Volume 12, Number 7 · April 10, 1969
Is There Hope for Religion?
By J.M. Cameron
Mystics and Zen Masters
by Thomas Merton
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 303 pp., $5.50
Theology of Hope
by Jürgen Moltmann
Harper & Row, 342 pp., $8.50
Christian theology in the twentieth century has faced two crises and now faces a third. First, the presuppositions of liberal theology—primarily, that an ethical teacher, the 'historical' Jesus, could be detached from the framework of eschatology and the miraculous within which he is presented in the Gospels—were shown to be without historical foundation. To adapt Newman's remark that whatever historical Christianity may have been it was certainly not Protestantism: whatever the preaching of the earliest Christians may have been it was certainly not liberal Christianity. The liberal Christian was shot and stuffed by Schweitzer in his Quest of the Historical Jesus at the beginning of the century. Granted there is no single portrait that can be detached from the figure presented as Messianic, the fulfillment of prophecy, the preacher of an eschatology, what then are we to think of this figure, so strange and commanding and yet so discordant with how we take the course of the world to be?
Review, 3240 words
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