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J. Omar Good Professor of Religion
Juniata College
Don Braxton
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Braxton reviews Alister McGrath’s Glimpsing the Divine (Eerdmans, 2002), commending its twelve articulate, lavishly photographed meditations as a fine introduction to Western spirituality but criticizing its conservative neo-Barthian confessionalism, its Eurocentric treatment of non-Western traditions as “taillights” to Christianity’s “headlights,” its one-sided host-guest engagement with the natural sciences, and its metaphysical dualism. In a section added for ministerial readers, he contrasts McGrath’s self-contained confessionalism with H. Richard Niebuhr’s call to respond to all things as if to God’s actions upon us, and argues that in an era of rival fundamentalisms exclusivity must become a thing of the past.
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Braxton, taking his cue from David James Duncan’s defense of ignorance as a fly-fisher’s most crucial tool and from Socrates’ midwife’s art in the Theaetetus, defends a doctrine of “honesty of mind” resting on four premises—knowledge is constructed, judgments are wagered amid imperfect knowledge, expertise can disable learning, and we are encumbered by other ways of knowing. He field-tests the disposition against three domains: the climate-change and creationism debates in environmental studies, the post-September 11 turn toward religious pluralism (engaging Union Seminary’s Joseph Hough and Hauer and Young’s “three-world” approach to the Bible), and the liberal arts classroom where students “become democrats of the mind” through Reinhold Niebuhr’s balance of conviction and contrition.
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Braxton appreciates the dialectical structure of Santmire’s mandates—“skeletons in our closets and riches in our own vaults”—and reads it as a faithful expression of the Lutheran tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther. He argues that Santmire is on target in warning against premature flight to non-Christian traditions for environmental wisdom (theoretical sensitivity does not translate into ecological behavior in practice), and that classical Lutheran social ethics has too often been quietistic. But Lutheran ethics at its best is dialectical, not dualistic—recognizing the interpenetration of church and world, Law and Gospel, eschatological Kingdom and present realities, as in Hegel, Ritschl, Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Larry Rasmussen. Braxton commends environmental responsibility, social criticism of unsustainable practices, and a liturgical practice of resistance to instrumentalism as appropriate next steps for Lutheran liberal arts colleges, especially Capital University.
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