The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong.

Cunningham, David S.

By William C. Placher. Louisville: Westminster/ Knox, 1996. Pp. xii + 222. $19.95.

Contemporary theologians seem to agree that, at some point, "thinking about God went wrong"; but they typically locate this misstep among premodern writers (Augustine, Thomas, and the Reformers get most of the blame). In contrast, Placher rightly recognizes that the real watershed took place in the modern era, when the transcendence of God and the reality of grace were "domesticated" into something that human beings could analyze and control.

While other recent commentators have relied primarily on secondary sources (and have thus read pre-Enlightenment thinkers through modern lenses), P. begins with the texts of Thomas, Luther, and Calvin. He shows that all three had a tremendous sense of God's mystery; God cannot be fully comprehended, and yet we still feel compelled to speak. And all three recognized that the assurance of our salvation was located in God's gracious work in Christ. These chapters are well executed, and the one on Thomas is especially commendable: it provides a fine summary of the argument, recently developed by David Burrell, Nicholas Lash, and Bruce Marshall among others, that Thomas was not the logical positivist that neo-Thomism has made him out to be, but rather had a healthy respect for the ultimate inadequacy of all our language for God.

These accounts are followed by two chapters that narrate the domestication of modern thought about God. Its mysterious multiplicity, brought into focus by Christ, was displaced by a generic and systematized claim to univocal comprehensibility. This occurred not only among philosophers (Descartes and Leibniz), but also among theologians, both Catholic (e.g. Cajetan and Sudrez, who systematized and narrowed Thomas's observations on analogy) and Protestant (e.g. Quenstedt and Turretin, who sought to turn the profoundly tentative theologies of the Reformers into straight-laced, logical systems that would fit the tenor of the times). In addition, the radical depth of God's grace was domesticated by those who urged introspective piety and moral order--Pietists, Puritans, and Jansenists.

These shifts led to "contrastive" understandings of God and grace, making them into zero-sum games: transcendence was played off against immanence, and human activity was thought to be inversely related to that of God. The theological results were disastrous: partisans lined up to champion either God or the world (e.g. in controversies about miracles and about the problem of evil), and a number of quasi-Pelagian theologies were reborn (Molina, Arminius, and the so-called "federal" theology). And of course, the most complex and mysterious aspect of premodern thinking about God--its thoroughly trinitarian character--almost disappeared from Christian theology.

In two final chapters, P. assays implications for contemporary theology. He does not advocate a purely negative theology, but does seek to recover the premodern ability to hold together those elements of God's nature and activity that the Enlightenment deemed "contradictory" or "mutually exclusive" (e.g. divine foreknowledge and human freedom, God's grace and our actions). P. draws on resources offered by theologies both postliberal (Frei, Lindbeck) and hermeneutical (Ricoeur). These chapters include fine discussions of revelation, sin and grace, and theodicy.

P.'s argument is thoroughly persuasive. Contemporary theology has been extraordinarily impoverished by its slavish devotion to certain Enlightenment idols. While the postmodern critique has alerted us to this malady, it has not always oriented us toward truly theological cures. This book does so. Its flaws are few and minor: an occasional reference to an unproblematized concept of "truth," a slightly excessive deference to Calvin and Luther on free will. It also might have profited from an expansion of its suggestive comments on Calvin's rhetoric to a more thorough engagement with the rhetorical tradition, which was so thoroughly interwoven with premodern theology (and so thoroughly marginalized in the Enlightenment).

But these are tiny quibbles; the book is a fine success. Not only is its argument clear, coherent, and (to my mind) correct; it is also written in a thoroughly readable style. P.'s language for God is inclusive but never cumbersome, and he offers numerous concrete examples (especially when the going gets philosophically tough). Students should find it quite digestible; indeed, if it could be placed in the hands of every advanced seminarian and beginning graduate student, both the academy and the Church would be very much "enlightened."