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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Students of Karl Barth will recognize my title immediately: it is a paraphrase of Barth's own effort to understand Rudolf Bultmann. Like Barth, I seek really to understand, not to evade or repudiate; and really to seek, not to grasp insight as the better tool to punish the opponent. But like Barth again, I may find understanding an elusive goal. For I am one of those Christians Kaufman believes at odds with her own age.
1 Kaufman, Gordon, In Face of Mystery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 47, 48.Google Scholar
2 Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, Hoskyns, E. C., trans. London: Oxford University Press, 1950Google Scholar/Der Römerbrief, München: Chr. Kaiser, 1922Google Scholar; Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963.Google Scholar
3 Thomas Aquinas often uses such turns of phrase: Summa Theologica 1.2 q 109, art 1, 7, 9; q112, art5.
4 Vaihinger, Hans, Die Philosophie des als ob, Leipzig: F Meiner, 1922Google Scholar, The Philosophy of “As If”, Ogden, C K, trans. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968Google Scholar; James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Penguin Books, 1982.Google Scholar
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6 Rahner, Karl, The Foundations of Christian Faith, Dych, Wm, trans. New York: Seabury Press, 1978Google Scholar, Grundkurs des Glaubens, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1976.Google Scholar
7 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973Google Scholar; Lindbeck, George, A Theory of Doctrine, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984.Google Scholar
8 See for example Kaufman's defense of a constructed realism in the notes to Chapter 23, ‘Faith in God’, numbers 8 and 9, pp. 485–487.
9 Tanner, Kathryn, The Politics of God, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, Chapter 2.Google Scholar
10 For a carefully argued defense of this point see Baker, Lynne Rudder, Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar, particularly in her discussion of ‘Practical Realism’, Chapter 1 and Chapter 8.
11 Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God’ in Faith and Rationality, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, pp. 16–93Google Scholar, especially Part IV, pp.73–91.
12 Frei, Hans, Types of Christian Theology, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pp 28–30.Google Scholar
13 D W Winnicott and other theorists of the Object Relation school of psychoanalysis often use such language to describe the ‘transitional space’ from which culture emerges. In Winnicott's terms, cultural objects, from our childhood play to complex high culture, is both created and found, a paradox, ‘Winnicott's paradox’. Though Kaufman may be intrigued by such parallels, he would lodge a protest, I think, against their systematic certainty and ‘totalizing’ aims.
14 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine; Frei, Hans, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974Google Scholar; Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology:
14 The Gospel as Narrated Promise, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985Google Scholar; Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, Green, G., ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987Google Scholar. Though Lindbeck has been accused of this form of insularity and antirealism, he defends a form of realism, and seeks to further ecumenical dialogue, not self-assertion. It may well be however that one's aims are not one's achievements.
15 See van Inwagen, Peter, ‘Non est Hick’ in God, Knowledge and Mystery, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 191–216Google Scholar, for a reliance upon Original Sin in the analysis of Christian relation to world religions.
16 So too argues Kathryn Tanner in Politics of God, Chapters 2 and 6, about the ground of tolerance in the transcendence of God.
