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Book Review: God and Man

sympathetic hearing, as, e.g., in his reservations on the attempt of Moltmann and Pannenberg to make hope the principle of theology (chap. 5), a project given a qualified Catholic expression by Schillebeeckx in his God the Future of Man. Such an endeavor, while cutting across the "Jesus of history-Christ of faith" controversy, merely substitutes the "God out ahead of us" for the "God above us," categories of the future and of promise for those of logos and disclosure, thereby subordinating to hope not only faith but charity as well. A chapter entitled "Is Faith Defenseless?" offers what amounts to a new curriculum for what used to be known as "apologetics." In sharp opposition to Bultmann's insistence that man "must realise that he possesses nothing on the basis of which he could believe" (Kerygma und Mythos, cited on p. 28), F. sees faith as both admitting and demanding some grounding outside of itself: "If everything were a matter of belief, then there would be no faith at all" (p. 36). His own approach views the credibility of faith as analogous to the question of the foundations of love: faith, in short, is grounded in an act of trust and surrender to a person, but this latter in turn is further grounded in the "authority and the authenticity, and thus in the insight and the knowledge, of him who is believed" (p. 34). Critically speaking, this may satisfy for faith in general but suggests certain deeper underlying difficulties where faith in God is concerned. Seemingly the situation today is one in which the God-question, i.e., the question of the very reality of God, grounds every possible Christian faith-act. As Schubert Ogden puts it, it is "not one problem among several others, [but] the only problem there is." F.'s procedure, in a later section on atheism, focuses on the "implicit theism" in the actual good will of so many modern nonbelievers, thereby neutralizing the explicit denials of God in the realm of theory and ideas. This explains somewhat the fact that he himself rests content with the "co-affirmation of the Unconditioned" as adequate basis for the affirmation of God. But even more radically, the existence of God as a praeambulum fidei reduces itself back to the prior question concerning the very possibility of any kind of religious discourse, i.e., beyond the problem of truth to that of meaning itself. F. does not pursue matters that far, but an author cannot be taken to task for not writing a different kind of book than the one he intended.