Theology after Hiroshima

Abstract

The year after Hiroshima the American theologian Henry Wieman wrote, ‘The bomb that fell on Hiroshima cut history in two like a knife. Before and after are two different worlds. That cut is more abrupt, decisive and revolutionary than the cut made by the star over Bethlehem. It may not be more creative of human good than the star, but it is more swiftly transformative of human existence than anything else that has ever happened.’ One might not expect many Christian theologians to agree too readily to such a statement of the significance of Hiroshima, but it illustrates the challenge which Hiroshima and its implications constitute for Christian theology. Hiroshima revealed a radically new possibility in human history: the possibility that human beings themselves might put an end to human history. Jonathan Schell, whose brilliant book The Fate of the Earth contains the most extensive attempt so far to think through the implications of the radical novelty of the human situation since the invention of nuclear weapons, wrote that by inventing the capacity for self-extinction as a species, ‘we have caused a basic change in the circumstances in which life was given us, which is to say that we have altered the human condition’.