endeavors are appreciated by our associates it is impossible
to maintain the conviction that they are worthwhile." 22
Equalizing communal provision of welfare and participatory
opportunity makes possible a fair system of recognition in
which persons preserve a sense of their value as they realize
an ideal of free and equal moral personality, i.e., positive liberty. In proposing this set of connections, contemporary liberals are attempting to describe and to locate socially some
archetypal and institutionally established pattern of behavior,
some "role," that aptly bears freedom and individuality. Disagreements on conceptions of the good are still assumed to be
present. Freedom from interference and for private lives and
loyalties retain a deep importance. And members of a liberal
commonwealth who choose to devote most or all of their time
to non-political matters are countenanced, not condemned. 23
But with all of this said, the refined liberal plea remains. Without a principled and shared sense of political membership, with21 In Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty
(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969), p. 158.
22 Rawls, A Theor:y of Justice, p. 441.
23 For a splendid statement, see Walzer's "A Day in the Life of a Socialist
Citizen," in Radical Principles, pp. 128-138.

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out genuine empowerment for and within the conversation of
politics, without equal access to self-respect-without
these,
the liberal vision of justice is defective, precisely because these
conditions are necessary for the establishment and maintenance
of a free and equal society.

Christian Ethics and the Problem with Rights
How does liberal justice of the sort represented by Walzer,
Gutmann, and Rawls stand vis-a-vis Christian ethical reflection ? I want to begin an argument for my answer by suggesting a way in which Christian ethics may embrace a category
often taken to be central to liberal thought, that of "rights."
The language of rights is employed extensively in contemporary Christian ethical writings, and especially in Roman
Catholic treatments of justice. Recently, John Paul II devoted
an entire chapter of his encyclical Laborem Exercens to the
rights of workers. Less recently, John XXIII argued in Pacem
in Terris that respect for the entirety of rights owed to persons
in virtue of their humanity (" human rights ") is the fundamental condition for attaining peace in the modern world. 24
There is, however, a certain theological problem which accompanies these and other similar claims. It has to do with the
relation between the logic of rights and a particular view of
human persons which is supposed to support the defense of
a person's rights. The relevant view of persons includes the
claim that human dignity, respect for which is implicit in respect for human rights, always exists within various concrete
relationships. An implication is that a life of mutual interdependence significantly contributes to human flourishing. The
Roman Catholic tradition thus holds that the point of just
social arrangements is to promote genuine mutuality, a sense
of fellowship and community, among the citizens of a commonwealth. Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth make
24 In David J. O'Brien and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., Renewing the Earth
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 124-170.

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similar moves. 25 Now while it may be assumed that there is
compatibility between claims commending community and an
emphasis on the connection between human dignity and human
rights, the compatibility is hardly obvious and needs to be
argued. Consider that " rights " are valid claims to some good
to which the holder is entitled. Persons " stand up " for their
rights. They may indeed "fight" for their rights, and the consequence of the fighting may well be disruption and conflict,
not fellowship and mutuality. Persons express indignation and
resentment when their rights are denied, and the link between
such moral emotions and community is not perspicuous. And
even " if there are conceivable circumstances in which one
would admit rights diffidently, there is no doubt that their
characteristic use and that for which they are distinctively well
suited, is to be claimed, demanded, affirmed, insisted upon." 26
Why, then, are rights stressed by a tradition which also stresses
community and cooperation ? Why work with these potential
creators of conflict, and not, for example, with reciprocal duties
or needs? The problem with rights in this context concerns how
practices of claiming, demanding, etc., are both compatible with
and, seemingly, required by community.
One might try to overcome the problem by understanding
rights as claims to the conditions of existence requisite for the
fulfillment of one's social obligations. 27 One problem with this
solution is its indeterminacy; one may not be sure how obligations to society translate into the presence of community. On
its face, the position captures all sorts of very different visions of life in society, libertarian as well as organicist. Another
problem concerns whether or not rights may be relativized unacceptably given prospects of differential societal contributions.
25Karl Barth, Against the Stream, ed. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1954), p. 188. Cf. relevant sections of Gaudium et
Spes, in O'Brien and Shannon, pp. 252-258.
2s Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 151.
21 See, e.g., Lisa Sowle Cahill, "Toward
a Christian Theory of Human
Rights," The Journal of Religious Ethics 8 (Fall 1980), 277-301.

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Perhaps the free speech of some should be protected more than
that of others because the former have more that is important
to say. Or maybe the elderly and the sick just do in fact have
fewer rights, since their obligations to society have diminished.
One can avoid this interpretation by allowing that the individual's obligation to serve the common good must be modified
in view of the individual's ordination to fellowship with God;
one cannot subordinate such a creature to the social whole of
which it is a part. 28 But to make this last point is in a way
to state the problem with rights all over again. How does the
irreducible and divinely bestowed dignity of the individual
mesh with that same dignity understood in terms of service
to the common good in the spirit of fellowship ?
What is missing, and what I would like to begin here to provide, is a general theological description of what fellowship
amounts to in political and other contexts. With that in hand,
we will be less perplexed about how " rights " language conforms to it.
Let me begin by noting three different ways in which human
persons may be understood to be social beings. 2° First, there is
a sociality which refers to the ways in which social influences
leave their mark upon persons in matters of language, value,
action, and belief. Call this foundational sociality. Secondly,
recognition sociality is a mode of human interaction which,
through patterns of demonstrated competence, support, and interpersonal acknowledgment, enables the effective pursuit of
jndividual projects through the generation of self-respect.
Finally, normative sociality is a mode of human relationship,
constitutive of human flourishing, which coordinates goods of
community and individual self-expression.
Normative sociality has a certain prominence theologically.
I would argue, following Karl Barth, that human creatures
exist in the image of God as they are with others in fellowp. 282.
detailed analysis of these forms of sociality, see Werpehowski,
cial Justice, Social Selves," Chapter Three.
2s Ibid.,
20 For

"So-

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ship. 30 This "cohumanity" contributes most significantly to
creaturely flourishing. Applicable to every facet of human
existence, be it work, play, culture, or politics, and having a
radical isolation as its antithesis, cohumanity is the image and
parable of the free differentiation in relation that constitutes
God's intratrinitarian life, and hence His free action ad extra.
It stands also as both likeness and promise within the work of
creation of the redeeming relation between Christ and his community. The human creature, then, conforms in its being to
the convenanting God, and anticipates its ultimate fulfillment
as God's covenant-partner, by being a covenant-partner in its
own sphere of human creaturely activity. 31
What are the basic features of this creaturely covenant? 32
In the first place, cohumanity requires a two-sided openness,
one to another, with a view to the benefit of the other. Each
must focus upon the other as much as possible in terms of his
or her particular point of view, and not merely as" the surface
to which a certain label can be applied." 33 A related implication is that creaturely fellowship in any area of human activity
is realized among concrete individuals. as such, and not among
mere representatives or embodiments of this or that cause or
gTOup. Beyond the necessary condition of mutual openness,
cohumanity requires a mutuality of speech and hearing. Each
party must try to interpret oneself to the other and must do
so with a view toward the specification of a relevant and preao Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume III/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1960), pp. 316-324. My indebtedness to Barth's idea of cohumanity in what
follows should be evident. For his full analysis, see ibid., pp. 222-285.
31 Both
Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer argue from the narrative in
Genesis 1: 26f. of the creation of humanity as male and female to establish
the relational character of the imago dei. For the latter's study, see Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation
(New York: Macmillan, 1959),
pp. 35-40.
32 The following description
applies to self-conscious adults. Obviously, important modifications can and must be made in the case of infants, the
severely mentally handicapped, etc.
33 Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 236.

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supposed common sphere of life and interest. This intersubjective space is to be defined not only through active disclosure
but also through willing acceptance on the part of each party.
These conditions are completed by the existence of mutual
assistance, in which each party helps and is helped by the other
from within the shared sphere. One thinks and chooses not
from one's isolated point of view, nor from one's associate's
point of view, but from a "third point of view," a perspective
from which one's own good and the other's good are equally
in play. 34 As those created and summoned by God for fellowship with Him, human creatures are to bear responsibility for
their own lives; but they are also in essence dependent. In the
variety of forms of human life, the facts of self-responsibility
and dependence are witnessed and coordinated through patterns of mutual help. What is called for is a differentiated freedom on both sides realized in fellowship. Since all act within
the grace of creation, cohumanity is a possibility for all human
persons, a possibility which norms the full sweep of human activities in a manner appropriate to different relational contexts.
So cohumanity is constituted by two components: " free
differentiation" and "relation " or " fellowship." The definition of each component is internally qualified by the other,
just as in the divine-human covenant concrete identity and
otherness is established in and through fellowship. The " free
differentiation " of the parties who pursue their own individual
life-acts is in principle congruent with and realized in the fellowship of mutual openness, speech, hearing, and assistance;
and the " relation " or " fellowship " is not realized apart from
the preservation of "two-sided freedom." Creaturely self-fulfillment is jeopardized when the two components are split apart.
An individual who pursues his or her personal life-act outside
of patterns of mutual assistance is in misery. A "fellowship"
which denies free differentiation for the slightest suggestion of
slavery or tyranny cannot make for human fulfillment. The
34John Finnis, Natural Law an!), Natural Riphts (Oxford: Oxforcl.
sity Press, 1980), p. 143,

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claim about internal qualification must be distinguished from
any proposal to the effect that either component is merely a
means to the other. By the same token, one cannot separate
the components so completely to allow the judgment that " individuality " apart from fellowship and '" fellowship " apart
from individuality are in themselves " good-making." The individuality which welcomes fellowship and the fellowship which
preserves free differentiation are what is "good-making,"
properly speaking. " Individual " and " community " are
therefore not separate and potentially antagonistic; to commend the one includes the commendation of the other.
Now this last point suggests an important correlation between the normative sociality that is cohumanity and what I
have called "recognition sociality." In its existence with its
fellows, the human creature is recognized by others as being
valuable. That recognition, which takes place within a context of fellowship, is itself a condition for the preservation of
individuality and distinctness. The absence of recognition implies an absence of a sense of self-worth; but the absence of a
sense of self-worth may lead to the abandonment of distinct
individuality in favor of submission to the other. Or it may
lead to a kind of self-doubt which destructively expresses itself
in a need to dominate the other, just because the other is seen
to be so threatening in its own separateness. In either case,
cohumanity is denied. These consequences suggest that creaturely individuality, a component of cohumanity, must be
maintained in and through the relation and fellowship of
cohumanity. There is nothing circular about this proposal. It
is in fact only a confirmation and extension of my earlier analysis in which I argued that free differentiation and relation
internally qualify one another. Introduction of the category of
recognition permits a concrete demonstration of the " fit " between the two components. So thoroughly intertwined are
these components that the sense of one's value in separateness
is forged in and through fellowship. Conversely, persons assured of the value of their self-constituting activities and proj-

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ects will not have disdain for fellowship, but will find themselves more able to pursue relationships with greater zest and
commitment, and in deeper and more varied ways. Thus would
patterns of recognition promote and elicit deeper and surer
expressions of cohumanity. So while cohumanity has a certain primacy in being the context within which recognition sociality is effectively realized, there is also a sense in which the
two overlapping patterns of relationship reciprocally support
one another.
At this point, we are in a position to address the problem
with "rights" considered earlier. The enhancement of cohumanity must involve not only generation of ever greater
prospects for sharing among persons, but also the maintenance
of a two-sided differentiation and freedom. What the language
of rights preserves, with its associated practices of claiming and
asserting, is the otherness, the valued separateness of the other.
This is true insofar as acknowledgment of fundamental political
and economic rights, for example, entails recognition of a person like oneself who would insist that these rights be recognized. To yield to the claim of the other is ipso facto to deny
that the other is an extension of oneself, as it is to deny that
the good bestowed is but a gift, an expression of mere magnanimity. This recognition in part enables the right-claimer to
develop a sense of self-respect; but since recognition sociality
presupposes as well as enhances a measure of cohumanity, the
claiming and acknowledging of rights by citizens of a political
commonwealth ideally stands as an invitation to establish
more perfect cohuman relations among the members. In brief,
rights have as their proper province and presupposition at least
some measure of cohumanity, and the recognition of a person's
rights ideally would make for cohumanity's deeper realization.
Merely to assert that one is in need will not necessarily elicit a
response which accords recognition and enhances self-respect:
To claim one's rights to goods which one needs does more
nearly draw forth that response, and accordingly yields the
possibility for greater partnership. So if all are to be viewed

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as equal members of a commonwealth, the ascription and
acknowledgment of fundamental rights to goods necessary and
appropriate for effectively carrying out a plan of life confirm
and condition fuller realization of membership in line with a
sense of human dignity that embraces free otherness and sharing alike. 35
These reflections suggest how and why the nature of rights
may be viewed as compatible in principle with community,
understood as partnership between irreducibly distinct parties.
In fact recognition of rights may not, in a sinful world,
engender a quality of recognition supportive of community.
But the theological appropriateness of rights-language, as I
have presented it, is not jeopardized by the non-ideal case; for
rights as stringent claims express both judgment and promise.
A begrudging recognition of rights, one grounded in hostility
and a desire for isolation, yields some benefit to the recipient
nonetheless. Moreover, that the stringency of the right-claim
may serve as a restraint on sinful self-seeking points to the
attribute of divine patience. God gives His creatures time to
come to Him, even as He judges those to whom He gives the
time. Yet the feature of judgment is in service of promise, as
God's patience is in service of His wisdom. Practices of claiming and asserting rights stand not only as sources of restraint
and outlets for attaining some well-being even in the midst of
inhumanity; they also present the opportunity for a genuine
recognition of otherness as it arises from and sustains those
creaturely covenants which reflect and witness to the divine
nature in God's relations ad intra and ad extra. So even in the
case of this problem with rights, God may be known as the
One whose judgment remains itself while being surpassed by
mercy and grace.
My resolution of the problem with rights necessarily includes
the view that cohumanity may be realized within political life.
In their active commitment to principles of justice regulative
of major political and economic institutions, and in their com35 Cf. Feinberg,

pp. 148-155.

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patible lower-level political activities, citizens of a political
community may assist one another in the advancement of their
life plans under conditions of freedom and equality. They also
may help one another, through their common deliberations
about justice, to attain an ideal expressive of their nature as
free and equal. These kinds of mutual help require the presence
of various effective opportunities for citizens' participation in
the public business; provision of these opportunities would in
turn require the democratization of corporate government
(since " the public business " includes decisions about the state
of the economy) , and the decentralization of governmental activity and political movements generally. This arrangement of
political life may yield a value which genuinely witnesses to
the sovereign God who creates and redeems, and who as such
sustains human creatures even as they would seek to stray
from Him.
I said earlier that the political bond can be viewed as an
anticipation of friendship, and perhaps now the meaning of
that formulation comes clear. Friends, according to C. S. Lewis,
deeply care about the same truth, and friendship is a sharing
of that concern. 36 Citizens of a cohuman political order do indeed share and pursue some truth in mutual openness, speech,
hearing, and assistance, and the sharing thus realizes a good
of relation deepened in friendship. In the context of divergent
plans of life and particular final ends, such citizens are bound
to one another in their commitment to principles and social
conditions supportive of freedom, equality, and, integrating
these, cohumanity itself. It is against the background of this
vision of political life that I wish to evaluate political
liberalism.

Analysis and Assessment
By contemporary accounts, political liberals have always
been anxious people. They are uneasy about the presence of
sa C. S. Lewis,

11160), pp. 97·98.

The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

108

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

human desires which need to be restrained or even frustrated
for the sake of social harmony. They worry about how scarce
natural resources are to be distributed. 37 Perhaps most of all,
they worry about how a peaceful distribution of goods may
take place given the fact that persons simply do not agree
about what manner of life constitutes human fulfillment.
These problems of restraint and frustration, scarcity, and disagreement show up in the studies I have been considering. But
within an appropriately restricted frame of reference, they
might also fittingly appear in Christian political writings. The
problems reflect the facts of human finitude; limitations constraining human discernment, knowledge, and satisfaction all
may attest to the truth that the creature is not the Creator. 38
An important feature of the liberal solution to the facts of
human finitude, however, may not fit theological concerns
nearly so well. In order to respond to the dangers of severe
social conflict occasioned by religious and other disagreements,
liberal political theory has tended to defend the " autonomy "
of morality, which "consists largely in abstraction from one's
own conception of the good and one's own (nonliberal) political and religious commitments." 39 Sandel levels his sights on
this feature, and Christian ethicists must heed his general
critique, mistaken interpretations of Rawls aside; for it is obvious that any positive Christian appreciation of political
liberalism cannot be based upon an abstraction from peculiarly Christian points of view. In such a circumstance, there could
be nothing " Christian" about the appreciation at all. To embrace complete abstraction in the name of reasons derived from
Christian ethics, moreover, would be self-defeating, since the
maneuver would suggest that there are good reasons based
a1 Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1960), pp. 314-325.
as The work of Reinhold Niebuhr offers deep insight into the implications of
a Christian notion of human finitude for political ethics.
39 Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority:
Reli,qion, Morality, and the
Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981),
p. 233.

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

109

upon a Christian understanding of the sphere of politics for
dispensing entirely with a Christian understanding of the
sphere of politics. A positive relation between Christian ethics
and liberal justice can be established only by showing how
some features of the latter roughly overlap with a theological
apprehension of what political life is, what it is for, and of how
God's work may be known in it. For example, something about
politics theologically conceived would have to justify something like Rawl's "veil of ignorance," which constrains persons'
deliberations in the original position by denying them knowledge of their particular final ends. But that constraint could
only be part of an account in which the theological perspective
remains decisive. Abstraction from particular theological beliefs, then, would be necessary in order better to focus on a;
theological value from which the Christian political thinker
does not distance oneself, and which the partial abstraction
supports. The consequence, according to the view of anthropology and politics sketched earlier, is that the support of a
material ideal of cohumanity in political life includes and is
not undermined by a qualified self-distancing. The latter is
part and parcel of cohumanity's political realization among
citizens who, apart from their disagreements, view themselves
as free, equal, and with one another in mutual assistance. Abstraction displays the possibilities and the boundaries of common ground politically conceived.
If the troublesome feature of abstraction can be handled in
this way, a substantive theological account of liberalism's
strength, weakness, and promise becomes possible. Liberalism's
special strength is its elevation and egalitarian defense of the
irreducible otherness of the free individual; Paramount value
belongs to the individual's " autonomy," to his or her ability
"to take ultimate, self-critical responsibility for one's ends and
the way they cohere in a life." 4° Christianity cannot simply
dispense with this emphasis. The Word of God addresses the
40 David .A. J. Richards,
1981)' 9.

"Rights

and Autonomy," Ethics 92 (October

110

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

individual in his or her separate and responsible life-act, and
summons the individual to respond in freedom to the gracious
offer of mercy and fellowship. While one's separate point of
view and responsible initiative is confronted and challenged by
the Word, neither as such is in any way imperiled. Similarly,
interhuman relationships are defective if free differentiation on
either side is compromised in favor of slavish deference or
domination. Respect for individual development of a self-responsible point of view characterizes Christian commendations
in the political sphere accordingly.
Free differentiation, however, is to be forged in and through
relation or fellowship. That liberals more often than not fail
to acknowledge this reflects liberalism's weakness, and justifies
Christian critique of the liberal ideal as incomplete and misleading. Rawls and Walzer seek with little success to remedy
this defect. We have already considered the latter's failure to
develop a concrete idea of membership to buttress his participatory ideal; and while Rawls may offer some help here, his
own material vision of community is deeply ambiguous, as
Sandel notes. Ackerman in effect neglects the subject of community. Gutmann thoughtfully distinguishes liberal egalitarianism from Rousseauan " communal egalitarianism," but
never comes up with a clear and positive statement concerning
the possibilities for a theory of community within liberalism
itself. 41 In light of these failures, one has good reason to fear
that liberal political theory will continue to be plagued by a
vision of politics that accredits factional interest to the exclusion of common commitment. This " interest politics," made
credible by an unqualified view of individual separateness and
self-responsibility, is aptly described by Sheldon Wolin:
Interest politics dissolves the idea of the citizen as one for whom it
is natural to join together with other citizens to act for purposes
related to a general community and substitutes the idea of individuals who are grouped according to conflicting interests. The individual is not first and foremost a civic creature bound by pre41 Gutmann,

pp. 218-230.

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

111

existing ties to those who share the same history, the same general
association, and the same fate. He or she is instead a business executive, a teamster, a feminist, an office worker, farmer, or homosexual whose immediate identity naturally divides him or her from
others. As a member of an interest group, the individual is given
an essentially anticivic education. He is taught that the first duty
is to support the self-interest of the group because politics is nothing but a struggle for advantage. 42
There can be no base for mutual assistance where isolation in
the name of" individual interest" holds sway. This is because
the conception of " interest" precludes realization of the conditions of mutual assistance, i.e., mutual openness, speech, and
hearing.
It is clear that Walzer and Gutmann wish to criticize and
advance beyond " interest politics," and there is a felicitous
incoherence in their work that signals the promise of contemporary liberal thought for movement in this direction. Both
theorists focus on the connection between individual self-respect and the recognition of fellow-citizens. Yet the analysis
of cohumanity pointed out that the kind of interpersonal recognition generative of self-respect is available only against a background of some mutual openness, speech, hearing, and assistance. Their lapses notwithstanding, Walzer's and Gutmann's
best insights implicitly presuppose and require a definite view
of community which their own general account fails explicitly
to provide. The possibility remains, however, that these
thinkers and others like them will come to organize their reflections more and more in terms of the norm which the reflections themselves imply. Christian political ethics may contribute significantly to the realization of this possibility, not
only by working directly for political arrangements supportive
of cohumanity, but also by proposing in concrete and timely
ways how talk about self-respect goes hand-in-hand with talk
about mutual respect, sharing, and assistance.
42 Sheldon S. Wolin, "What Revolutionary
raoy 2 (Fall 1982): 20-21.

Action Means Today," Demoo·

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

Consider archliberal Ronald Dworkin's critique of current
national policies curtailing redistributive welfare programs. 43
He sounds a familiar note with the claim that a liberal policy
"must impose no sacrifice or constraint on any citizen in virtue of an argument that the citizen could not accept without
abandoning his sense of his equal worth." He allows that people with a lively sense of their own worth can accept grounds
for bearing burdens for the sake of the community as a whole.
But what grounds are consistent with maintaining self-respect?
Surely one cannot accept reasons that permit irreversible losses
to a minority merely in order to achieve gains for the large
majority. Perhaps, however, it is claimed that the inflationary and growth-impeding effects of egalitarian welfare programs will severely damage a public environment which all citizens cherish and want to uphold. Society gets poorer, and consequently culture declines, order is lost, hopeful expectations
across the board give way to despair. If this forecast is acceptable, then one can say that sacrifice is asked of the poor
who would benefit from these programs not for the sake of
benefiting individuals privately, but rather for the sake of
preserving a set of public institutions to which they and all
others are commited. Now this argument depends, according
to Dworkin, on a conception of " active membership " in a
community. If people can accept burdens with pride in this
case, it is because they have an operative sense of the community to be benefited as their community. Such a sense can
exist only in circumstances where their lives draw on and
contribute to the social values sought to be preserved, and
where they are empowered to take part in the maintenance of
those values now and in the future. The very plea to someone
to bear burdens is fitting only when the community offers to
that person " the opportunity to develop and lead a life he
can regard as valuable both to himself and to it." But these
conditions demand that cutbacks in welfare provision have as
48 Ronald

Dworkin, "Why Liberals Should BPlieve in Equality,"

York Review of Books 30 (February 3, 1983), 32·34.

The New

POLITICAL LIB'.ERALlSM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

113

an accompaniment efforts on other fronts to improve the social integration and political participation of the ones who suffer. The present administration fails exactly at this point, since
its policies, taken together, deprive the sacrificers of the very
goods possession of which might allow for justification of the
sacrifice in the first place.
Dworkin's remarkable critique implicitly affirms that political life should be understood as a " conversation." That conversation is not merely about power as it accrues or is denied
to individuals pursuing isolated interests given isolated preferences; it is also and especially about how members of a community will to live together. The category of "interest" undergoes a transformation insofar as some shared commitment
to " our life together " is presupposed as the background to disputes based upon different conceptions of the good. "Individual interests " include a shared desire for patterns of relationship conducive to self-respect among citizens. The patterns
are characterized by a sense of membership established through
common commitment to principles of justice and a conception
of public virtue, and effective empowerment. But Dworkin's
argument goes beyond all of this (and, I suspect, goes beyond
Walzer and Gutmann) with the suggestion that what may well
constitute the desired relationships is the characteristic of mutual assistance, the mutual willingness to help and be helped
within political life. This is but a suggestion, and a qualified
one at that; perhaps the most that Dworkin would say is that
the presence or absence of a quality of mutual assistance in
this particular case supports or impedes self-respect. Nevertheless, the argument, which Dworkin hopes will contribute to an
"overdue development in liberal theory," commands extensive elaboration by proponents of cohumanity. They will say
that cohumanity integrates and makes intelligible the liberal
plea for a sense of membership, empowerment, and fair access
to self-respect; and they will try to show that in the absence of
this relational norm and its implications for citizen participation, liberal arguments and policies offered in defense of individual " autonomy" or free differentiation will not succeed.

114

WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

Conclusions

1. I agree with Hauerwas that the Christian community
must maintain its integrity, and I also agree that a political life
based on distrust or isolation or complete abstraction from particular Christian commitments jeopardizes that integrity.
Still, the Church may " be itself " in its pursuit of social justice
in the political sphere, if " justice " is taken to coincide with
cohuman political arrangements.
2. While Meilaender is correct to distinguish friendship from
citizenship, I fear that he argues for too much, because the concrete relation of the one gracious God to the political order
remains obscure in his theological analysis. If cohumanity, a
creaturely relation which in its structure reflects the being and
work of the covenanting God, norms the political life, the obscurity is removed, and greater clarity is given to the political
implications of Christian respect for the irreducible dignity of
human creatures beloved of God. Respect of this sort would
display itself in efforts to provide persons with the conditions
through which they may be with one another as citizens in
fellowship.
3. A cohuman political ethic may embrace a liberal ideal
of free differentiation inasmuch as the ideal. stresses interpersonal recognition and self-respect. Without the relevant political ethic, the ideal is incomplete and misleading. In any case,
responsible theological defense and criticism of contemporary
liberalism must address its treatment of recognition sociality.
4. Walzer is correct in his claim that justice requires defense of the plurality of social goods in accordance with their
relatively autonomous meanings. The proponent of cohumanity
may be better able to protect the meaning of some of these
goods from '"liberal collapse" into categories of isolated
choice and interest by showing in argument and practice how
they retain a covenantal dimension. Family relations cannot
be reduced to a power struggle, and education cannot be reduced to a way for individuals to "get ahead," leaving the

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

115

rest behind. Walzer's analyses of family as a sphere of guaranteed love and of education as nurturance toward democratic
citizenship are extremely instructive in this connection. Still,
an anthropology of covenant is a crucial complement to
'Valzer's vaguer reliance on " our shared understandings," lest
the defect to which liberalism is especially disposed be insufficiently resisted.H
WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI

Villanova Unfoersity
Villanova, Pennsylvania

44 For their patient and critical support,
I would like to thank the members of the Yale-Washington Theology Group, and especially Ronald F. Thiemann and J . .A. DiNoia, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS
Faith and the Mystery of God. By MAURICE WILES. Philadelphia:
tress Press, 1982. Pp. 160. $6.95 (paperback).

For-

The Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in this slim
volume sets forth a personal account of his central beliefs as a reflective,
critical theologian. He begins by calling attention to the problems caused
for Christians by contemporary awareness of the multiplicity of differing
faiths, all of which merit consideration and respect. In his modest style
Wiles is prepared to claim, as a Christian, that we do have glimpses of
something beyond relativity and that personal language about the divine
Many disagreements, he contends, are
is "not wholly inappropriate."
occasioned by a false understanding of religious language, which is intended to be disclosive of the transcendent and, even more importantly, to
stimulate creative responses. Language about God acting in history, accordingly, cannot be taken as literally describing God's active intervention, but it can significantly shape our ideals and patterns of behavior.
The divine causality is more felicitously understood in terms of final
rather than efficient causality-a proposal which Wiles, with his distrust
of metaphysics, leaves rather undeveloped.
This imaginative view of religious language is for Wiles the key to many
crucial theological problems. The "real presence " of Jesus in the Eucharist can now be understood as symbolic rather than literal and thus
(against Paul VI) as a matter of trans-signification rather than transubstantiation. The church can be understood as the Body of Christ not in
a literal, biological sense (the view here attributed to E. Mascall and
J. A. T. Robinson), but in a metaphorical sense, pointing the way to a
new intimacy with God built upon personal relations to other Christians
and to Jesus himself. Still more centrally, Jesus may be understood as
one with God not in a metaphysical sense (J. N. D. Kelly) but in a figurative and inspirational sense. The gospels, according to Wiles, are intended to communicate a way of looking at Jesus in the light of the divine
glory rather than to provide factual information about him. The important thing about Jesus, it would appear, is not what he actually was
but what he means for faith.
Having established these principles, Wiles attempts to summarize the
new possibilities opened up by the gospel story. Exemplary in his own
personal life of faith (pace Aquinas), Jesus arouses in his followers a
confident reliance on God's graciousness so that they are, in a sense, "jus-

116

BOOK REVIEWS

117

tified by faith.'' The cross should not be taken as vicarious suffering
(W. Sunday) or even as a vicarious penitential act (R. C. Moberly) but
as a parable of God's engagement in the costly struggle against evil. The
resurrection accounts, correspondingly, need not be taken as affirming
a real change in the dead body of Jesus, but as a confident affirmation
of God's eventual victory over evil. As parables, the stories about Jesus
create new possibilities in our own lives.
From Christology Wiles passes on to ecclesiology. He depicts the
church as a community called to foster freedom and universal openness.
While institutional structures are indispensable, no specific church order
can be imposed as mandatory without detriment to freedom within the
church and to ecumenical harmony among churches. For the church to
define itself against any other group is for Wiles a serious deviation, at
variance with the goal of universal human fellowship-the aspect of the
church's task which Wiles, following Charles Davis, most strongly emphasizes. The quest for specific identity on the part of the church is a
delusion. " To put it very sharply,'' writes Wiles, "it is only the church
which does not much care whether it is one which is one. By that standard
churches are hard to come by" (p. 89).
In his reflections on worship Wiles returns to his themes of symbol
and evocative language. The language of worship, he insists, is radically
different from the language of belief. The same is true of prayer. We
do not pray beause we believe that God acts in answer to our petitions
but because we find ourselves impelled to pray and because, in praying, we
experience a transformation of our own wills.
In the field of ethics, Wiles espouses similar principles. Morality is
not a matter of obedience to revealed precepts or of conformity with the
natural law. Rather, it is action that creatively responds to the possibilities inherent in the Christian vision of life. These possibilities, however,
must be continually tested by critical reason.
In a concluding chapter Wiles assesses the doctrine of the Trinity at
its current value. Classical theology, in his opinion, effectively undermined the relevance of the Trinity by admitting that specific events could
never be properly attributed to any one of the three divine persons, but
always to all conjointly. Wiles proposes to revise trinitarianism in terms
of a fundamental doctrine of God as Spirit. As one advantage, he finds
that this enables us to avoid calling God " Father,'' a title he regards as
ambiguous and confusing. Further, it permits us to formulate a SpiritChristology, portraying Jesus as divinely inspired, in place of a crude
doctrine of Incarnation. Finally, it leads to an ecclesiology in which the
church is viewed as a spiritual community, " the place where creative love
is recogni,zed as love" (p. 124).
From this summary it should be evident that Wiles has composed a very
dense and comprehensive work, displaying an impressive command of

iIS

BOOK REVIEWS

many specializations, including comparative religion, linguistic theory,
dogmatics, liturgiology, and Christian ethics. Never ponderous, he sustains throughout a highly personal and almost colloquial tone. He avoids
theological jargon, but can, as occasion requires, adduce theological opinions as agreeing or differing from his own. Among modern authors, he
utilizes the ideas of Philip Wheelwright, F. W. Dillistone, I. T. Ramsey,
John Macquarrie, G. W. H. Lampe, Paul Tillich, Charles Davis, Karl
Rabner, and Edward Schillebeeckx. While taking clear positions of his
own, he is consistently courteous and modest. With disarming simplicity,
he presents the mature fruits of many years of sincere inquiry. He is
honest, reasonable, and well informed.
'
Wiles's synthesis is, in my judgment, typical of a large stream of
current liberal theology in the "revisionist" school. This theology intends and claims to defend Christian faith, and even to commend it to
nonbelievers. But in the quest for defensibility the authors so whittle
down the contents of faith that the surviving remnant, even if it still
merits the name of faith, has minimal substance. Wiles's positions on
many central points would not be recognized as authentically Christian by
Athanasius or Augustine, Anselm or Aquinas, Luther or Calvin, Newman
·or Barth. Gone are the traditional doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation.
In Wiles's reconstruction Jesus was not personally divine, nor did Jesus
really atone for the sins of the world, nor did he objectively rise from
the dead. In place of these traditional doctrines we are invited to hold
that the biblical story, though not literally true, stimulates the reader to
a loving and hope-filled commitment. This interpretation, it is true, diminishes the conflict between rival religions, but it does so at the price of
making the Christian say no more than many non-Christians could agree
to. How much of Wiles's profession of faith would be beyond the reach
of a pious Hindu 'l
Crucial for Wiles's entire enterprise is his doctrine of religious language.
Many of the points he takes over from Wheelwright and Ricoeur, Ian
Ramsey and Ian Barbour are valid and important. One may agree that
religious language gathers its images from experience in the world and
symbolically extends their meaning so that they point to various aspects
of the divine mystery. But it is important that the religious imagination
should not present us with the merely imaginary; that it should lead us
into deeper realms of reality and thus offer us more, not less, than descriptive or scientific truth. Wiles, I take it, would concur with these
principles, but when he goes about interpreting the language of Scripture
and the creeds he assigns meanings that are, in my judgment, reductionist.
He would re.iect the charge of reductionism on the ground that he has
made faith functional :for life, While I appreciate thii:; ef!:istE.J11.tial CQlJ.•

BOOK REVIEWS

119

cern, I would submit that a faith with richer doctrinal content could be
still more fruitful for Christian existence, and actually has been in the
lives of many saints.
Wiles's conclusions cannot be effectively challenged on his own methodology. Although he wishes to stand " recognizably within historical Christian tradition," he considers it appropriate " to test, to review and where
necessary to revise both the traditional affirmations of faith and its contemporary insights" (p. 128). Accordingly he takes Scripture and traditicn as providing something less than authoritative witness to divine
revelation. He treats them as offering materials to be interpreted ar,cording to the norms of contemporary experience and common sense. This
method guarantees in advance that the novelty of the gospel will be
blunted. An alternative approach would have to reckon with the possibility that God might do and reveal things beyond all that the human
imagination might be inclined to conceive. The idea of Christianity as a
radical reversal of all human expectations is almost totally absent from
the present volume. Yet if this idea is correct, Christianity cannot help
but be far more distinctive than Wiles would have it.
AVERY DULLES, S.J.
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.O.

Hume and the Problem of Causation. By ToM L. BEAUCHAMP and ALEXANDER ROSENBERG. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Pp.
xxv + 340. $23.50.

Although of interest primarily to philosophers of an empiricist persuasion, familiar with the recent literature on causality, this clear, careful,
and precise volume can be easily summarized. Beauchamp and Rosenberg
do very careful textual analysis of David Hume's works, but they are just
as interested in constructing "a unified and defensible Humean theory of
causation" (p. 32; italics added). Their principal target throughout is
J. L. Mackie's The Cement of the Universe (1974), and they accuse Mackie
of "offer[ing] epistemological answers for metaphysical problems" (p.
xxiii, in a very handy analytical table of contents, referring to chapter 7,
which ends with the claim that Mackie " seems to confuse ontological and
epistemological accounts of causation " (p. 282]).
The account of (metaphysical) causality Beauchamp and Rosenberg
offer is a modification-involving a criterion they call "Nominal Extensionality '' (p. 269)-of a proposal due to Jaegwon Kim (1973), inter-

120

BOO:K'. REVIEWS

preting Hume's account as requiring ''the time-like, the space-like, and ...
abstract items " to be brought " together under the category of a structured event" (p. Z51). (This will be referred to again later.)
Beauchamp and Rosenberg provide their own summary: "[J. A.] Robinson and most all recent writers on causation believe that Hume holds a
pure regularity theory of causation .... J. L. Mackie, who allies himself
with Robinson, ... [says Hume means] that statements of causal connection are nothing but statements of de facto constant conjunction" (pp.
31-32). This view, Beauchamp and Rosenberg then say, is indefensible
because it fails to "distinguish causal laws from statements of de facto
regularity" (p. 32). This they counter, saying, "After all, there is the
second definition of ' cause ' . . . [plus] Hume's repeated assertion that,
' According to my definitions, necessity makes an essential part of causation ' (Treatise, 407)" (ibid.). And what they then propose is to provide
their defensible reconstruction of Hume's theory of causal events.
Aside from Mackie, Beauchamp and Rosenberg take on G. E. M. Anscombe (chapter 3), William Kneale (chapter 4), and Bertrand Russell
and Richard Taylor (chapter 5)-among others. In chapter 8, Beauchamp
and Rosenberg take up Hume's views on causal explanation, where their
opponents are C. J. Ducasse (Causation and the Types of Necessity, 1924),
R. G. Collingwood (An Essay on Metaphysics, 1940), H. L. A. Hart and
A. M. Honore (Causation in the Law, 1959), in addition to Mackie.
Throughout, they maintain they are not talking (at least primarily) about
epistemological skepticism-except with respect to the claims of rationalism. According to the authors, Hume is not at all skeptical about scientific rationality; indeed, that is what (they say) he is appealing to against
the rationalists !
Undoubtedly, Beauchamp and Rosenberg will encounter opposition from
within the empiricist camp-especially from people like Mackie who favor
an epistemological (and skeptical) interpretation of Hume. It is equally
obvious that they will be opposed by adherents of views such as those of
Collingwood-not to mention philosophers such as Errol Harris (e.g., in
Hypothesis and Perception, 1970), who will argue that once one goes
along with Jaegwon Kim's "structured events," nothing is left of Humean
empiricism to contrast with idealist, or neo-idealist, or Whiteheadian
events.
Aristotelians (along with Kantians and neo-Kantians, though obviously
£or different reasons) will wonder why causal explanation has been relegated to such a minor role. In Aristotle's four-causal scheme, after all,
(efficient) causality is primarily a matter of explanation; "agency" in
the metaphysical sense is simply the commonsense reality a (realist) theory
of efficient causality sets out to explain. (Aristotelians will, as a matter

BOOK REVIEWS

of course, object to the implicit nominalism, to the anti-realism of the
venture; if they have a cavil about
entire Beauchamp/Rosenberg/Hume
the book, it will be that they are never given so much as a mention, much
less a hearing.)
Granted all these objections from people who would have wanted Beauchamp and Rosenberg to have written something different, their book is
an impressive accomplishment. They would seem to have successfully
extricated Hume from the entanglements of those, friends and foes alike,
who would make him out to be a me;e regularity theorist and skeptic.
They seem clearly to be right in claiming that Hume was skeptical primarily about rationalist claims with respect to causality. Whether Beauchamp and Rosenberg are as successful in defending their " event" view
of causality (derived from Jaegwon Kim) is a matter likely to be debated
for some time in empiricist circles-while process philosophers grumble
from the sidelines that they come perilously close to giving up the rational
empiricism they work so mightily to defend.
p AUL T. DURBIN

Philosophy Department
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware

Understanding

Human Action: Social Explanation

of the

Vision of So-

cial Science. By MICHAEL A. SIMON. State University of New York
Press, 1981. Pp. 226. Cloth, $29.50; paper, $9.95.

" This book," the author writes, " is an attempt to see what it is about
human social life that makes a social science based on the model of
natural science impossible" (p. viii). The "principal argument of the
book " is outlined in the introduction as follows :
The social studies have essentially to do with human actions; actions are
free in the sense that they are not subject to explanation and prediction
on the basis of strict causal laws; what empirical science is capable of
investigating successfully cannot be free in that sense; hence the social
studies cannot be empirical sciences (p. 2).

Simon's first three chapters are devoted to establishing the first premise
of this argument. In Chapter 1, he attempts to show that action "must be
conceived as a logical primitive," in the sense that it is "irreducible to
any concepts that do not themselves presuppose the notion of action or
agency" (p. 7). The thesis of his second chapter is that "social relations as we know them are not possible without a concept of action which

BOOK REVIEWS

they presuppose, and that this concept has no essential role in language
other than to serve this mediating function" (p. 27). And in Chapter
3, he locates the subject matter of social science in human action and its
products (p. 41).
In his first two chapters, and again in Chapters 4 and 7, Simon makes
use of the work of some prominent philosophers of action. These chapters exhibit a less than adequate familiarity with the literature in the
field. In Chapter 1, for example, Simon employs an objection of Ryle's
to volitional theories of action (p. 18) and Melden's version of the argument that there can be no causal connection where there is a logical connection (p. 19), without considering recent, and even not-so-recent, meritorious replies, e.g., by D. M. Armstrong, A. C. Danto, Donald Davidson,
and Alvin Goldman. And in Chapter 4 he advances a version of contextualism-" Reasons explain ... by representing the action as appropriate under the circumstances" (p. 62)-without even mentioning the
weighty objections raised by such influential figures in the field as Davidson, Shaffer, and Davis.
Simon's discussions of action are sometimes imprecise or seriously incomplete at important junctures. The following are representative instances of this problem. (1) Simon reports that "What is essential" to
his " understanding of human actions is that they be conceived neither as
random nor as determined in accordance with causal laws" (p. 131).
Thus it is crucial for him to get clear on what determinism is. Yet he
elaims-what is demonstrably false-that "If human beings are a proper
subject matter for deterministic science, their behavior must in principle
be totally predictable" (p. 170). Simon also contends, in apparent
ignorance of Goldman's well-known attack on the position, that a person cannot predict his own actions (pp. 171-2). Even if he is right
about this, the arguments which he employs have been forcefully criticized
and one would like to see a reply. (2) Simon makes some interesting
claims about reasons for action which are difficult to assess in the absence of an account of what reasons for action are. He contends, e.g.,
that what can count as a reason for action is constrained by social norms
( p. 68), and that " The only role that causation plays in the explanation
of actions in terms of reasons is as a relation between the occurrences that
give people reasons for acting and the actions that they do for those
reasons " ( p. 121). But he leaves the notion of a "reason for action "
unanalyzed. We are told that " The hearing of the sound of bombers
overhead" is "a reason for someone to run for cover" (p. 117) and
that some wants are reasons for action (p. 62). But how are these two
types of reason
If I hear the sound of bombers overhead and
want to avoid being blown to bits, do I have two reasons to run for
coverf If I hear the bombers but want to be killed in ground-to-air com-

BOOK REVIEWS

bat do I still have a reason to run for cover1 (3) The stated thesis (reproduced above) of Chapter 2 involves the claim that " social relations
as we know them are not possible without a concept of action which
they presuppose" (p. 27, my emphasis). But Simon says only two paragraphs later that " What we need to do, if we are to prove that human
action is a social concept, is to specify a sense in which actions do presuppose a system of social interactions" (p. 28, my emphasis). And, without explaining the shift, Simon addresses the remainder of the chapter
to the latter thesis, in which what was originally said to presuppose a
concept of action is now being held to be presupposed by actions. The
second thesis is not quite the converse of the first; but in the absence of
explanation the shift is puzzling indeed.
The middle chapters of the book (Chapters 4-7) "consider the topic
of social explanation and examine a number of approaches to understanding why people behave as they do" (p. 2). Chapters 4 and 7 are
concerned respectively with the roles of reasons in social investigation
and with causation. In the former, Simon argues that "reasons depend
on norms " and that there can therefore "be no science of action that
regards actions as separable from the culture in which they are performed" (p. 76). The stated purpose of the latter is "to consider
whether human actions and other social phenomena have causal explanations" (p. 111).
In Chapters 5 and 6 Simon deals with explanations of irrational and
non-rational behavior and with non-rational explanation of human behavior. The latter chapter is a rejection of a biological approach to explaining human action. The former defends the thesis that " All social
explanation is ultimately rational explanation," since all " explanations
of what rational agents do . . . rest on the paradigm of a person doing
something for a reason,'' and all explanations of social phenomena " presuppose the existence of rational agents " ( p. 90).
In the last four chapters (Chapters 8-11), Simon is "concerned with
the nature of social science's output" (p. 3). His book, he says, "can
be seen as a philosophical response to the failure of social science to
contribute much understanding of the universe of human affairs" (p.
viii), and Chapters 8-11 focus on this failure. Simon's target in Chapter
8 is the theoretical inadequacy of social science. " The failure of the subject matter of social science to lend itself to rigorous theoretical comprehension shows,'' he argues, " that either the subject matter is 'deficient' in the sense that it refuses to behave in ways that can give rise
to theoretical ordering, or else social scientists have not been patient or
clever enough to discover what the proper ordering should be." That he
affirms the first disjunct is made clear in Chapter 10, the thesis of which
is that "the subject matter of the human sciences is such that a properly

BOOK REVIEWS

explanatory science of that domain is impossible in principle " (p. 170).
Chapter 9 argues that " objectivity is not a possible goal for social inquiry in general" (p. 166). And Chapter 11 concludes with an assessment of social science according to which what it contributes is, for the
most part, " a compendium of facts, stories, insights, and world views "
(p. 205). " Once its scientific aspirations are set aside and its pretensions
stripped away,'' social science is, Simon argues, "at best, a set of humanistic disciplines" (ibid).
Of this final group of chapters, 9 is the least convincing and 10 is
the most important for the purposes of the book. In the penultimate
paragraph of the former, Simon writes: "If the pursuit of objectivity
in social science requires withholding evaluative characterization, and a
refusal to apply evaluative categories implies an evaluational stance"
(both of which antecedents he affirms), "then the notion of objectivity
with respect to social inquiry must be self-contradictory and incoherent"
(p. 166). But given that what Simon means by an objective social discipline is one which is "capable of providing accounts of human affairs
that are as free of bias and independent of the values held by the investigators as the natural sciences are" (p. 150, my emphasis), it is
natural to reply both that an objective social discipline may make value
judgments, provided that the values appealed to are those of the person,
group, or institution being studied, and that the refusal to apply one's
own " evaluative categories" implies only a meta-evaluational stance which
in fact promotes the objectivity of the accounts given of human affairs.
One might even take a stronger line and argue that there are objective
values which may be objectively applied in making comparative evaluative judgments across cultures. To these replies Simon has no convincing
answer.
The thesis of Chapter 10 is the dominant thesis of the book, viz., that
because human action, the fundamental subject matter of the "human
sciences," is free, it is not subject to fruitful "scientific" investigation.
" Something whose behavior is neither random nor causally necessitated,''
Simon says in his " Afterword,'' " is nothing for science to get mixed
up with" (p. 207). What is missing here, and in the rest of the book,
is careful argumentation designed to show that human beings exhibit a
kind of freedom that is incompatible with their actions' being determined. We are given, as I have mentioned, familiar arguments from the
impossibility of prediction; but these arguments have been intelligently
disputed, and Simon does not reply to the objections. That human actions are free in Simon's sense is an important premise in what Simon
describes asl " the principal argument of the book," and it merits much
more attention than he gives it.
My reservations notwithstanding, Understanding Human Action is of
interest to practitioners and philosophers of social science and to action

.BOOK REVIEWS

theorists. Simon's attempt to make human action the fundamental subject matter of social science is worthy of investigation, even if his discussions of action are not always as carefully conducted as one might
wish. About his treatment of the other main premises in the central argument of the book, claims about free action and its relations to causality
and empirical science, I can only say that it contributes little to the current study of these issues.
ALFRED

R. MELE

Davidson Oollege
Davidson, North Oarolina

The Human Center: Moral .Agency in the Social World. By HOWARD L.
HARROD. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981. Pp. x + 150. Cloth,
$14.95.
Reading a book on the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer during the income
tax season suggests two different aspects of ordinary experience. Vermeer
renders ordinary people, usually women, in everyday situations, such as
reading a letter or pouring milk. His renderings are clear and distinct,
as thougli he was trying to do in painting what his contemporary Descartes
wanted to do in philosophy. But there is also a sense in Vermeer of something deeper and more mysterious. There is a luminosity not only of the
colors but of ordinary human experience. Nothing could be further from
this aspect of ordinary experience than filling out the income tax form,
which is, whether we like it or not, a part of our common, ordinary
experience. The income tax form itself, as well as instruction booklet,
render ordinary experience opaque; worse yet, they render ordinary experience prosaic. All this is by way of introducing Howard L. Harrod's
The Human Center: Moral .Agency in the Social World.
Like Vermeer, Harrod offers to illuminate ordinary experience. The
opening sentences of his book are: " Ordinary moral experience often
goes unnoticed and unanalyzed, and yet it exhibits some of the most
marvelous instances of human transcendence. One fascination motivating
this work is precisely the luminosity of the small, the common, and the
mundane." Perhaps my expectations were too high, but as I read further
I got the feeling I was reading a philosopher's version of an income tax
booklet. In a way, one might not unreasonably expect stylistic problems
in a work that is a phenomenological description of moral agency in the
social world. Let's face it, phenomenologists not infrequently write in an
expressive style dubbed by Thomas Hanna the "Teutonic plague". Harrod's book does not suffer in this way, though. He does not overwhelm

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the reader with terminology (jargon). His vocabulary is not the problem;
he'd never make it writing sociology. His problem is that he writes like
a bureaucrat: He says the most banal things in tortuous circumlocutions.
Let me illustrate. I take the following to mean that in the process of
socialization a male learns his roles as father and husband, and these roles
are seen as ' right '.
By the time a male child has become an adult, for example, the typical
and symbolic meanings surrounding the social roles of father may be
sedimented as part of personal history and identity. At the point in personal life when the social project of constituting a family and becoming
a father comes into view, the foundations for the personal project of
getting married and having children has become a taken-for-granted meaning structure orienting the agent's action. The typical sequences of action which are necessary to realize the project are fantasized in the future perfect tense; and when the act is completed in the social world, it
is retained in memorial experience as a significant personal event which
becomes the subject of various acts of recollection and interpretation and
may, under certain circumstances, become a symbolic vehicle in experience.
The context within which interpretation and reinterpretation proceed includes not only typical understandings at the level of law and the broader
social system; there are also important normative elements that derive
from the symbolic mediation of value meanings in experience.

Unfortunately, this is not atypical. Consider this key passage. As I
read this passage, Harrod is ' describing ' how human freedom arises
because we can reflect upon and learn from our past.
This last point opens toward a fundamental dimension of the freedom of
human agents. This is a freedom which is inherent in both biographical
horizons of experience and the horizons that constitute the social world.
There is an ongoing sedimentation of experience which proceeds routinely, but dialectically related to this is the capacity to transcend experience by turning back upon it. Each act of recollection is both an elongation of the aperture of awareness toward horizons of sedimented experience and fundamentally a new act, an act which may give rise to reinterpretation of the past as it has been grasped previously by the self.
This means that the past has both the character of recognizable identity
in the experience of agents and potentially open horizons. The open
horizons are made possible by the capacity to turn back upon experience
in acts of recollection and through these acts to reconstitute its meaning
in various ways.

But a philosopher may have the expressive style of a bureaucrat and
still have exciting ideas, as is evidenced by Kant and Hegel. So let us
turn to the substance. Again, great promise followed by disappointment.
The stimuli for Harrod's work, he tells us, are pluralism and scientific

BOOK REVIEWS

reductivism: pluralism because it is conducive to subjectivism in ethics
·and therefore undermines any public ethics; and reductivism because it
relegates values to the epiphenomena! and therefore bowdlerizes moral
experiences. His analysis of moral agency, then, offers promise, for he
wishes to show how human beings constitute a world of values and moral
actions, a world which is inherently intersubjective and relatively autonomous. The promise, however, is not redeemed, at least in an important or
novel way.
Harrod's counter to scientific reductivism is a phenomenological description of the moral agent in the social world. But his description is
by now 'routinized', to use one of his favorite terms. The central notion
in his description of moral agency is the intentionality of consciousness.
The conscious agent constitutes meaning, but since he is an embodied,
linguistic being and not a disembodied Cartesian cogito, meaning constituted by the moral agent is inherently intersubjective. Thus, in response
to scientific reductivism, Harrod writes that " the reality sense of the
experience of value . . . arises as a consequence of features that are
essential and not accidental to the human being· and the human social
world." I happen to share Harrod's sentiments here, but since he never
goes beyond the level of phenomenological description, I do not see that
he has adequately met the challenge of scientific reductivism. For a reductivist (such as Mario Bunge in his recent Scientific Materialism) could
also agree with the above quotation. For reductivism is not a claim about
the experience of value but about the ontological status of values, which
of course depends upon an ontology of the person. I certainly do not
wish to claim that a phenomenological description of the experience of
values may not be useful in developing a response to reductivism; it is
simply not enough.
More disappointing than his failure really to engage the problem of
the ontological status of values is Harrod's failure to come to grips with
pluralism. I say this because I believe pluralism not only conducive to
social divisiveness and sheer power politics, but because pluralism must
try to show how we can come to a reasonable consensus on issues; it must
provide some way of overcoming relativism and dogmatism. Harrod believes that an affirmation of the reality of moral experience and the disclosure of universal, formal features in the moral experience are enough.
Yet he himself concludes that he has failed.
This conclusion brings us back to the concern with which we began,
namely, the pluralism of the modern world and of contemporary experience. If anything, the analysis in these pages has deepened this problem
by affirming it and by showing the grounds in human agency upon which
it rests. Does this mean that no paradigms of value meaning are better

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than any others? Or is moral experience and the values that evoke it
hopelessly bound up with the relativities of space, time, and individual
idiosyncracy? An answer to this question would, of course, require another type of analysis.
The last sentence says it all.

p AUL TRAINOR
Providence Oollege
Providence, Rhode Island

The Autonomy of Religious Belief. Edited by FREDERICK CROSSON. Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Pp. 162. $14.95.

Many philosophers of religion have found in Wittgenstein's languagegame analogy and in his concept of a form of life the rudiments of a new
apology for religious belief. Both of these terms call attention to the fact
that our language is imbedded in the praetices which surround it-so imbedded, in fact, that the meaningfulness of our words and the rationality
of our judgments depend on an underlying agreement in our behavior. In
relation to religion, this suggests that religious language, insofar as it is
tied to its own distinctive form of life, might have its own peculiar standards of intelligibility and rationality. Religious belief, in other words,
might be logically autonomous. Each of the contributors to this collection
of essays-J. M. Cameron, Louis Mackey, D. Z. Phillips, Kai Nielsen,
Kenneth Sayre, and William P. Alston-has something to say about this
idea.
According to the editor, Frederick Crosson, the central question in the
book is whether religion can be adequately understood as a form of
life. But the contributors are far more concerned with the concept of
logical autonomy than they are with the concept of a form of life. None
of them makes any serious attempt to explicate Wittgenstein's use of the
term "form of life"; most simply adopt the popular view that "languagegame " and " form of life " are more or less interchangeable terms for
separate domains of linguistic practice. This then enables them to raise
the question of autonomy in terms of religion's relation to external influences and independent reasons for religious doubt.
This, of course, is not. a new issue, even in its quasi-Wittgensteinian
formulation. Indeed, two of the authors represented here, Phillips and
Nielsen, have been central figures in a long-standing discussion. The two
extreme positions which have emerged from this discussion are described
by Phillips as " internalism " and " externalism." According to the former
view, all external criteria of meaning and rationality are irrelevant to

BOOK REVIEWS

religious systems of thought, or to any other self-contained conceptual
systems. According to the latter view, religious claims are subject to universal criteria of reason and sense. Given this distinction, Nielsen's contribution to the present discussion, like his previous contributions, can be
described as a merciless attack on internalism. If' religious belief were
immune to external criteria of meaning and truth, then the most searching
and fundamental questions about it would be out of place. But such questions are not out of place. Ordinary people as well as philosophers want
to know what exactly the believers affirm when they believe in God. What,
if anything, does the word " God" refer to
How can the referent of
this word be known or identified or distinguished from other
Nielsen insists that there is nothing deviant or senseless about these questions, nor is there anything logically absurd about the possibility that
" God " refers to no more than a figment of human imagination. It may
not make sense to ask questions such as "Is time rea1' ", but it surely
makes sense to ask if God is real. Such questions arise for believers as
well as non-believers, and they require a response.
In Nielsen's eyes the undeniable seriousness of such questions means
that religious claims need to be defended in ways which do not depend
on the prior acceptance of a religious outlook. Independent reasons for
belief, drawn on external criteria of judgment, are needed to justify religious language-games as a whole. Yet as Phillips points out, the inadequacy of the internalist's account of belief does not prove the adequacy
of the externalist's account. Serious doubts may surround religious belief,
but this does not mean that these doubts can only be met by grounding
religious claims in independently gathered, logically prior, evidence of
their truth. Depending on the nature of the doubts themselves, there may
be appropriate responses which do not involve the appeal to external
evidence. Phillips does not pursue this point, but it is so important that
I would like to add some thoughts of my own. Religious doubts do not
all have their source in a lack of evidence. Some doubts arise because
religious claims seem conceptually peculiar or inconsistent, and these might
be answered by explanation or instruction. Others may arise because
certain claims seem pointless, and these might be answered by leading one
to see what it would mean, practically speaking, to take the beliefs in
question to heart. Still other doubts arise because religious ways of life
seem inhibiting or psychologically harmful, and these might be answered in kind with pragmatic appeals. Depending on the situation, any
of these responses might be appropriate; yet none involves the attempt
to found religious claims on prior rational grounds. And this in turn
suggests that there is a middle ground between the false isolation claims
from reasonable doubt and the rigid demand that religious claims be
justified as inferences from non-religious premises.

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BOOK REVIEWS

I think that Phillips would agree with these remarks about doubt, but
it is only in an appendix to his essay that he defends himself against his
critics. The body of his essay is designed to show that religious belief
is not autonomous, that the culture which surrounds a religion affects its
credibility, and that the resultant dangers cannot be escaped. Neither a
private relationship with God, nor the vain hope of rational proofs, nor
the will to accommodate cultural changes can protect the believer. For
private relationships to God depend on publicly available ways of understanding those relationships, " proofs " for the existence of God live from
the faith that precedes them, and the possibility of renewing an old faith
in the midst of a current crisis depends on a kind of authoritative speech
which cannot be manipulated. Owing to the weight of crushing experiences, such as the Jewish holocaust, people may lose their sense of life's
divine meaning; and there is no way to change this fact. Churches can
issue assurances, but, if these are not being heard, concerned believers
cannot simply decide to speak more authoritatively. That sort of thing
cannot be engineered.
Cameron makes a similar point in his essay. He cites the character of
Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch to show how a wider view of the
world can give a particular religious outlook-in this case Roman Catholicism-an almost bewitching appeal. Yet he might just as well have
chosen a character like Hester Prynne to show how changed events and
circumstances can drive a person away from the larger society's religious
views. For his point is that religious forms of life are not immune to
outside influences and threats. They are not even immune from inside
threats, as Kierkegaard's relation to the Danish Church shows. This leads
Cameron to question the usefulness of the term " form of life," but the
real object of his criticism (like that of Nielsen) is not the term but the
compartmentalized conception of language which it supposedly enshrines.
The one issue that remains in tension among these three writers concerns
the appropriateness of maintaining and defending such claims as " God
is real," or " God exists," in the face of culturally generated criticism.
Nielsen and Cameron plainly believe that such claims are in order; but
Phillips, who doesn't discuss the point in this volume, thinks that such
cnssertions invite a confused assimilation of the affirmation of faith claims
to the affirmation of testable hypotheses about objects of one kind or
another. Again, however, a more careful analysis of the nature and variety
of religious doubts might show that there is a third alternative in which
the importance of maintaining the reality of God can be acknowledged
without thereby confusing this issue with other questions about the existence of objects.
In effect, Alston tries to develop an intermediate· position between the
" externalist " who wants an argument for the existence of God and the
"internalist" who thinks such demands are too confused to be legitimate.

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131

Before accepting the Wittgensteinian terminology in which this issue is
cast, however, he introduces some refinements of his own. He, for example,
is the only contributor who stops to consider the problems involved in
identifying different language-games, or in distinguishing one form of
li:2e from another. He realizes that Wittgenstein himself may have had
no " single consistent criterion " of individuation here; yet instead of
pondering the implications of this critical insight (which in itself is
enough to undermine the internalist's position), Alston offers his own way
of defining language-games. (The reviewer's own views on this subject
are presented in "Language-games and Forms of Life Unconfused," Philosophical Investigations, Vol. I, No. 4, Fall 1978). According to his
stipulated definition, each language-game (he does not discuss forms of
life) defines its own entities and ontological categories; each defines the
range of concepts which can be applied to these entities; and each defines
its own irreducible or immediate judgments.
All this is done so that one can say more clearly whether Christianity
qualifies as a separate language-game. And here Alston's answer is " yes."
Christian discourse has its own ontological referent, God; it has its own
set of concepts (attributes) which must be learned in connection with
this object; and it has its own primary judgments which provide the basis
(data) for further reflection. These judgments include such things as a
felt sense of God's presence, a sense of being comforted or guided by God,
an appreciaticn for divine glory in nature, etc.-all of which depend on
more mu'ldane perceptions of physical objects but which are no less immediate for that reaso'l than similar judgments about people and their
personal qualities. In both cases, Alston argues, we experience certain
qualities through physical objects, but our judgments are not inferences
from phenomenal impressions. Even so, he does not conclude that the
Christian language-game can be justified simply by noting that it is
played. Like Nielsen, he insists that it makes sense to ask whether the
epistemic machinery of such a language-game promotes true understanding, or puts us "in touch with reality." We can ask these questions partly
because rational standards of consistency and parsimony cut across
language-games, and partly because the Christian language-game is peculiar in various respects. Not everyone plays, the players themselves see
alternatives, they encounter doubt and uncertainty, they differ in their
mastery of its coneepts, and they gain no predictive power by virtue. of
their unC\ers•anding. None of th1s conclusively counts against Christianity,
though; for in a lengthy and theologically rich discussion Alston shows
that each of these erstwhile objections depends on dubious assumptions
about what a reliable language-game should be. He concludes by saying
that Christian belief might be self-justifying, in that a greater participation might produce a greater awareness of God, often in unanticipated
ways.

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The remammg two essays are somewhat eccentric in relation to the
others. Louis Mackey discusses the theology of St. Bonaventure with the
expertise of a medievalist, but his overall purpose is to illustrate the way
in which the language of revealed religion " undermines the languages by
which men define themselves." He uses the term "Lebensf orm" to describe ways of life conducted in worldly categories, defined by natural
needs and inspired by rationally or imaginatively created ideals. Such
forms of life and language are thrown into upheaval by the " absolute
alterity" of revealed categories of thought. Yet this may be exactly what
a redeemed life requires. Perhaps the believer must accept thoughts which
he cannot humanly think. Readers familiar with Mackey's work on Kierkegaard will find suggestive allusions here, but the connection with Wittgenstein is minimal. Nothing would be lost in this arresting essay if Mackey
had avoided the term " form of life " and used another word, such as
"culture" or "natural life," to describe that which revelation subverts.
Sayre's essay revolves around the question, "How does one know that
he believes in
" A person cannot know that he believes in Godi.e., the true God-unless the descriptions through which he understands
God are accurate. And that is something that most people cannot claim,
at least without being presumptuous. Nor can one know that he believes
in God simply because he participates in religious practices, which Sayre
alternatively describes as religious forms of life. Some participants in
religious practices do not really believe, while others who do believe do not
participate (go to church, etc.). Thus, we need another account in order
to save the commonsense claim that we can know whether we believe in
God. His solution : religious belief is a perceptual disposition. " To believe in God is to be disposed to certain forms of behavior, under the
perception that the world is a certain type of place." This sort of perception is neither intentional in the sense of being directed at a theoretically defined object, nor intentional in the sense of being dircted at a proposition. Rather, it is a way of " taking" the facts which propositions describe. That is a very promising idea, but one would like to hear more
about it than one does at the end of Sayre's essay.
In this essay, also, the concept of a form of life plays an incidental
role. Yet none of the essays should be judged as contributions to scholarship on Wittgenstein. The purpose of the book is to advance old controversies about faith and reason in new ways, and this it does. In more
instances than a mere review could ever display, it does it with the sensitivity of people who know about Christian faith, the ways of the world,
and the philosopher caught in between.
JORN H. WHITTAKER

Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

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183

Religion as Art: An Interpretation. By THOMAS R. MARTLAND. State
University of New York Press, 1981. Pp. 221. $14.95.
Among the more extraordinary of William Blake's many extraordinary
claims is the assertion, in his engraving of Laocoon, that " Christianity
is Art." ("Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples," he tells us, "were all
Artists.")
That something of the Romantic apotheosis of art and the
artist survives today is evident in the religious aura that attends much
of the language we use to talk about art. We like to think of the artist
as an " inspired being," a " priest of the imagination " who has his
"vocation" and produces "transcendent " works of art that furnish us
with equally "transcendent" aesthetic experiences or "epiphanies."
This attitude is perhaps most strikingly embodied in that characteristic
modern phenomenon, the art museum. " Once a mere collection," notes
Andre Malraux, " the art museum ... is becoming a sort of shrine ....
From the Romantic period onward art became more and more the object
of a cult."
Not surprisingly, the exaltation of art goes hand in hand with an
aestheticizing of religion. As art basks in the decaying afterglow of
religious belief, so religion forfeits its claim to truth and becomes little
more than another expression of man's "creative potential." Again, the
museum-in Holderlin's phrase, an " aesthetic church "-aptly illustrates
this. "Regarded as a temple," writes Hans Sedlmayr:
the museum is not the temple of any particular God but a Pantheon of
Art in which the creations of the most varied epochs and peoples are
ranged next to one another with equal claims to our attention. For this
to be possible, however, it was first necessary that the divinities for whom
the works were created in the first place should themselves be undeified.

Distinctions vanish as Christ and Hercules join hands and become
brothers, their divinity accommodated to aesthetic criteria. " The museum,"
Sedlmayr continues, " resolves all religions into things of the past, absorbing them into a new pan-religion of art."
Champions of this development will find eager support in Thomas
Martland's Religion as Art. His thesis is nothing if not straightforward: "what art does, religion does." Both "present collectively
created frames of perception or meaning by which men interpret their
experiences and order their lives " ( p. 1). No doubt there is something
right in what Mr. Martland says. Art and religion can help us interpret
our experiences, and religion, at least, has helped many order their lives.
The problem is that the thesis as it stands is uncomfortably general.

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It doesn't seem to have isolated the distinctive features of art and religion. Our fund of practical knowledge, for example, is not noticeably
artistic or religious, and yet it is " collectively created " and undeniably
helps us interpret our experiences and order our lives. And wou.d we
want to agree with Mr. Martland about
Art may be important to
us for a number of reasons, but does it provide us with a means of
ordering our
. Should
Mr. Martland is obviously after big game here, but I'm afraid that his
exposition is not entirely convincing. In arguing for the connectionindeed, for the virtual identity-of art and religion he develops a stable
of concepts that, taken together, are designed to allow lJ;S to appreciate
what is valuable about art and religion and at the same time, to enable
us to distinguish them from their less worthy counterparts, " craft and
magic." His central idea is that art and religion liberate us from " old
understandings, old ways of seeing things" (p. 18) and create new ones,
while " craft and magic" are content to rest with the already known (cf.
p. 73). Art and religion serve the future, craft and magic the past; art
and religion seek new understanding (a good thing), craft and magic
want power and control (bad things).
Unfortunately, the loose generality that undermines the book's overa11
thesis also undermines its supporting arguments. Consider, for example,
Mr. Martland's discussion of the notion of " truth-to," introduced in an
attempt to arrive at criteria for deciding whether something really is
" art or religion." " Those activities which function as art or religion,"
he explains, "are those activities which are ' true-to ' the open-ended
context in which they operate. This context is yesterday's, today's,
tomorrow's. To be true in this way means to coalesce continually with
constantly new discoveries" (p. 115). There fo]ows a reference, apparently obligatory in books of this ilk, to quantum mechanics and
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This leads to the facile observation
that since "physical theory serves to bring order into the world of experience, ... science ... and its concepts are akin to artistic or religious
acts in that they too create what men experience so that men can understand" (p. 116).
His recapitulation near the end of the text is similarly uninformative:
"An object or activity is art or religion insofar as it is in part responsible for the massed impact of that common ground that leads into the
future. To recognize that something is art or religion is to recognize a
particular future which, in turn, illuminates a particular present and a
particular past" (p. 155). After one has unraveled such a pronouncement, I should think that the diffieult task would be to specify activities
that could not, on the basis of this characterization. be construed as " art
or religion."

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135

Mr. Martland's treatment of citations poses related problems. In
elaborating his position, he enlists what we might call the collage method
of scholarship. The object is to propose a simple and well-known idea ip
an oblique and mystifying manner and then to embellish it with surprising examples from radically different sources and traditions. Instead
of arguing, one merely juxtaposes statements, relying on verbal similarities to suggest conceptual continuities.
For example, both art and religion are said to exhibit a "distance "
from taken-for-granted or habitual ways of looking at things: " so far
as a work does function as art or religion it must evince some distancing
(p. 59). Mr. Martland associates distance
from old understandings"
with creativity and observes that the idea "emphasizes that a necessary
and permanent withdrawing accompanies art's and religion's openness to
creating or finding the yet-to-be" (p. 43). He then marshals supporting
quotations from an astonishing variety of sources, including, to take one
representative passage, Van Gogh, Paul Klee, Kierkegaard, Hesiod, T. S.
Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clement of Alexandria, the gospel of St.
John, Foucher's The Life of the Buddha, an Islamic text, the Mundaka
U panishad, and the Vakyapadiya. It's a bit like Hesse's glass bead game.
Mr. Martland's creative interpretation of sources contributes to the
effect. Consider his reading of Rudolph Otto's idea of God as mysterium
tremendum et f ascinans. For Otto, the focus was clearly on the dual
character of man's encounter with the "who 1ly other." As absolutely
transcendent, God is experienced as a terrifying yet irresistably fascinating mystery; one is simultaneously repelled and drawn in. In Mr. Martland's hands, however, the idea gets a new twist. Otto, he tells, us,
calls man's religious intere"t in affirming his inherited structures the
element of fascinosum, and his interest in transcending them the element
of tremendum. The former stems from man's consciousness of the given
as already created, whereas the latter stems from man's consciousness of
the given as something to be created. ( p. 34)

Equally novel is his interpretation of Aristotle's view of art. Conspicuous in the Aristotelian teaching is the contention that in art the
idea or conception of what is to be made precedes and guides the execution. In the Ethics, Aristotle defines art as the "capacity to make,
involving a true course of reasoning" and insists, in Parts of .Animals, that "art indeed consists in the conception of the result to be
produced before its rea 1ization in the material." True, this does not jibe
well with a view of art that extolls spontaneity, inspiration, and creative
abandon. But as it is nice to seem to have Aristotle on one's side, one
may have to emend Aristotle. This Mr. Martland does handsomely:
" Aristotle postulates that art . . . imitates a nature which is activity,''
that has no place a:part
he writes, "which creates or produces

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from the activity itself.'' And, by way of clarification, he quotes Robert
Frost: "a poem particularly must not begin with the thought first" (pp.
17-18).
Or consider his treatment of Schopenhauer's interpretation of the
Lord's Prayer. For Schopenhauer, man is first of all a desiring, not a
rational, being. What we want tells us more about who we are than
what we think. Yet we often deceive ourselves about what we want.
Thus, when Schopenhauer suggests that the phrase " Lead us not into
temptation" means "Let me not see who I am,'' he means that temptation, confronting us with a desire that we have to acknowledge but wish
to suppress, reveals us to ourselves. The burden of temptation is the
burden of self-knowledge. But for Mr. Martland, the matter is considerably more exotic:
The "who I am" to which Schopenhauer refers is the knowledge of the
self which the soothsayer holds, the knowledge of "who I am" here and
now. Thus Schopenhauer's analysis of the prayer is that it is telling men
that they must not be tempted into being content with these structures
which they already know; rather, they must press on to relate with the
not-yet, with the appearing with God. ( p. 56)

But to appreciate the truly vertiginous quality of Mr. Martland's book,
ponder his frequent use of the locution " artists and religious people ":
So far as artists and religious people are concerned it is the awareness
that the world in which they function is an accommodation, perhaps by
God whom they really do not know, or perhaps by them to a previous
moment, and that writing and listening to poetry, like attaining nirvana,
is equally a falling forward out of that accommodation into what is now
not yet, but nevertheless will be the new world. ( p. 51)
Artists and religious people must do their activity in that special way
free from prior understandings, as ends and not means. (p. 89)
Artists and religious people have no fixed or predetermined

essence. ( p.

91)
The artist and religious person must be true to themselves
universal applicability of their activities. (p. 112)

[sic] in the

In part, the many confusions of this book result from itsi impossible
thesis. For, though each may assimilate itself to the other, art and
i·eligion are plainly not the same thing. The protean complexity of the
subject cautions reticence-there are exceptions to almost any generalization-yet certain basic distinctions are still illuminating. Thus, following Aristotle, we might hazard the suggestion that art is first and foremost a kind of making. Religion, however we decide to define it (or
avoid defining it), is surely not that. To this extent at least we should
be !Pliqed b;r stiind!lrd linguistic
and common sense,
M

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both of which Mr. Martland is perhaps too quick to snub. In fact, the
real clue to this book may lie in the epigraph to the penultimate chapter,
" Verification," where Mr. Martland cites an oft-quoted passage from
Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:
" But 'glory' doesn't mean a nice knock-down argument," Alice objected.
"' When I use a word,'' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
Mr. Martland, alas, sides with the egg.
ROGER KIMBALL
Yale University
New Haven, Oonnecticut

New Studies in Theology, Vol. 1. Edited by STEPHEN SYKES and DEREK
HOLMES. Duckworth, 1980. Pp. 192.
Here is a book to be applauded for both its intention and its execution. It is the first in a projected annual series that seeks to develop an
English language forum for the discussion of fundamental, doctrinal,
and systematic theology and related disciplines. The editors state that
this forum will be open both to established scholars in the field and to
their junior colleagues who wish to share the conclusions of important
dissertation work. There is certainly a need for such a forum. The
number of publications interested in constructive, technical theological
articles is not large, especially if one looks beyond the Catholic-oriented
journals.
No particular theme ties together the articles in this volume. Two are
straightforwardly constructive pieces: Nicholas Lash on the from-above/
from-below distinction in Christology and I. U. Dalferth on the relation between the experience of Jesus as Word of God and the truthclaim that Jesus is the Word of God. Three make constructive points
through discussions of other theologians. Robert Morgan discusses the
connection between historical-critical studies and the doctrine of incarnation through an analysis of the unsuccessful attempt by Anglican scholars
to base the latter upon the former. James Bradley argues that process
metaphysics might be a truer heir than any naturalistic philosophy to the
most important aspects of Feuerbach's critique of theology. Richard
Roberts contends that Barth's attempt to derive the nature of reality exclusively from revelation ends up denying the reality of everyday historical succession. Three of the pieces are more exclusively historical:
P. G. Wignall on the pre-World War II theological writings of D. M.
MacKinnon, R. E. Williams on Vladimir Lossky's understanding of

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apophasis as a key to theological
and Ann Loades on the
evolution of Kant's views on theodicy. The book closes with a survey by
G. M. Newlands of the literature produced in the debate surrounding The
Myth of God Incarnate.
The quality of the articles is consistently high. All are typified by
level-headed, precise thinking of the sort one associates with English
scholarship, though the prose is often rather dense. This density may be
due to the apparent origin of many of the articles in recent dissertations. The articles also share the atmosphere of England. The editors
and all but two of the contributors are connected with Oxford, Cambridge, or Durham Universities. Corresponding editors are listed, however, from other parts of the world; so perhaps future volumes will be
more geographically diverse.
A few of the articles may have wider appeal than others. The article
with the broadest significance is probab,y Lash's "Up and Down in
Christology." He argues that the much-used distinction between Christology from above and from below has become more confusing than helpful. The terms are used both to distinguish differing methods in Christology and to distinguish differing descriptive Christological models.
While these distinctions are interrelated, they are not identical. Clarity
is not furthered by referring to both distinctions with the same set of
terms. Lash directly addresses the reasons Pannenberg advances for pursuing Christology from below. The above/below metaphor turns out to
be used in sometimes inappropriate or misleading ways. In addition,
some of the concerns that allegedly demand a Christology from below can
be better met in other ways. Most importantly, Lash contends that "the
beguiling simplicity of the metaphor" obscures the dependence of any
coherent Christology on decisions about the nature of God and about our
knowledge of God. Lash's points are well taken. Anyone who wants to
continue to use the from-above/from-below distinction shoU:.d attend to
Lash's questions.
Those interested in Christology might also look at Morgan's article.
He recounts the attempt by Anglican moderates to ground a traditional
or liberal doctrine of incarnation on historical-critical biblical studies.
His conclusion strikes me as essentially correct: incarnational doctrine
must make contact with the historical data if it is plausibly to claim that
it is talking about a real man, but such data cannot become significant
evidence for an incarnational interpretation of Jesus. This essay raises the
question whether some Germanic Catholic theologians are headed down
dead-end roads others have traveled before.
A third article of some interest is Bradley's discussion of Feuerbach's
relevance to modern thought. Bradley suggests that not only Marx,
Engels, and contemporary scholars such as Wartofsky, but even Feuer-

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189

bach himself may have misjudged both the most important aspect in
Feuerbach's critique of theology and the connection between that critique
and philosophical naturalism. Bradley's thesis is that the true importance
of Feuerbach's critique lies not in his anthropological reductionism but in
his exposure of the core of living religion of the ' dramatic ', genuinely
historical interrelation of God, nature, and humanity. Theology and
metaphysics are to be condemned for misrepresenting this dynamism
through static and abstract categories. On this reading, F. H. Bradley
and Whitehead, not Marx and Freud, are the continuers of the most important aspect of the Feuerbachian critique. I leave a final judgment on
the adequacy of Bradley's interpretation to the Feuerbach specialists.
Nevertheless, it seems to me prima facie implausible that the anthropological reduction of religion is not decisive to Feuerbach's argument and to
his importance for contemporary discussion. One can say, however, that
Bradley has pointed to an aspect of Feuerbach's arguments that is often
not given prominence.
Comments can be made and questions raised about the other contributions. For example, Williams does an excellent job of showing how
Lossky's initially forbidding Orthodox Mysticism connects with an
anthropology of self-transcendence that many modern Catholics and
Protestants find appealing. And I wonder how Newlands would fill out
his eminently reasonable statements about the need for something at least
akin to a concept of incarnation. In trying to reflect on the fundamental
principles of Barth's theology, does Roberts take with sufficient seriousness Barth's claim that his theologizing was not guided by fundamental
principles? That these and other comments could be expanded at some
length shows that the series is off to a worthwhile start in this volume.
MICHAEL ROOT

Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary
Columbia, South Carolina

The Jesus of Faith: A Study in Ohristology. By MICHAEL L. CooK, S.J.
New York: The Paulist Press, 1981. Pp. 208. $6.95.
The inclusion of both ' Jesus ' and ' faith ' in the title indicates Cook's
desire to distance himself from those who would argue that the starting
point for christology is one of the by-now familiar alternatives: either
from below or from above. For Cook neither alternative is adequate.
The construction of an adequate christology (the purpose of the book)
begins from the concrete, personal existence of Jesus of Nazareth because
" it is Jesus in the concrete particularity of his own personal existence
who reveals to us and so ' defines ' the divine, the human, and the future"

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(191). Cook's point is that one does not begin with some formal definition
of humanity and then impose that definition on Jesus (the from below
approach) and any other category suggested by contemporary christology.
Indeed, only the concrete historical Jesus himself reveals and thus defines
humanity and divinity. This not only explains the primacy of Jesus,
historical and particular, in this study; it also explains the prominent
place Cook gives to history: it is necessary, legitimate, even indispensable
but always subordinate to faith in any study of christology. Thus, the
lion's share of Chapter I is concerned with the correct understanding of
the relationship between history and faith. To gain this understanding,
Cook follows Norman Perrin's use of three distinct kinds of knowledge:
historical knowledge, historic knowledge and faith knowledge. Faith
knowledge is particular, concrete, and essentially interpersonal (I-Thou).
It is also transhistorical " insofar as it introduces the idea of God's activity
and it may or may not be related to historical/historic knowledge." (23)
A faith knowledge of Jesus, as Cook nuances it, allows one's faith to be
related to the historical and historic Jesus (to the Jesus of history and
to the Jesus of the early Church's proclamation) and yet to be able to
transcend the inevitable limitations of such knowledge, yielding to the
grace, risk, and peculiar certainty of an I-Thou relationship. Thus, both
faith and history are ways of knowing within historical consciousness, but
faith knowledge is not reducible to a dimension of historical/historic
knowledge. Towards the end of his work Cook restates this: " The Wordfaith correlation, while internally related to history, is primarily revelatory
in character, something that simply transcends the inevitable limitations
of scientific historical knowledge while remaining intrahistorical" (19091). For Cook, then, the category of faith knowledge is elastic enough
to handle what is available to us from both historical/historic data (what
a historical-critical investigation of scripture and tradition yields) and
what is available to us from transhistorical or meta-historical data (the
resurrection as the primary example of such data).
In brief, Cook states a very positive, though nuanced and ultimately
subordinate view of historical and historic knowledge of Jesus vis-a-vis
one's faith in him as Lord. Given this, it is not surprising to find him
employing a thoroughly historical approach as he moves from the origins
of Christian faith in the Jesus of history (his ministry and fate, Chapters
II and III) to the early Church's resurrection proclamation of him as
Lord (Chapter IV). Once these data are studied, Cook is in a position
to suggest the necessary elements in any adequate contemporary christology
(Chapter V).
Once again, the option of starting point is not between the Jesus of
history and the Christ of faith but rather Jesus in the concrete particu111.rity of his own personal existence and the continuity (including both

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identity and difference) between this Jesus of history and the community's
faith in him as Lord. Thus Chapter II investigates this concrete Jesus in
terms of his ministry in the context of eschatological prophet. This is
done precisely " in order to show how his ministry could raise questions
intelligible to his contemporaries . . . while he continually transcended
their expectations ... " (35) Cook's analysis of Jesus's prophetic existence involves the three dimensions of word, deed, and fate. Word embraces J esus's understanding and proclamation of the Kingdom of God
through an analysis of his language (parables, abba, amen) and his deed
(healing ministry, table-fellowship with sinners, prayer). Included in his
discussion here is the nature of one's response to Jesus in terms of acceptance (faith) or rejection (fate). In this chapter, as throughout the
book, Cook follows and nuances authors with whom he is in basic agreement on this or that aspect under discussion. His originality is not so
much in presenting new material as in suggesting the elements necessary
for an adequate christology (historical Jesus, cross, resurrection, incarnation, and Jesus's identity-in-being with God.)
"Jesus is known to us not simply in his earthly ministry, his words and
deeds, but primarily in his fate " (73). Thus, Chapter III deals with
J esus's death and resurrection, with each interpreting the other. Acknowledging but nuancing Moltmann's contribution on the subject, Cook understands the death of Jesus as speaking not of a division within God but
of God taking human divisiveness into his own life. At issue, then, in the
crucifixion of Jesus is not the death of God but death in God and its
saving significance for us. But faithful to his approach, this is understood concretely in "that it was this man Jesus who was condemned as
a blasphemer, crucified as a rebel, and died as one forsaken by God whom
God has raised from the dead. The scandal is in the concrete particularity of Jesus." ( 83-84) " It is in this way that the cross interprets the
resurrection, for God ' became the kind of man we do not want to be: an
outcast, accursed, crucified' " (77, quoting Moltmann).
The bulk of this chapter deals with a generally favorable exposition
of Fuller's treatment of the resurrection in the New Testament and needs
little comment. However, one point is of particular interest. In interpreting Mk. 16 :7, " Go now and tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going
ahead of you to Galilee .. .'" (NAB), Cook suggests that Mark's point
is to insist that the ambiguity with which the ministry of Jesus was met
"can only be properly understood in the light of the cross" (92). This
is Mark's way of moving his community beyond an assessment of Jesus,
in his ministry, as a mere wonder-worker (theios-aner) and so to understand their Christian discipleship as more profoundly rooted in his experience of death.
Again, largely following Fuller, Cook in Chapter IV discusses the
movement from implicit christology, via the resurrection faith, to explicit

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christology and, this, through the three strata of New Testament communities (Palestinian Judaism, Hellenistic-Jewish mission, Gentile mission). This movement develops from a more eschatological to a more
experiential· focus, as well as from a merely functional view of Jesus as
God's agent to ontic affirmations about his relationship to the divine to,
finally, ontological questions about his identity-in-being with the divine.
The final section of this fourth chapter looks briefly to the emergence of
the Chnlcedonian faith precisely in J esus's identity-in-being with the
divine. .Like Rahner, Cook regards Chalcedon as both end and beginning
of faith reflection on the person and work of Jesus.
In the first four chapters of his book, Cook articulates, through an
hist.orical-analytical approach, the development of christology from the
proclamation of Jesus to the dogmatic statement of Chalcedon. Chapter V
seeks a r:iore synthetic approach as he attempts an adequate christology
for toda:r. This synthetic approach is realized in an analysis of the
thought ·)f four contemporary theologians : Schoonenberg, Pannenberg,
Moltman:1, and Hodgson. These theologians are chosen for several reasons: (l '1 they all take as their starting point the concrete particularity
of Jesus in his own personal existence; (2) each engages the understandof rrnlity from the vantage point of the concerns of the contemporary
wc.rld, a procedure which is " indispensable for anyone who is seriously
concerned about doing theology today" (134); (3) each emphasizes one
or more of the aspects which Cook considers essential for an adequate
christofogy today: the concrete historical Jesus, cross, resurrection, incarnation. The order, with incarnation last and following upon a consideration of pre-existence, is important to Cook. What Cook brings to the
discussion, in addition to arguing for the inclusion of all these elements
in an adequate contemporary christology, is his further insistence that an
assessment of these elements must be " grounded in a metaphysics of ontic
identity " of Jesus with the divine (191) .
Chapter V is the most important part of the book. Especially helpful
perhaps is Cook's discussion of the relationship between soteriology and
christology, with christology rooted in soteriology so that " Jesus' salvific
significance is pre<'isely his personal relation to the Father as the perfectly obedient Son " (164, f.n. 45). Cook is using the concerns of Antioch as a corrective to what might be considered the one-sided victory of
Alexandria at Chalcedon.
Helpful, certainly, is Cook's presentation, nuanced from his Roman
Catholic perspective, of the views of these important major theologians
and their significant contributions to christology. But one wonders why
more Roman Catholic thinkers are not included. One suspects it is because too few begin their christologies with the concrete particularity of
the historical Jesus.

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Cook's insistence on the identity-in-being of Jesus with the Father
underscores the fact that it is God himself who is given to us and for us
in the incarnation. This concern preserves the important patristic soteriological principle that only God saves us and is a needed perspective if one
is to remain true to the New Testament conviction that in Jesus and his
ministry God himself is among us and for us.
Given Cook's emphasis on the concrete particularity of the historical
Jesus, one would perhaps expect some consideration of praxis as the
transforming effect of faith in Jesus upon society. Theologians as different as Sobrino and Nolan, who, incidently, begin their christologies with
the concrete Jesus, might suggest praxis as an additional ingredient to
ihe elements considered necessary in an adequate christology for today.
One might add the ingredients of worship and witness too, as in van
Beeck's christology.
Many will find this work very significant as a review of much contemporary christology and as an aid in introducing graduate level students
to a study of Jesus Christ.

LEWIS s. FIORELLI, 0.S.F.S.
Cluster of Independent Theological Schools
Washington, D. 0.

Luther and the Papacy: Stages in a Reformation Conflict. By SCOTT H.
HENDRIX. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981. Pp. xii + 211. $14.95.
Martin Luther's well-known polemics against the papacy, especially
during the last years of his life, have been the subject of a variety of
studies. Most recently, Remigius Baumer, a Roman Catholic scholar at
the University of Freiburg, Germany, presented the view that the young
Luther radically changed his mind in 1518-19 from a tolerant, if not propapal, stance to a deep personal hatred of the papacy as the embodiment
of the anti-Christ in his time (Martfo
und der Papst, 1970). In
contrast to Baumer, Hendrix, who is Associate Professor of Church History at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminarv in Columbia, N.C., concentrates on the question of Luther's motive. Why did Luther attack the
The answer to this question evolves in the carefully argued
thesis of the book that Luther's opposition to the papacy is dee-ply
grounded in the conviction that the p0pes and other ecclesiastical officeholders did not exercise their legitimate pastoral function, namely, to nurture the people by communicating the word of G d to them. Hendrix
shows how Luther developed this conviction in finely differentiated stages
between 1517 and 1522, concluding that all hopes for a rapprochement
0

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between Rome and Wittenberg were lost since Rome refused to heed the
call to return to a proper exercise of pastoral authority.
Hendrix presents his thesis in seven chapters, each headed by a wellselected Luther quotation and a detailed chronology of events. Starting
with a brief analysis of Luther's own recollections about his early years
(1505-17), Hendrix sums up Luther's early views of the papacy with the
term "ambivalence'' (ch. 1). A basic shift in Luther's attitude occurred
in 1517 when Luther encountered the very unpastoral trafficking in indulgences, promoted by Bishop Albrecht of Mainz with the support of
Rome. This shift is linked to Luther's breakthrough to a Reformation
theology which rediscovered the powerful message of Paul's gospel of
justification by faith apart from the works of law. Aware of the jungle
of contradictory interpretations with reference to the precise date of
Luther's breakthrough, which he called his " tower experience " ( Turmerlebnis), Hendrix refuses to make a calculated guess, but tends to lean
towards 1517 as a terminus ad quem. Whereas Luther ignored rather than
intentionally excluded the papacy in his new, budding ecclesiology before
1517, his famed Ninety-Five Thesis of 1517 intended to establish the limits
of ecclesiastical authority. Luther tested papal authority in the context
of canon law when he attacked the indulgences, calling for a return to the
.word of God as the highest authority in the church. Hendrix describes
this period from October 1517 to June 1518 under the heading "protest"
(ch. 2). Luther's first personal encounter with Roman authority, his
meeting with Cajetan in Augsburg, led Luther to open " resistance " (ch.
3, sketching the period from June to December 1518). When Cajetan
demanded recantation without dialogue, Luther countered with a confession of faith in God who justifies sinners through Christ without any
human disposition, merit, or good work. By 1518 Luther had decided
that loyalty to the Roman church no longer included loyalty to the pope.
Contrary to popular opinion, Luther, however, did not set up a strict
authority of Scripture against papal authority. He appealed to the authority of a General Council, thus avoiding the label "scripturalist "·
Hendrix rightly stresses this evidence in the face of Luther interpretations which view Luther as the staunch defender of the prineiple " Scripture alone" (so la scriptura). When Luther discovered that there was little
hope for a General Council, he challenged Rome to prove from earliest
conciliar tradition, not just Scripture, that the papacy was instituted by
Christ as the highest authority in the church. The challenge was taken up
by John Eck at the Leipzig debate in 1519, focusing on what Hendrix
calls Luther's "proposition thirteen". This proposition argued that the
historical tradition of fifteen hundred years, Scripture itself, and the decrees of the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) stood against the Roman contention that the papacy was a divine institution. Such a " challenge " (the

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title of ch. 4) quickly led Luther to open "opposition" (the heading of ch.
5). Thus Luther was convinced by 1520 that the pope was the anti-Christ,
a label which had been applied to various popes since the eleventh century
when Pope John XXII condemned radical Franciscans who refused to
believe that Christ and the apostles possessed property (Edict Cum inter
nonnullos, 1323). Hendrix does not see in Luther's increasing polemics a
total opposition to the papacy. Rather, he shows that Luther only wanted
to make it clear that the pope had no exclusive right to interpret Scripture
and that being a Christian does not depend on membership in the church
of Rome. According to Luther, the church can exist without the papacy.
But if the papacy claims authority over consciences, without exercising
proper pastoral care, it is anti-Christian, and resistance against the pope
becomes a holy duty. Hendrix sums up Luther's anti-papal stance in 1521
under the heading " conviction " (ch. 6). The term takes on a double
meaning since Luther's conviction, expressed at the Diet of Worms, that
consciences are "captive to the word of God" led to his conviction as a
heretic and outlaw. After Worms Luther remained convinced that the
papacy had violated its holy obligation to care for the consciences of the
faithful. Hendrix describes this unchanging stance in a final chapter,
entitled "Persistence, 1522-1546 " (ch. 7). Colorful Luther quotations
demonstrate that the papacy was somehow always on Luther's mind until
he died. He wanted his epitaph to read as an address to the pope, " Alive,
your plague, dead your death"; he used pornographic language to describe
his anti-papal stance; and he included a rejection of the papacy in his
last prayer at the hour of his death.
Hendrix raises the question at the end of his detailed study whether
Luther fulfilled the "duty of a good pastor", as he had put it in the
Ninety-Five Theses of 1517. Did Luther console terrified consciences more
effectively than anyone else in the sixteenth century' Or was Luther too
radical, too zealous, too polemical ' On balance, Hendrix concludes that
Luther was justified in his persistence since Rome refused to engage in
reforms, be it in the matter of indulgences or in other matters. Even the
Council of Trent, whose first sessions took place during Luther's last days,
did not appear to address the grievances in the church, although it ended
up doing so by 1563. Thus Luther seemed justified, according to Hendrix,
to start and to nurture a reformation which would offer pastoral care to
people in the face of the papacy's neglect to exercise the duty of its
assigned pastoral office.
While this book does not make a pioneering contribution to Luther
research, it puts together both primary and secondary evidence in such a
way as to help readers, especially those who are not seasoned Luther
scholars, to appreciate Luther's primary concern for the neglected consciences of the faithful in the church of his time. Thirty-seven pages of

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footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and indexes of persons, places, and
subjects disclose solid, careful work. The book offers further, conclusive
evidence against a Luther image which projects a hot-headed reformer,
driven by a hatred of Rome, perhaps on the basis of bad parenting as
Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther) and other psychohistorians have argued
with insufficient evidence from Luther's works. To this extent, the book
offers necessary revisionist historiography. For Luther was, after all, a
priest-professor deeply concerned with the proper care and nurture of
God's people, never really eager to break away from the Roman church
for the sake of creating a " sect ". Hendrix's book once again provides
evidence for the thesis that Luther was the leader of a reform movement
within the church catholic, driven out of his church by a careless exercise
of authority unfortunately associated with the papacy. When Lutheran
church historians can, together with Roman Catholic scholars, such as
Joseph Lcrtz and his students, deal with historical evidence without prejudices, Luther will finally get his due as a father of the church who became
embroiled in a schism which none really desired. This book, therefore,
is one historian's contribution to an ecumenical climate of opinion which
still needs a fresh wind blowing in clean air to overcome persistent pollution generated by ecclesiastical pride and prejudice. Hendrix himself notes
in the Introduction that the official, bilateral Lutheran-Catholic dialogue
in North America relied more on the irenical attitudes of sixteenthcentury Lutherans and Catholics than on the polemics of the old Luther.
This is a commendable book. It is sensitive to issues and answers concerning a neuralgic theme, and it assembles the evidence for a balanced
hindsight and for reasonable judgment on what was, and still is, a thorny
question for ecumenists, namely, the origins and nature of teaching authority in the church. This reviewer would have liked to see more of a
treatment of the relationship between pastoral office and papal teaching
authority than Hendrix provides. For magisterial and pastoral authority
are intimately linked in the exercise of the papal office; and Luther himself seemed quite aware of this link. This observation, however, is not
meant to be a substantial critique of the book. Rather, it is meant to
point up a holistic understanding of ecclesiastical authority which, according to Luther, combines being a good pastor and a good theologian.
ERIC

Institute for Luther Studies
Lutheran Theological Seminary
Gettysburg, Penns11lvania

w. GRITSCH

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147

C. S. Lewis's Case for the Christ-ian Faith. By RICHARD L. PURTILL.
New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Pp. 146. $10.95.
Richard L. Purtill's study of C. S. Lewis presents a concise summary
of key themes in the thought of that still-popular apostle to skeptics who
died in 1962. It also helps focus two questions of major importance in
contemporary apologetic theology: Hew is one properly to deal with
biblical scholarship in addressing a
And, more important,
how is one to wed imagination to reason in an apologia for the faith 7
BBC broadcast talks by the Oxford don, which were first published in
this country in 1942 as The Case for Christianity, inspired Purtill's title.
He shows an impressive command of the Lewis literature. Although he
tried to ke2p qurtation to a minimum, most of Lewis's forty-some books,
as well as unpublished letters and manuscripts, find their way into the
notes. Nevertheless Purtill expresses the opinion that Till We IIave Faces
is perhaps Lewis's best novel, Letters to Malcolm one of his best nonficticn books, and The Last Battle, the final chronicle in the Namia series,
" one of Lewis's greatest books." He is equally aware of the many secondary studies, from which he quotes judiciously, with commendable
restraint.
Professor of philosophy at Western Washington University, Purtill is
an admitted and unabashed Lewis fan. It is therefore to his enormous
credit that he gives us Lewis without honey. One good example of his
honest criticism comes in disrussion of the argument for the so-called
"mental proof" for belief in God. Fellowing a quotation from M;racles,
he writes, " Here, I think, Lewis makes one of his rare missteps in argument." Lewis has lost pnints to evolutionists. Purtill puts great stress on
the cogency of Lewis's arguments. In this respect he is loyal to his professi0nal interest in logic.
A Christian logic shapes the book. In ten brief chapters we are taken
from belief in God to death and beyond. En route we are introduced to
Lewis's ideas about Christ, miracles, other religions, ethics, prayer, and
related themes. Clean prose and clear thinking are evident throughout,
and Purtill has frequently transposed Lewis's arguments into an American
key. Thus, for example, Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon successfully illustrates the discussion of miracles, and the "Playboy (or
Playgirl) philosophy" the discussion of Christian living. In this respect
Purtill makes a significant contribution as an apologist in his own right,
as well as a sensitive interpreter of his British predecessor.
Both Lewis and Purtill, therefore, contribute to the maior questions
about the apologetic task raised above. Lewis's attitude toward biblical
criticism, apparently shared by Purtill, is perhaps one of the reasons for

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Lewis's current popularity. In my opinion, however, it is an attitude
which oversimplifies the nature of the New Testament and misunderstands
the intention of biblical scholars.
The issue is clearest in the short chapter headed "Who is
There Purtill begins with an accurate paraphrase of Lewis: " Christ
claimed to be God. He was either telling the truth, or he was insane, or
he was a liar." Indeed the whole of J esus's behavior as recounted in all
four gospels is said to be " inexplicable " if Jesus did not claim to be
God. A similar attitude pervades the chapter on miracles and history.
There Purtill explains Lewis's position with equal simplicity: "In other
words, proponents of the view that Christ's cures were psychosomatic ...
must decide whether they accept the written records as factual or fictional,
or believe them to be a mixture of both."
Purtill allows himself to quote at length from a paper on "Modern
Theology and Biblical Criticism" which Lewis originally delivered in
1959. Those chiefly responsible for "undermining the old orthodoxy"
are "divines engaged in New Testament criticism." Himself a literary
critic, Lewis eharges these scholars with reading rationalistic presuppositions into the text. He and his interpreter prefer the plain words of
the Gospel story to demythologizing. They both reject any theory of
interpolation [sic] by the early Church. Again it is an either/ or decision:
" either the early Christian writers were liars, or they were deluded, or
they recorded accurately what Jesus did and said."
Rather than inveigh against so-called " modernistic " views of Scripture, it would seem more useful for the apologist today to help a skeptic
understand the kerygmatic nature of the gospel genre. Lewis and Purtill
seem to share their own modernistic presuppositions-those of historicism.
The issue of the i·elation between imagination and reason raised by
this book is more complex. One of the secrets of Lewis's success, Purtill
rightly argues, is his imaginative power in the service of reason. Throughout the book Lewis's use of vivid metaphor, concrete imagery, apt analogy
is amply illustrated. Yet the person whom Lewis was primarily addressing, as Purtill understands his work, was one who has an "appetite for
argument" about the truth of the faith. The case for a reasonable faith
which they both make often seems to be addressed to a kind of scientific
rationalism which may no longer dominate our intellectual climate.
It seems highly likely that it is Lewis's imagination more than his
reason which accounts for his popularity today, and which thereby conveys a message to apologists today. He speaks to people who sense what
Rahner and his students recognize as an " eclipse of mvstery" in our
culture. He awakens depths of being inaccessible to logical argument.
It may be that the Narnia tales are far more effective Christian apolo-

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getic today than any effort to explain the mystery of the Gospel. Purtill's
keen appreciation of Aslan's country suggests Lewis's appeal far more
powerfully than his appreciation for Lewis's logic.
MARIANNE

H. MICKS

Virginia Theological Seminary
Alexandria, Virginia

A Passion for Truth: Hans Kung and His Theology. By ROBERT NOWELL.
New York: Crossroad, 1981. Pp. 377. $14.95.
Kiing in Conflict. Edited with a Translation and Commentary by LEONARD
SwrnLER. New York: Doubleday, 1981. Pp. 627. $17.95.

In reviewing these two works I first will deal briefly with each separately, noting their contents and making some comments. Then I will
make three comments pertinent to both. Finally I will raise six questions
which the two evoke. I am not primarily concerned with Kiing's theology
as such, though of necessity some of my comments pertain to it.
Nowell's book is a "theological" biography of Kiing. The introductory
chapter, "Loyalty Disavowed," provides the context for the book. The
Kling case raises two questions: whether the Church is committed to the
truth or its own past; whether the Church is truly universal or limited'!
Kling is presented as the contemporary Catholic theologian who is (alone'!)
passionately committed to both the Church and (especially) the truth,
who tries to make sense out of Christianity for our world today, who
assumes that Christian faith is reasonable and must be something vital.
Above all, Kling is a preacher, who wishes to proclaim the message of
God not of men. Whether he has been successful is now, from the standpoint of Roman authorities, disputable. Whether or not Rome's evaluation
of Kiing is correct the reader will be better able to judge by the end of
the book. For the purpose of this book is to enable the reader to judge
(I presume with some objectivity) the relative merits of Kiing and the
magisterial (especially Roman) authorities.
Chapter two, "The Making of a Theologian,'' and chapter three, "Rome
and Paris," depict Kiing's milieu (secular and ecclesial) and its influence
upon him, his seminary and educational experiences up to his doctoral
work. Central here is that Kiing's theological development paralleled the
developments within the Church from a pre-Vatican II (closed and repressive) Church to a Vatican II (open and liberating) Church. Chapter
three likewise indicates the theological issues which first caused concern

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for the pre-doctoral Kiing and which will be important for his later theological development (the meaning of tradition and the natural-supernatural question). Also mentioned here is Kiing's early contact with the
theology of Barth and its abiding influence upon him. From chapter four
to chapter eighteen, Nowell presents in chronological fashion the key
writings and main theological positions of Kiing, while at the same time
noting Church events during these years which in some way influenced
Kiing's writings (e.g. the calling of Vatican II by John XXIII and
Humanae vitae). Likewise throughout these chapters he deals with Kiing's
conflict with the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and
the Doctrinal Commission of the German Bishop's Conference.
Regarding Kiing and his theology Nowell makes several points worth
noting. (1) Kiing has developed an ecumenical rather than a polemical
theology. He does not try to prove Protestants wrong and Catholics right
but rather is concerned to listen to what Protestants are saying and to use
this as an occasion and basis for a Catholic examination of conscience
(p. 68). (2) Nowell accurately notes the pastoral concern of Kiing's
theology. Kiing generally is not addressing a professional, theological
audience but rather the educated lay person. Hence his writings tend to
be "more popular" in language style. 'rhat Kiing writes for the lay
person itself has ecclesiological ramifications; it shows that he acknowledges the emergence of the laity from its subservient position in which
the laity was strictly the " ecclesia discens." In addressing the laity, Kiing,
as Newman earlier, is relativizing somewhat the ecclesia docens-discens
distinction (p. 96). (3) Nowell often shows how later works of Kilng
build upon earlier ones. For example, Kilng's positions on infallibility
(1970) are found in seminal form in Structures of the Chui·ch (1962).
( 4) Nowell rightly underscores the
of Kiing's historical method
of doing theology, forcing theology to face up to "the awkward facts of
history" and nnt explain them away with theological theories. "When
this historical realism is roupled with a similar willingness to let the biblical data speak for itself [sic], as it is in Kilng's case, the result can best
be described as empirical theology" (p.115). (5) Nowell correctly points
out on several occasions that for Kilng the " Gospel" is the criterion of
all later developments in theology and Church (e.g. p. 139). (6) Throughout Nowell gives good insights into the man, the reformer, and the theologian, Hans Kilng.
Now
comments. (1) Nnwell's presentation of Kiing's thoui;ht is
accurate. This book can serve as a one-rlume compend;um of Kil'lg's
theology. The only chapter which I found wqnting is chanter fourteen,
"Hegel as a Theologian," which deals with
quite diffirnlt work
of :Kii.nff
Menschwerdung Gett es. However, (2) Nowell's

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151

utterly uncritical and bordering on doulia. The author seemingly agrees
with every point of Kilng's theology. He never challenges Kiing or adverts to ambiguit:es or limitations in his thought. I make only two (insignificant) critical remarks. The first pertains to Kling's position on the
necessity (or lack thereof) of ordination for the validity of certain
ministries. Why did not Kling mention the Korean Church of the late
18th century (pp. 105-05, 148)? Second, Nowell offers a mild criticism
regarding Kling's position in On Being A Christian concerning the involvement of the Church in social-political questions (p. 273). He likewise
notes the absence in Kling's last two works of a treatment of prayer. (3)
Nowell, himself not a theologian to the best of my knowledge, makes
blase comments which may indicate that Nowell is in water over his head,
comments which indicate an attitude ranging from sarcastic to paranoic.
Examples: (a) Nowell (in line with Kling) seems to think that the cfficial
teaching on infallibility is too riddled with absurdities to be upheld (201).
This is a bit of a revelation to me. That the official position on infallibility may cr-ntain certain d"fficulties, that it is capable of further development and clarification, I concede. That it is absurd is certainly not
per se evidens. (b) Nowell's remarks concerning theologians (a pack of
"angry theologians" at that), who hate to see their "sacred cows" led
away to the slaughterhouse, who as "members of a football team," "gang
up against" Kling (pp. 212,
284) are not only puerile but intimidat;ng. Both N°well and his hero (Kiing) decry the lack of freedom and
openness in the Church, especially regarding theologians. Yet both are
capable of drawing from a well-stocked linguistic arsenal words which
seem to have as their only purpose to mock and intimidate the opposition.
If you disagree with Kiing, then you are one of the football players
" ganging up on " him. Dees that type of language advance free and open
discuss;on among theologians? Does it exhibit "a passion for truth "¥
( c) In line with Kiing, Nowell believes that infallibility results in the
Church's being " bound by the chains of its past mistakes as it fumbles
its way towards the truth." (p. 213). I am not aware that Kiing or anyone else has given one unambiguous example of an " infallible past mistake." The examples provided are the old ones which no informed
theologian considers infallible. So what are these infallible past mistakes?
"Bound by chains "? I believe that hermeneutical theory (especially after
Gadamer) would see the past in quite a different light. Far from binding,
the past just might be both liberating and instructive for the present and
the future. "Fumbles its way towards the truth." Again an example of
language which advances theological discussion and development! If the
Church has been doing nothing but " fumbling towards truth," then I
would have to say that it has been and will continue to be a "fumbling 11
that has involved much effort and not little intellectual acumen. Of course

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fumbling towards the truth may be very much indigenous to the human
situation. But that in itself should make one pause and inquire whether
this human fumbling might itself be a reason to ask whether indeed, if
the Church is to be the sacrament of God's eschatological and definitive
promise and Self-gift, then that same Church might be much in need of
God's eschatological Spirit, which Spirit might itself account for this
fumbling Church's ability to teach in an infallible way. ( d) And, finally,
Nowell seems astonished that "On Being A Christian sparked off a dispute that outdid in fierceness and bitterness that sparked off by Inf allible," for "in the present case Kling was not challenging or criticizing
anything" (p. 276). Even Kling's most benign reviewers have noted with
praise that this book was indeed quite challenging and critical. No problem with that. But Nowell gives the impression that this book from a
doctrinal point of view is harmless. Now that is certainly not obvious.
Apart from the fact that the magisterium had several difficulties with this
book, the fact is that many prominent scholars also registered doctrinal
difficulties with the book, especially regarding Kling's explanation of
"vere Deus." One would have thought that the reactions of so many
prominent theologians would have caused Nowell to pause and at least
entertain a few critical questions. Many other statements of Nowell are
equally vulnerable. But I think that I have made my point.
If the purpose of the book is to aid the reader to make an objective
and critical appraisal of Kling, then the book has failed. In this regard,
I have several critical reactions: (a) The " Gospel" is for Kling the
criterion of all later development. True, but simplistic! Why' Does not
Kling also seem to indicate that Jesus himself is the
What does
Kling mean by "Gospel"? With such a criterion stated so simply, is
there not a tendency to go "backwards," as if what is first is either best
or complete? More importantly, when one speaks of the Gospel (or Jesus)
as criterion (and who would deny
are we not immediately thrown
into the very thorny area of hermeneutics? (b) Kling's method is basically
historical. But (see pp. 149-51) in dealing with the question of the Petrine
Office, Kiing is willing to bypass the question of whether a Petrine Office
going back to Peter can be historically established. What is important is
"succession in the Spirit." One can also ask whether in his historical
theology Kling always does justice to all pertinent data of the past or is
highly selective? ( c) Nowell uncritically accepts Kling's position that the
teaching of the Church on birth control is, according to Roman theology,
an instance of ordinary but infallible magisterium (pp. 188-89). Not even
Paul VI made that claim! Likewise (p. 208) Pius XI in Casti connubii
was fulfilling the conditions of Vatican I for the exercise of the infallible
Petrine teaching office! ( d) Few would say today that the last word has
been said on infallibility, but to say that "the doctrine of infallibility

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153

comes to look more and more like a Cheshire Cat" (e.g. p. 208) exhibits a simplistic understanding of the complexity of the philosophical,
historical, theological, and ecumenical issues involved, despite Nowell's
reference on p. 209 to "the complexity of the doctrine." That so many
prominent theologians have taken issue with Kiing on this question should
make Nowell more circumspect and critical. My concluding comments:
if one is interested in a quick and accurate review of Kiing's theology,
read it. If one rejoices in an attempt to make the magisterium appear
intolerant and silly, read it. If one is interested in a critical treatment
of Kiing's theology, there is nothing to be learned from it.
Swidler's book, apart from a preliminary and informative biographical
chapter and a final chapter of evaluation, is a documentation consisting
of statements and correspondence from, to, or about Kiing during the
years 1968-1980. The bulk of the correspondence consists of that between
Kiing and the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and between
Kling and the German bishops. The book also contains a " spare narrative" to "provide both the context for the texts and a continuity between
the important documents. . . . With the original sources in a contextual
setting, the reader is enabled to understand just what was going on and
why, and also to decide which claim or counterclaim is warranted" (p.
xiv). Swidler points out that his book also provides important material
lacking in The Kung Dialogue, published by the U.S. Catholic Conference
in 1980. This documentation will provide not only a valuable insight into
the train of events but also expound important elements of Kiing's thought
(p. xiv).
In his last chapter Swidler makes it clear that he has attempted " for
the most part to play the role of the 'objective' historian ... so that the
reader could ... judge the developments accordingly " ( p. 609). He then
steps beyond the objective role of the historian and presents his own
evaluation. Kiing's difficulties with the Church are due to the fact that:
(a) he takes the historical-critical method seriously and hence is unafraid
of change; (b) he is totally honest; ( c) he writes in an understandable
manner about contemporary problems. Swidler also challenges the modus
operandi of the Doctrinal Congregation. " It falls short of the minimally
accepted canons of justice and legal procedure in contemporary Western
civilization" (p. 611). His conclusion: the documentation shows that the
measures taken against Kiing parallel the repressive measures of the
19th century Church.
This work, therefore, like Nowell's, has as its purpose to help the
reader make an objective judgment regarding Kiing, though the reader
at times (in the intervening narrative sections) will have to close his
objective eyes to interpretative comments of the author in favor of Kiing
lest he or she not be able objectively "to decide which claim or counterclaim is warranted."

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It is impossible to summarize the content of this documentation. But
several points merit mention. (1) Kling's seeming willingness to collaborate with Church authorities; (2) his persistent objection that the procedures of the Doctrinal Congregation are unjust; (3) his demand to be
presented with counter-arguments and not gratuitous assertions; ( 4) his
avowals of (a) loyalty to the Church; (b) the legitimate role of the
magisterium; ( c) the truth, value, and necessity of binding, doctrinal
statements; (d) his openness to correction; (e) his orthodoxy, and acceptance of the ancient Christo logical councils; ( 5) his pastoral concern
and ability to theologize meaningfully in and for today's situation; ( 6) his
later clarifications regarding the divinity of Christ which represent an
advance beyond statements in On Being A Christian.
However, for this reviewer several questions also emerge. (1) Are not
many of Kling's demands questionable and perhaps unreasonable, e.g. to
be allowed to inquire and teach without suspicion, to leave the judgment
to history, to have discussions on his terms? Does Kling in effect consider himself exempt from magisterial oversight? (2) Does Kling clearly
address the s'ibstance of questions put to him or does he continually
"dodge" the substantive issues by, for example, raising questions regardbg procedures. Is he truly willing to dialogue7 (3) Did some of the
very simple questions put to Kling by the German bishops and theologians
regarding the divinity of Christ really require further time for reflection
berause of the complexity of the issues involved? Was not Kling simply
being asked whether or not the S('n is as divine as the Father, and cannot
that question be answered with a simple "yes " or "no "? ( 4) Is the
meaning of Kling's statements always so obvious? Why must Kling constantly defend himself by saying that interpretations of his writings do
not represent his own intentions? ( 5) Cannot Kling (and also Swidler)
see that merely affirming the orthodoxy of one's statements does not necessarily make them orthodox? Despite the many questions raised to him,
Kling (and Swidler) cannot see that his Christol('gical statements regarding the divinity of Chist are not obviously adequate. (6) Were the German bishops unable to view Christological doctrine in categories other
than Greek metaphysical? Greeks can be Christians, but must all Christians be Greeks? Dees metaphysics equal Greek metaphysics 7 (7) Why
is Kling unable to relate in a positive way his (and the New Testament's)
functional categories with the metaphysical categories of the councils, so
as to show clearly that he has retrieved in an orth0dox fashion the binding truths of these coun°ils (and the New Testament)? Why does he
insist on pitting Greek metaphysical against functional categories7 Christians need not be Greeks, but Greeks also can be Christians. (8) Did not
the statements from both sides, especially towards the end, become highly
polemical, filled with half-truths and false accusations, and hence serve
no constructive purpose T

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155

Now for comments upon Swidler's book. (1) Given the documentation,
I question Swidler's one-sided evaluation of the Kiing case. Could he not
raise even one critical question regarding either Kling's theology or his
way of relating to both the magisterium and other theologians? Does the
documentation unambiguously show, as he seems to think, that Kling is
right, the magisterium wrong? (2) The documentation in this book is
valuable for those who wish to evaluate the Kling case as well as for
those who are interested in Kiing's theology or the questions he raises. To
both groups I recommend the book, but I urge the reader to form his or
her own judgment on the basis of the documents and issues themselves.
I end this lengthy review with three comments and six questions which
these two books (and the Kling affair) raise. Comments: (1) Unlike
Nowell and Swidler I cannot give Kiing's theology a blanket exoneration.
Kling has asked challenging questions and provided provocative answers.
That his own positions (especially regarding infallibility and the divinity
of Christ) are as orthodox as he claims is certainly not evident, not even
to many of his peers. (2) I am not convinced that Kling or his followers
have sufficiently attended to the substantive reactions to his thought, and
I fear that now the "blinders are on." (3) Unlike Nowell and Swidler
I do not believe that the evidence clearly indicates that Kling was truly
willing to collaborate and that the Church authorities and their procedures were intolerant and unjust. I do not think the case is so cut and
dried. I am not saying that the Church authorities in their statements
and their procedures left nothing to be desired. I am merely saying that
perhaps, if Kiing had been more cooperative, the results may have been
quite different. Collaboration and dialogue had always to be on his terms.
Is not that a bit unrealistic and possibly self-serving? The documentation
indicates to me that the German bishops especially were most considerate
of and compromising towards Kling. In turn, he seemed to frustrate
them at every turn.
And now some questions. (1) Has the magisterium taken seriously the
consequences of historical consciousness and the historical circumscription
of doctrinal formulas, as is noted in Mysterium ecclesiae itself? Historical
consciousness and circumscription are not the death of infallible dogmas
(as Kling seems to hold). On the contrary, with a sophisticated historical
hermeneutics, theology, preaching, and the magisterium will not only be
able to retrieve the binding truth of past doctrinal assertions but will be
able to enrich and rearticulate this truth in such a way that doctrine can
speak meaningfully to our times. Again, Greeks can be Christians, but
not all Christians must be or can be Greeks. Merely citing a Denzinger
passage does not end a theological discussion. Those who think it does
are guilty of a magisterial fundamentalism as naive and dangerous as
biblical fundamentalism. The world really was not created in six days.

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But neither is Genesis 1 wrong! (2) Must not the theologian and the
magisterium today make Herculean efforts to understand and respect each
other, to dialogue and work constructively with each other, realizing that
each is in service not of itself but of the Gospel and the Church? (3)
Has the last word been said on the relative roles and competencies of the
theologian and the magisterium? Since the last word has not yet been
said on God, I doubt whether it has been said on this topic either. Is
there not a tendency for the magisterium to dismiss the theologian or too
quickly make him or her subservient? Was this not perhaps a justifiable
fear of Kling? On the other hand, does the theologian truly recognize
the role of the magisterium? If so, what is it? (4) Does not the Kling
case raise questions as to: (a) the adequacy of curial procedures; {b)
the representation of various theologies on the Roman Doctrinal Congregation and local episcopal doctrinal committees; ( c) the relation of the
local episcopal conference to the Roman Congregations and of the local
bishop to the national conference and Roman Congregations? ( 5) Regarding Kling, would he not do well to write, a clear and detailed account
of his understanding of the relation between theology, scripture, tradition, and magisterium? (6) Regarding the Kiing affair, was not the ending a tragedy which perhaps could have been avoided? Is this the best
the Christian community can do? Does not the ending challenge the consciences of both the theologian and the magisterium? With Kling somewhat "on the shelf,'' is the Church as a whole now better off? Has a
challenging, provocative, and perhaps even necessary voice been dismissed?
My hope is that the Kiing case will in the long run benefit the whole
Church, perhaps by forcing it to deal constructively with many of the
questions raised above. Finally, I hope that, because I have myself found
it necessary to be critical of these works as well as of Kling, I have not
thereby become a member of the "football team." I really have no desire
to join in "ganging up on" Kling or anyone else!
DONALD

Washington Theological Union
Washington, D. 0.

W. BuGGERT, 0. Carm.

noo:K REVIEWS

157'

American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the
United States. By James Hennesey, S.J. New York: Oxford University Pxess, 1982. Pp. 397. $19.95.
The preparation of a comprehensive history indicates a new self-consciousness on the part of the community it is written within and about
and suggests that one era of that community's history is at an end and
another beginning. John Gilmary Shea's History of the Catholic Church
in the United States (1886-92) came at the time when it seemed that the
great dream of a church that could be both Catholic and American was
nearing fulfillment. John Tracy Ellis's .American Catholicism (1956) and
Thomas McAvoy's A Histo1·y of the Catholic in the United States came
when it seemed that the failure of American Catholics to be both Catholic
and American might be ending. Father Hennesey's study suggests a
whole new consciousness among American Catholics, a new maturity, a
new sense of place in American culture and history.
American Catholics is quite different from its predecessors in its historical methods and assumptions. Earlier historians emphasized the unity
of the American church : American Catholics presented a solid front to
the challenge of American Protestant anti-Catholicism; they were united
by shared devotions and a common loyalty to the pope; and they participated in the shared task of creating and sustaining a church in the
complicated world of the United States. The first noteworthy assumption
of this new history is that the American church has always been a complex community in which diversity has frequently erupted into bitter
conflict. Diversity has been rich indeed: American Catholics includes helpful sketches of the history of Afro-American Catholicism, of the values
and practices of the Hispanic church of the west and southwest, and of
the deep piety of Native American Catholics.
But the tensions have been sharp as well. The many ethnic groups
which contributed rich and ancient traditions to the shaping of American
Catholicism usually resented and mistrusted each other; in some cases,
long and debilitating rivalries developed. Clergy and laity have often
competed for authority and power and have diverged in their understandings of what is best for a particular community. The trustee controversies
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the best known
examples of this tension, but there have been many others. Hispanic
Catholics of the southwest suspected that the missionaries sent to them
by the American hierarchy were there to impose a foreign culture on
them. Catholics found themselves on both sides of the Civil War, when
regional loyalties eclipsed their shared faith. White Catholics, as Hennesey
unflinchingly shows, have not welcomed Black Catholics into their

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BOOK REVIEWS

churches. Nor has the intellectual life of American Catholics been homogeneous: Hennesey's complex picture of American Catholicism inc:udes
the avant garde clergy who constituted a modernist school in New York
City in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This complexity reveals
the confidence of Hennesey's history : twenty years ago, these conflicts
would not have been mentioned, let alone treated so seriously and calmly.
This church took shape in an equally complicated society. Competition,
hostility, and, much more rarely, cooperation characterized the relations
between Catholics and Protestants in a nation which had established a
Protestant social consensus in place of an established church. The United
States is anti-Catholic in its deepest roots and American Catholic historians before Hennesey tended to construct their histories around this
reality. Marked as foreign by the styles of its devotion and the national
origins of its congTegations, American Catholicism struggled along as a
minority faith in a Protestant land.
Hennesey's second major historiographical assumption is his departure
from this perspective. Hennesey's Catholics have a claim on the United
States. American Catholics is not a statement from the ghetto, but a reflection of the central economic and social place that Catholics now occupy
in the United States. This centrality is taken for granted. The consciousness that Hennesey describes as nascent in the church of the 1920s has
come to fruition today: "The American Catholic community throughout
its many layered being grew in self-assurance and acquired a sense of
chosenness theretofore reserved in America for those with better Puritan
credentials."
Although he discusses anti-Catholicism throughout and emphasizes its
persistent importance, extending well into this century, Hennesey locates
the shaping dynamic of the American church in its endeavor to create a
community that would be both Catholic and American. The history of
the American church has been determined by its own needs and goals,
not by a hostile environment. In his discussion of Catholic history in the
ante bellum period, a heyday of xenophobic anti-Catholicism, Hennesey
observes, "But American Catholicism's more pressing problems were internal." His focus is kept on this internal dynamic and development,
beginning with John Carroll's great dream of a truly American church
in the colonial period right through to the triumph of John Courtney
Murray at the Second Vatican Council.
Rome has not always agreed with American Catholicism's positive selfassessment, however. For much of its modern history, American Catholicism has smarted from the rebukes delivered by the pope during the
Americanist controversy. Roman officials, who felt that the United States
had reaped the whirlwind of religious anarchy that they at least had
known was lurking in the Reformation, did not share the American

:aooK REVIEWS

159'

church's enthusiasm for the United States or for the Catholicism that
took shape here. Romans had difficulty understanding the special needs
and requirements of the American church. As Hennesey notes of American-Roman relations in the nineteenth century, "American ideas and concerns did not always translate easily into European idiom and were frequently misunderstood by those whose horizons were bounded by the
Adriatic and Tyrhennian seas."
This incongruence between Rome's understandings and American
Catholic realities and self-perceptions is the third assumption governing
Hennesey's study. Rome occupies an interesting place in this history.
It is there, on the other side of a large ocean, firm in its misperceptions
of American Catholics and their country. Rome intervenes early in the
history of the Catholic community in the United States to undermine
Carroll's plans for a genuinely American church and to secure the dependence of American Catholics on Propaganda Fide. But Roman officials
never fully appreciated the precariousness of Protestant-Catholic relations here and so they fumbled badly at times. They publicly reminded
American Catholics that the separation of church and state was tolerable,
but that the establishment of the church was still the best way to order
society; they almost outlawed the Knights of Labor, misunderstanding
the nature of the organization. These off-stage authorities could also be
manipulated by clever and well-connected American Catholics engaged in
controversies the Romans often could not understand but chose to participate in for their own reasons. On their part, American prelates have
often jealously guarded the power they did have and struggled to keep
Rome an ocean away. It was this characteristic combination of cultural
misunderstanding and power struggle that drove the Americans' protracted campaign to prevent the arrival of an apostolic delegate in Washington at the end of the nineteenth century, a campaign so resolute that
Leo XIII asked an American priest in Rome, " Why don't they want the
Pope there 'I "
In its broadest strokes, then, .American Catholics tells the story of a
complex church taking shape in accordance with its own inner goals and
needs and in response to a changing nation. This is not, however, to say
that Hennesey has written a celebration or an apologetic. His history,
rooted as it is in the confidence and security of contemporary American
Catholics, adopts an open and critical attitude towards the history of
the American church. This is seen most clearly in Hennesey's presentation of Catholic participation in the American labor movement. Catholic labor activism was one of the glories of the earlier histories: the
church of working class immigrants had supported its people in their
struggle for decent wages and working conditions. IIennesey tells this
in the nice harmony between the firm anti-socialist bias of late 19th ·

160

BOOK REVIEWS

story too, but he is careful to qualify it: "The real Catholic impact was
century Catholic teaching . . . and the upwardly mobile aspirations of
Catholic immigrants, who saw themselves as incipient capitalists, not as
members· of a proletariat." Catholics exerted a powerfully conservative
influence on the development of American labor unions. This is an area
of American Catholic history that demands the attention of social historians; Hennesey's balanced assessments are useful places to begin.
On some questions, however, Hennesey shares the assumptions of his
predecessors. Surprisingly, despite his attention to the many conflicts
that troubled the American community, Hennesey makes no mention of
class conflict. His picture of a complex community includes economic
diversity, but rich and poor seem at peace in the same church, where, it
has long been assumed, a common faith obliterated class rivalries and
struggles. Rich Catholics, always deemed a sign of Catholicism's success on the American scene, willingly share the burdens of a poor church
in the traditional view.
One of the most intense periods of class conflict in the American church
was the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hennesey sees this
conflict as ethnic, the reaction of new immigrant Catholics to the " hibernarchy" of the American church. But class conflict underlay and fired
the ethnic hostilities. Italian and Polish immigrants competed with Irish
and German Catholics for jobs. The new immigrants were sometimes
used as strike-breakers; they often came to resent the authority of Irish
and German supervisors. Many Irish Americans had moved solidly into
the middle and upper classes by this time (although Catholic historians
have long overlooked the fact that Irish immigrants remained an important element of the American poor into the twentieth century), and they
viewed the arrival of this European proletariat with the same apprehension and dread as non-Catholic Americans did. As a result, one· of the
functions of the newly forming Catholic social work organizations of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to make the immigrant
laboring Catholics safe for American society, to secure their conformity
to American social and economic values and to eliminate the threat of
radicalism in the immigrant colonies. One participant in the first conference of Catholic Charities warned that "of its very nature, poverty,
notably acute poverty, easily rouses passions and suggests vices, which
are the next step to discarding the faith; such as discontent, seditiousness,
theft, gambling, intemperance, uncleanliness and immorality." Many of
the participants at this conference echoed these themes of distaste for and
fear of the immigrant poor. The conservative influence. of Catholics on
the American labor movement might have its roots in the ideology revealed in this ·conflict between a middle class church and the working
class immigrants. .·

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161

Hennesey also shares the assumptions of his predecessors in the matter
of Italian American Catholicism. Since the publication in 1946 of Henry
Browne's important essay, " The ' Italian Problem' in the Catholic Church
of the United States, 1880-1900," American Catholic scholars have never
known quite what to do with Italian American Catholics. For many
years, a debate raged in the church over whether or not these immigrants
could even be considered Catholics. In part, a methodological assumption
is at the heart of this failure of understanding. American Catholic
scholars have assumed that what is " religious " or " Catholic " is what
takes place inside a church and so they have tried to study Italian Americans with church-oriented criteria. The result is that Italians appear to
be very bad Catholics in the early twentieth century. Their faith or
spirituality simply cannot be measured with reference to church attendance or support for Catholic education. But the assumption, repeated by
Hennesey, that Italians were therefore ignorant of religion until the
American church launched an " evangelization effort"· is to misunderstand
quite profoundly the nature of Italian American history and religion.
These same Italians gathered in huge public devotions, to the Madonna
or to various popular saints; these feste combined solemn religious devotion with the atmosphere of a party, a combination Italians would not
separate even at the insistence of the American church. Other Amerfoan
Catholics thought the Italians were pagans, and this judgment has not
been altered by historians. But it was in such " non-liturgical" (an unhelpful and misleading term for historians) celebrations that Italians revealed their faith and passed it on to their children. While Italians filled
the streets of New York, New Haven, Waterbury, Philadelphia, Youngstown, and other northern industrial cities displaying the most fervent
spirituality, American Catholic scholars have been walking through empty
churches and assuming that, because the churches were not full, Italians
were not religious.
Hennesey's massively comprehensive history does include references to
popular spirituality, but these are necessarily brief. Popular history often
seems overwhelmed by the history of the institution. Hennesey has told
the latter story with as much detail and specificity as possible and has
prepared the way for a more intimate popular history of American Catholics by his careful attention to the full variety of the American community. Subsequent studies will be made much easier by Father Hennesey's book. .American Catholics is rich in suggestions for further research: it will inspire and excite future American Catholic historians.
Father Hennesey has written a magnificent survey of the history of
American Catholics, an essential work, a vital contribution to the historiography of American Catholics.
Fordham University
New Yor%

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