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Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology, by Kurt Buhring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 262 pp. $79.95 (c); $40.00 (p).
Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology is a scholarly text, geared toward, but not written exclusively for teachers and students of theology, religion, and ethics. Anyone who has ever struggled with reconciling belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God with the enormity of evil or random suffering, or asked the “Why do bad things happen to good people?” question, is wrestling as Buhring does in this work with the issue of theodicy, the branch of theology and philosophy that deals with the problem of the existence of evil. The existential insecurity that can result is derived from cognitive dissonance between our understanding of who or what God is, who we are in relationship to God, and our responsibility as human beings for what happens to us.
Readers from other disciplines, with an interest in the foundation, form, and content of ideas that have contributed to social policy, can derive some benefit from Buhring’s in-depth analyses of the work of the theologians that he has chosen to interrogate for this study. His primary thinkers, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim and the supporting cast of eight theologians included in the text, in discussing theodicy, have raised issues and concerns of broad applicability, well beyond the sphere of religion.
Within this deceptively compact text, Buhring uses an efficient “compare and contrast” strategy to explain some rather complex liberative theologies, alongside his distinctive perspective on the nature of God, suffering, and evil that he describes as humanocentric theism. He borrows the term from theologian William R. Jones, without necessarily rejecting out of hand, as Jones does, an underlying methodological and theological assumption of an all good and all powerful God. Chapters 2 and 4 provide the essence of the theologies that he has selected from his primary pillars, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim respectively, while chapters 3 and 5 speak to critiques and affirmations of Cone and Fackenheim from the eight theologians (described here as secondary thinkers) that are as broad and balanced as Buhring promises in Chapter 1.
From the very beginning Buhring makes it clear that in proposing humanocentric theism as his response to the “theodicy question” he is “affirm[ing] the reality of evil, the goodness of God, and reinterpret[ing] the nature of God’s power” (p. 7). Like Fackenheim, who has written extensively on post-Holocaust Jewish theology, and James Cone, the foremost apologist for Black Theology in the United States, Buhring maintains that social, cultural, and historical forces are inseparable from the form and content of one’s theology. To that end, with no shortage of events with which to illustrate the challenge that theodicy presents to belief in a benevolent and all powerful God, Buhring chooses two of the more extreme examples that, as he says, “so profoundly rupture[s] our conceptions of God” (p. 5). It is certainly likely that the notion of God for people of faith affected directly and indirectly by the horrific events of the Shoah or genocide of approximately six million Jews, and the enslavement and oppression of African Americans caused in part by continuing individual and systemic racism, would, at the very least, have undergone a metamorphosis.
Chapter 2 is a careful analysis of James Cone’s theology, which Buhring describes as a “response to the problem of suffering and moral evil more than …a solution” (p. 59). He supports Cone’s insistence on humanity’s responsibility to seek justice but finds the weight that Cone places on divine power in that process “dominating and patriarchal” (p. 60). He follows a similar method in Chapter 4, in explaining Emil Fackenheim’s advocacy of the need for Jews to endure and resist evil. Resistance is a theme that runs through Fackenheim, and Buhring highlights that by citing three of Fackenheim’s examples of contemporary resistance in response to the commanding presence of God. These include mad midrash, the struggle for the existence of the state of Israel, and tikkun olam, the mending of the world. Mad midrash “chooses to fully encounter the absurdity and perversity of existence lived after Auschwitz and, not to transcend these obstacles, but to transfigure them” (p. 121).
The theological synthesis developed from the work of the primary thinkers, Fackenheim and Cone, is complemented by skillful and thoughtful accounts from a deliberately diverse group of Black and Jewish theologians including William R. Jones mentioned earlier, Anthony Pinn, Richard Rubenstein, and Melissa Raphael. Buhring courageously places this diverse group of thinkers “in conversation with” his primary theologians, Cone and Fackenheim, in chapters 3 and 5; courageous because the range of perspectives and theological positions—humanism, feminism, theism—is breathtaking. Yet, he is able to provide us with nuggets of insights about all of them that are lucid and inclusive within his constructive theism.
Chapter 6, the final chapter, is somewhat more technical, especially when Buhring tackles theological anthropology head-on. His voice and advocacy of his own humanocentric theism as a response to theodicy becomes much stronger as he highlights the themes from his theological survey that have become central for him. The category of Resistance that Buhring draws from Fackenheim and Cone is an integral part of his development of humanocentric theism, and he concludes his book with an extensive theological anthropology around the notion of Resistance that admittedly has problematic elements. His reformulated humanocentric theism then is
a call for people to understand ethnic suffering as evil and an imperative to resist all forms of suffering and moral evil. . . . God inspires and persuades us to act for goodness, liberation, and hope, but it is up to us to actually carry out any form of redemption. . . . [I]nstead of looking to God to step into history to prevent evils from occurring . . . we must become aware of our own potential to change the course of history. Being created in freedom, we must realize that as a society we will have successes and failures, but this is the human condition. (p. 187)
The reader will undoubtedly feel a sense of relief and power when Buhring emerges from the complicated discussion of theology and ethics in Chapter 6 with three specific modes of resistance that are widely accessible: “care of one another, humor, and social and political liberation movements” (p. 191). These last several pages propose a plan of action to counter evil that is ultimately a manifestation of the divine will “that we all fully become human” (p. 191). It is pragmatic, comforting, and religiously pluralistic, with appeal to anyone seeking to be empowered in the face of one of life’s most intransigent, unanswered questions concerning the nature of God and God’s action in the midst of unfathomable suffering and evil over against human freedom.
Melodie M. Toby
Kean University
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