Events of Grace: Naturalism, Existentialism, and Theology.

Taliaferro, Charles ; GUNN, ALBERT E.

HARDWICK, Charley D. Events of Grace: Naturalism, Existentialism, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi + 309 pp. Cloth, $54.95--Is Christian faith compatible with a thoroughgoing naturalist view of the cosmos? Hardwick thinks so, and in this book he articulates and defends a naturalist form of Christianity. Hardwick argues that Christianity is not committed to the truth of theism, nor to any view that there is a God who created and redeems the cosmos through an incarnation. Instead, Christian faith witnesses to "events of grace" in which believers develop an "openness to being" (p. 154). "To live a life of faith is to live with a fundamental openness toward the future" (p. 156). This openness to being and the future is compatible with the denial that God exists, Jesus is the incarnate God-man, and other components of the various creeds of Christian tradition. While Hardwick does not think there is a God from a scientific or metaphysical point of view, he endeavors to read the Christian claim "God exists" as the referral to, and the affirmation of, a valuable way of life.

Hardwick develops his position on two fronts. One project is simply to spell out a version of naturalistic physicalism that is not eliminative nor reductive. That is, Hardwick wants to resist the most radical of naturalist projects advanced by the Churchlands, Quine, and others who argue that there are only physical events and therefore no mental states whatever. A more modest and popular naturalism recognizes our mental life but construes this as a feature of the material world. In outlining a moderate version of naturalism, Hardwick relies heavily on work by John Post. Hardwick then goes on to analyze Christian faith in fundamentally ethical terms. Christianity is grounded and defined in values that are respectable from a naturalistic point of view. "I am proposing to interpret the Christian confession of faith as a seeing-as for which `God' functions as a meta-assertion expressing a theistic set of values" (p. 75). So, while theism is rejected in metaphysics and science, there remains a "naturalistic theism" that is cast in terms of what Hardwick refers to as "a complex structure of valuing" (p. 75). Understood in this valuational sense, Hardwick thinks one can affirm God's existence: "As a meta-assertion for a valuing stance (a seeing- and experiencing-as), `God exists' can be true because determined by physical fact" (p. 115). This is secured despite the fact that "`God' does not refer. God is not an entity in the ontological inventory, nor is God even the universe as a whole" (p. 69).

Events of Grace is a bold project, designed to challenge what Hardwick sees as an uncritical dismissal of naturalism by theologians. "Theologians too readily--and too facilely--dismiss philosophical naturalism" (p. xi). The book does not contain a defense of naturalism or an in depth critique of theism, though there are many claims that certain features of classical Christian faith are unacceptable. Hardwick's work may best be seen as a constructive endeavor to see what may be salvaged of traditional Christianity in the wake of contemporary naturalism. By his lights, quite a lot of Christianity may be left standing. The book concludes with an approving citation of Romans 8:38-9, and the affirmation that "Faith knows that it may reside even under the shadow of dying in the promise of God's justifying grace" (p. 287). Indeed, in the Preface Hardwick identifies one of the aims of his book as contributing to the ministerial call to the care of souls. "The single audience I am most in mind to reach are those responsible for training candidates for the Christian ministry of the care of souls" (p. xi).

Despite Hardwick's considerable theological sophistication, it may still be wondered how it is that one can commend the care of souls (in traditional language, the Cura Animarum) when one does not believe that there are souls. Perhaps talk of souls may be rendered as a metaphorical way of caring for people, but it is less clear how references to God by Christians may be analyzed in a way that does not involve the belief that there actually is a God who may be referred to (whether God is understood in terms of theism, panentheism, pantheism, or monism). The quandary of naturalistic Christianity is akin to other naturalist projects in the philosophical literature. Consider Quine's naturalistic epistemology. The advent of epistemological naturalism has been read by many of Quine's critics not as a re-formation of epistemology, but as its dismissal. Hardwick's own project faces the similar challenge. If naturalism is reasonable, is it more reasonable to believe that Christianity is in fundamental error, or to conclude with Hardwick that Christianity is still viable in its value-laden approach to life? In the end, Hardwick's book may provide some testimony of the appeal of Christianity, for it is evident that Hardwick wants to retain some form of Christianity notwithstanding the loss of what many believers and theologians have historically assumed to be its central theistic claim.

Hardwick's dismissal of some traditional Christian convictions is passionate. He castigates the belief in an afterlife as "mythological," "unedifying," "quite out of place for Christianity," the result of "a massive denial of the reality of death, the childish affirmation that we really do not die," "suspiciously self-serving," and in light of Christianity's repudiation of egoism, "it is utterly implausible ... that [Christianity] also promises a subjective survival of self that offers solace and encouragement to some of our most egoistic impulses" (pp. 13, 22, 286). Yet why think any of that is true? In Events of Grace, Hardwick does not argue for the falsehood of theism nor for the incoherence or nonexistence of an afterlife; these are assumed in his text. If, contra Hardwick, one thinks an afterlife is intelligible and that there is an all-good, all-loving, and all-powerful God, why should anyone think it egotistical to believe or hope that this God may bring all who die into communion with God after death? If I care about David--a friend who died when I began writing this re view--and wish him to flourish with God, why construe this desire as egotistical, childish, self-serving, and utterly implausible? I would think, rather, that such desire is part of the whole idea of what is involved in loving another person. This desire may surely be in play in the face of fully recognizing "the reality of death." It is the reality of death that gives the desire its shape.

Hardwick cites Camus's existentialism in the Myth of Sisyphus approvingly. Yet witness Camus's own lamentation of the ill of a premature death. Was Camus's lament somehow childish? Or consider Simone de Beauvoir's rage against death. I do not read anything childish nor egotistical in their desire for life. Hardwick's recurrent theme that the belief in an afterlife is not fitting is grounded on his view that "At the prophetic center of Christianity is the critique of egoism, and salvation is conceived of its overcoming" (p. 286). Yet note that this classical rejection of egoism is historically most frequently grounded in classical theistic convictions. Christian ethicists have argued that we should be humble for, after all, we did not make ourselves or God; God made us. Moreover, we should be humble for decay and death comes to us all, and yet God in Christ will deliver us to a new life of openness not simply to "the future" but to a loving communion with God, our Maker and Redeemer.

This book makes an important contribution to the debate over naturalism and Christianity. Indeed, the debate that Hardwick's book addresses is among the most important in the history of ideas and at the core of philosophy of religion. Hardwick may be correct that theologians too easily dismiss naturalism. It needs to be added, however, that there are important philosophers who think that naturalism is too readily accepted in the philosophical and theological literature as well. Naturalism, with all its variations, is a powerful philosophical system. Despite all that, there are some legitimate objections to it that stem from philosophy of mind and metaphysics, objections that should give us doubts about concluding that it is the only game in town.

Charles Taliaferro, St. Olaf College.