Gilkey’s Reaping the Whirlwind: A Review Article

Abstract

GILKEY'S REAPING THE WHIRLWIND: A REVIEW ARTICLE * I L ANGDON GILKEY OF the University of Chicago is an interestingly eclectic American theologian whose thought has been developing in an explicit dialogue with other theologians and scholars beyond theology-not only philosophers but historians and a variety of social scientists as well. He is "eclectic" in the creative sense of that adjective, fusing and synthesizing elements from Whitehead and Heidegger, Tillich and Niebuhr with elements from Ernst Bloch and the current Liberation theologians. Gilkey stands in a tradition native to the study of divinity at the University of Chicago with its strong emphasis on the social matrices of religious thought. His oeuvre has been growing steadily for almost twenty years. It now consists of three major works-Maker of Heaven and Earth (1959), Naming the Whirlwind (1969) and this latest, Reaping the Whirlwind (1976)-plus two smaller more specialized studies, Religion and the Scientific Future (1970) and Catholicism Confronts Modernity (1975), and a number of articles and reviews. Maker of Heaven and Earth, developed from a doctoral dissertation , was done in the classic magisterial style of modern theology. It is an excellent study of the doctrine of creation and an updating of it in the light of contemporary philosophy and the sciences. It was to be followed by a sister-volume doing the same with the doctrines of providence and eschatology. But the theological turmoil of the 60s-the "secularity" boom and the God-ls-Dead phenomenon-hit Gilkey broadside, intellectually, and forced him, as he tells us, into writing a sort of book he had not really planned on writing: Naming the Whirlwind. This work is a re-consideration of the very foundations of theology and theological language. Against the reductionistic claims of the secularizers and morticians of deity, it offered a phenomenological defense of " transcendence," arguing for certain "ultimate dimensions" found inevitably even in modern secular experience. * Langdon Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of Bmorg (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976, 446 pp.) 185 136 CHARLES STINSON Reaping the Whirlwind bears very much the genetic marks of its two predecessors. It exhibits the concern with theological updating seen in the first, and the close attention to the unsettled state of dogmatics seen in the second. There has been, though, a noticeable decrease in clarity of arrangement and structure when we compare Reaping with the two earlier works. It is a very densely packed text, with not a few sentences overloaded like this one: In turn the r.elation between actuality and possibility, the synthesis of past, present and future into self-creative event, is the most fundamental role of providence, through its creative power moving each achieved actuality, each given, into the role of a destiny for self-actualizing freedom, and then presenting to each present, in the light of that destiny, novel but relevant possibilities for its future. (p. fl85) In addition there has been an enormous swelling of the footnote apparatus. A subtextual discussion, gathered together into no less than 110 pp. of endnotes at the back of the book, constitutes virtually an opusculum in itself. Compare this with the brief and infrequent footnotes found in the works of Niebuhr or Tillich who did " social " and " cultural " theology but a generation ago. Even Gilkey's earlier books had less subtextual discussion. This increase is, possibly, the result of an imperfect digestion of material. More probably, however, it is due to the stepped-up rate of productionthe theological journal-and-information explosion-and increasing complexity of issues raised in dogmatics, both Protestant and Catholic, after the 60's. Gilkey is a master of an ever-sprawling literature which resists a magisterial tidying up. Despite its densities, then, and other related inconvenientiae, Reaping the Whirlwind is an important theological study. It is not written, of course, for the lay public or for the parish clergy; it is to be read by theologians and other scholars who will debate its theses. Gilkey is extraordinarily generous in the space he gives to the views of others, both theologians and non-theologians. Almost a third of the main text-100 out of 319 pages plus most of the 110...