History and Theology: The Taproots Flourish

To judge from many a bookstore's religion shelf today, most of the U.S. reading public is variously interested in the occult (Edgar Cayce books; The Exorcism Series), pop piety (Joey Adams' The God Bit), sensationalized biblical "research" (The Jesus Party) or some aspect of esoteric Eastern religion.

The enthusiasm for chic new areas and bland old ones in religious publishing appears, however, not to have harmed solid, scholarly work in the theology and history of traditional Western religions. Indeed, commercial publishers seem to be unabashedly using frothy products to subsidize more substantial works, and university presses are contributing an increasing amount of important new religious reading.

The University of Chicago Press, for example, is publishing Church Historian Jaroslav Pelikan's magisterial five-volume series on the development of Christian doctrine, The Christian Tradition. It recently issued Lutheran Pelikan's second volume, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (329 pages; $16.50), a careful distillation of Eastern Orthodoxy's contribution to Christian thought. Princeton University Press will soon bring out a massive survey called Religious Movements in Contemporary America (900 pages; $25), which ranges from Scientology to Krishna Consciousness. An earlier entry from Yale University Press, Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom's huge but very readable A Religious History of the American People (1,158 pages; $19.50), has already become a standard.

Among other notable new works of history and theology:

HUTTERITE SOCIETY, by John A. Hosteller (Johns Hopkins University Press; 403 pages; $14). The stern Amish and their more moderate Mennonite brothers are better known than the Hutterites, another wing of German Anabaptists, whose long religious journey led them to Moravia, Transylvania and Russia before they came to North America in the last century. Hosteller, an anthropologist and sociologist at Temple University, comes from an Amish background and has already demonstrated his expertise in the well-known 1963 study called Amish Society. His new book draws an impressive picture of a people who share the general Anabaptist rejection of worldly frills and pleasures, but who have a special distinction of their own--a strict devotion to communal living that has endured with little change for more than four centuries. The Hutterites now number 22,000 and live in agricultural colonies mainly in the Northwestern and North Central U.S. and on the prairies of Canada. They are growing. When last measured in the 1950s, the Hutterites' median family size was an astonishing 10.4 children.

THE CRUCIFIED GOD, by Juergen Moltmann (Harper & Row; 346 pages; $10). Even when he was lecturing in the U.S. after publication of his Theology of Hope in 1967, this German Protestant theologian offered no vision of an easily won future: behind the hope of Christ's Resurrection, he insisted, lay the dark courage of the Crucifixion. Now Moltmann takes a long, measured look at the God who became man and an outlaw, "a scandal to the devout and a disturber of the peace in the eyes of the mighty." Learnedly and often ardently written, The Crucified God is an intellectual delight: Moltmann ranges over history, literature and philosophy to explore the fundamental alienation of the Cross, in which God paradoxically "takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and godforsaken can experience communion with him." Moltmann forces the reader to face the difficult central questions of Christian faith and action in the light of that Cross, and creates a consummate theological work.

MODELS OF THE CHURCH, by Avery Dulles (Doubleday; 216 pages; $5.95). Unusually popular for a work of theology, this book is already in its fourth printing. Jesuit Dulles, a leading U.S. Catholic theologian, writes cogently on the pros and cons of five current theories of ecclesiology (the theology of the nature of the church), making the proceedings accessible to laymen. Because ecclesiology underlies many other current debates in Christianity--such as ecumenism, authority and hierarchy, secular v. sacred mission--the book is important. In particular, Dulles rejects the "Institutional" model that characterized Catholicism until recent years, while seeing some value in the church's emphasis on continuity with the past and maintenance of a corporate identity.

THE MONASTIC WORLD, by Christopher Brooke, photographs by Wim Swaan (Random House; 272 pages; $35). Pictorially, this is as exhilarating and artful a presentation of Christian monastic structures as any popular volume ever before assembled. It includes not only such oft-visited sites as Assisi and Mont-Saint-Michel but also monasteries that seem more like eagles' aeries, such as Saint-Martin-du-Canigou in southern France. The text, moreover, is a lucid, sympathetic but judicious treatise on the monastic life and its reverberations in society, written by Medievalist Brooke, a historian at London University.

RELIGION AND SEXISM, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether (Simon and Schuster; 356 pages; $3.95 paperback, $9.95 hardback). Those who seek the roots of sexism in Judaism and Christianity can find plenty of them in this collection of essays edited by Theologian Ruether, a Roman Catholic and an outspoken feminist. Eleven scholars--ten women and one man--investigate various, mostly pejorative images of women in Old and New Testaments, in canon law, in the thought of the Church Fathers, medieval scholastics, Protestant Reformers and even such modern theologians as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. In this collection, at least, Tillich is one of the few male thinkers to emerge relatively unscathed.

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