An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt

Theology Today, Jan 2005 by Ogden, Schubert M

An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt By James M. Gustafson Minneapolis, Fortress, 2004. 119 pp. $15.00.

This is, in an important way, a strange book and, to this reviewer, not a satisfying one. True, readers will not find it strange in many ways if they have followed James M. Gustaf son's writings, especially those occasioned by his more recent polemic against theological trends variously called (and self-styled as) "postliberal theology," "the new Yale theology," "unapologetic theology," and "radical orthodoxy." Continuing that polemic, even if by reiterating it more than developing it, he once again makes his fervent appeal to the project of classic liberal Protestant theology over against all of these currently fashionable attempts to overcome "liberalism." All this will be familiar enough. What readers may well find as strange as I do is the peculiar way in which Gustafson makes his appeal in this book.

That way may well appear to be indicated by what he speaks of as, respectively, the book's "descriptive axiom," its "analytical inquiry" or "analytic task," and its "normative question." By the first, Gustafson means the descriptive statement, which he takes to be noncontroversial, that Christian theology and ethics "address or account for the same matters that secular disciplines do." Assuming this axiom, he proceeds (secondly) to ask analytically about "the traffic that goes on in the intersections when different disciplines address the same subject, and more particularly how theologians and moralists relate their work to other accounts." At once the product and the instrument of this analysis is the ideal typology Gustafson develops to distinguish three main ways in which theologians and moralists, in fact, establish these relationships. The first two of these ways are the respective extremes; the third, the mean between them. That is to say, theologians and ethicists either (1) reject evidences and theories from other disciplines, (2) absorb and are determined by them, or (3) in some way accommodate them (whether as limiting, or ruling out, what cannot be said theologically and ethically or as permitting, or ruling in, what can be said). Beyond this analytic task, however, is (thirdly) the normative question, which Gustafson formulates as asking, "What criteria ought theology, ethics, and other religious discourse use in rejecting, absorbing, or accommodating information and theories from nontheological disciplines and discourse?"

This seems to be the way in which Gustafson proposes to proceed. Yet, what is strange about his book is that he does not, in fact, pursue it. On the contrary, readers will look in vain for any place where Gustafson directly and explicitly addresses his own normative question, notwithstanding the fact that his book's title and subtitle clearly announce that it is nothing if not a normative inquiry, rather than a merely descriptive or analytical one. Gustafson's extensive criticisms of others' positions all beg the very question he nowhere addresses.

This is not to say, of course, that what he does do, critically as well as analytically, cannot be read by many readers of this journal, lay as well as professional, with profit and appreciation. But it may help to explain why, at least to this reader, the book is as unsatisfying as it is strange. I say "help to explain," because there are a number of more obvious, if less important, reasons why it fails to satisfy: among others, its repetitiveness and a whole variety of infelicities-from typos and inaccurate quotations, through misnamed persons and misdated events, to confusing employment of its own principal typology by referring to "absorption" when what is evidently called for is "accommodation."

Gustafson speaks more than once of postmodern dismissals of "the Enlightenment project" as a "mantra" of the theologies he so sharply criticizes as evasive and sectarian. But I fear that, unless and until he finally addresses his own normative question as directly and explicitly as his argument requires, Gustafson's own appeals to the continuing relevance and validity of the liberal theological project can be only too easily dismissed as simply a mantra from the other side.

SCHUBERT M. OGDEN

Rollinsville, CO