CHRIST IN A PLURALISTIC AGE

Tillich once observed that despite the modern boom in the study of religion, there was a dearth of serious systematic theology. His remark underscores the special significance of the work of John Cobb. Unlike so many who are content to throw a few bright ideas at a tantalizing topic and call it theology, he strives to make full contemporary sense out of the mysteries of faith without resorting to poetic obscurity, reductive interpretation or special pleading. In this book, he confronts head-on the crucial theological issue of the post-modem era--the meaning of Christ in the context of historical relativity and religious pluralism. Is it any longer possible to regard Christianity as anything more than one of the many ways of achieving human fulfillment? Cobb's revolutionary response, deriving from Malraux's account of the transformation of Christ in the history of art, is that Christ can be defined precisely as the liberating creativity anonymously at work in the current dissolution of parochial ideologies, including exclusivist Christianity. This is not yet the finished Christology toward which Cobb has been working for a decade but an in-transit report on a process of thought that could radically alter the conception of Christian faith. A big, complex, and controversial book, it may well be the theological event of the year.