Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective
Maguire, Daniel C.
Books: A THEOCENTRIC APPROACH ETHICS FROM A THEOCENTRIC PERSPECTIVE VOLUME ONE: THEOLOGY AND ETHICS James M. Gustafson University of Chicago, $20, 345 pp. Daniel C. Maguire To embark upon...
...Christian theology, he claims, has been too intent on seeing history as the sacrament of God's purposes rather than nature...
...In no meaningful way can this theocentric and not a little eccentric God say: "I have called you friends...
...He defends the reformability of historically conditioned religious dogmas...
...Gustafson comes to this theocentric God by way of nature...
...John 15:15) This God, to whom Gustafson assigns male gender, views us as "instruments" in his service, plans ultimate cosmic extinction for us, and then wants us to glorify and celebrate his grandeur...
...Matthew 23;37) This is not a God who promises that the end of human life is not death but resurrection...
...Post-mortem survival is too anthropocentric for Gustafson's theocentric ethics...
...While departing with many from a narrow Chalcedonic christology, (such incarnation is the essence of anthropocentrism) Gustafson replaces it with no christology...
...His kind of theocentrism is tendentially quietistic...
...His contention is that both Christian ethics and much of Western philosophical ethics have made humankind (" man," in his term) the measure of all things...
...How do persons reassess their ultimate end in the face of this theocentric and not anthropocentric God...
...It means, he- allows, that "one moves closer to some aspects of the Stoic tradition than most of Christian theology and ethics has...
...He has given us a serious work meriting serious attention...
...Theologians in this traditional understanding seek ways of finding a "happy coincidence between the divine law and what fulfills human life...
...By accepting that their chief end is not salvation but simply to honor, serve, glorify, and celebrate God "as the Calvinists have always said but not always believed and practiced...
...God is not nearly as "homocentrie" or "anthropocentric" as we had assumed...
...It is, therefore, an intellectual event when someone reaches for the radical metaphors and myths that sustain a dominant religious worldview and subjects them to bold scrutiny...
...There will be no surprises for death...
...Gustafson indulges no hopes beyond current scientific promises...
...Clearly the implications of this Gus-tafsonian shift are seismic...
...It is Gustafson's purpose to save us from our "egocentric predicament...
...He also finds no solace in Christian hope for immortality...
...This is not a "God of hope...
...Daniel C. Maguire To embark upon elementary theological explanation is a very personal and generously self-revealing endeavor...
...For one thing, Gustafson gives us more badspel than gospel...
...Christian es-chatology, a theme used in our time to create conditions of hope for oppressed persons in the world as well as for those who aspire to immortality, must be questioned...
...Indeed, it may, in the opinion of many, put him outside recognizably Christian perspectives...
...Much theology settles for analysis of waves, leaving unexamined the unseen currents that define our direction and destiny...
...Gustafson earnestly departs from this tradition of "happy coincidence...
...It is also rare...
...He has not undertaken previously a work of such scope nor, he says, will he do so again...
...Gustafson, it seems, has transferred "the egocentric predicament" from us to God...
...This is not a God who wants to gather us protectively as the mother hen would cherish her little ones...
...He notes frequently in the volume the scientifically predicted demise of the sun and this solar system some billions of years down the trail...
...The 'Long Friday,' as the Scandinavians call what we call 'Good Friday,' is truer to human experience than the superficial Easters to which instrumental pieties of the present age seem to point...
...The ultimate unconcern of this God could be catching...
...Death and nature will be stunned...
...These criticisms of the foundational assumptions of this work must not blot out many good things in the book...
...Angelic choirs do not attend this book singing tidings of great joy...
...Its victory is assured and nature, as the arbiter of our hopes, enjoys hegemonic imperturbability...
...This total death is our terrestrial and cosmic destiny and what it says of "the will of God" stirs more than a Calvinistic gloom in Gustafson's theological soul...
...Jesus gets lost in the theocentric shuffle...
...Is it patently absurd to hope that science which now reveals the sun's prospective end will, some billions of years from now, provide us the travel means to escape its terminal apocalypse or even the means to indefinitely refuel solar power...
...Romans 15:13) This God seems to have no more ultimate concern for us than he had for the dinosaurs...
...And yet, ultimately, his evacuation of hope seems his undoing...
...Hope is the parent of social justice and reform...
...One entertains the possibility that the 'law of God' does not guarantee benefits to oneself, to the perceived interests and good of one's community, or even to the human species as a whole...
...Like the natural-law ethicists he criticizes, he is too narrowly physicalist and partial in his assumptions...
...Christian hope, I would urge, calls us to reach with stubborn confidence for the possibilities that lie beyond all current orthodoxies, scientific and theological, and to divinize no current state of any question...
...He cites the vacuity of some of the "philosophy of theology" that parades as hermeneutics...
...Jesus is little consolation in all of this...
...He does not sing with the ancient Christian hymn, Dies Irae: "mors stupebit et natura...
...To do so, as he admits, is no minor move for a Christian theologian...
...He criticizes ethical dogmatism and false absolutism...
...Gustafson calls for a stress on nature as well as on history, prescribing, specifically, some heliocentric correctives for historicized Christianity...
...He chastises the self-righteousness of some social reform movements...
...That hope may be illusory but the surprises of both history and nature often support it in their fashion...
...What's to celebrate...
...When the author of such a venture is a well-known theologian whose work is admired by many, the significance of the event is accentuated...
...To base one's "theocentric" ethics on the contention that we have been strapped with a "Ptolemaic religion in a Copernican universe," signals an epochal change...
...He signals (without developing) the role of affect in ethical epistemology...
...James Gustafson's volume under review is the product of thirty years of energetic labor in the field of theological ethics...
...He criticizes the rationalistic density of much philosophical ethics...
Vol. 109 • July 1982 • No. 13
