THE COMMON QUEST: Theology and the Search For Truth

The reader who ventures past the discouragingly trite title of this volume will find it a treatise on the relations of theological intellectual enterprise with the disciplines occupying the academic community. The author addresses himself to the question of how the Christian Gospel can be communicated in the academic world, and advances to his task on the premise that the methods of the Church and of the Academy for discovering and creating truth are not only compatible, but serve the same truth and the same humanity. The relationship between the two domains, figured under the traditional terms of Jerusalem and Athens, is a dialectical one. Karl Barth's theology of the Word of God is taken as the theological position most suited to this dialectical encounter, because it treats of the Word of God as the Word of Reconciliation. The author acknowledges that science now constitutes a kind of ""third force"" along with theology and Greek inquiry and logic. He develops his theme with considerable scope of learning and with consciousness of the manifold issues that must be taken into account. He does not seem to clear up adequately the question of the ambiguity of the word ""truth"" when used in its Hebraic or its Greek sense; and he may not sufficiently take into account the crisis that the present advance of scientific thought as a way of thinking and reflection threatens to precipitate into the traditional academic world as well as into the world of theology. The future may not lie with either Jerusalem or Athens, but with Los Alamos. For academic readers.