Hard-Cover Revival

By Richard N. Ostling

The booming religious publishing business can boast some overnight bestsellers. A book version of Franco Zefirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, for example, has sold 125,000 copies since its television showing at Easter. Even third-rate spiritual self-help books sell by the hundreds of thousands. At the same time, works of serious theology--like Maverick Swiss Catholic Theologian Hans Kueng's treatise On Being a Christian--are receiving widespread attention. Some interesting new books:

The Church in the Power of the Spirit, by the Rev. Juergen Moltmann (Harper & Row; 401 pages; $15). Germany is to Christian theology what France is to wine, and Moltmann, 51, a colleague of Kueng's at the University of Tubingen, is one of its most eminent Protestant thinkers. Moltmann's first major work, The Theology of Hope (1964), based on the somewhat neglected promise of Christ's coming reign in a kingdom of righteousness, was a ringing call to optimism and activism during the days of "God is dead" theology. Then, in The Crucified God (1972), he looked back to Christ's Passion as proof that God is not aloof but has surrendered himself to experience suffering within human history. Having explored the Christian future and past in those two volumes, Moltmann now completes his trilogy with a work that knits both themes into the present.

The third book, newly translated into English, is a study of the doctrine of the church--the church being defined as "the present realization of the remembrance and hope of Christ." Moltmann believes that the church, caught in the ambiguities of the present, must grasp both the past and the future. Without this balance, he warns, the maintenance of church institutions can become all-important, and belief in Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection could "decay into a powerless historical recollection."

The broad time perspective is also needed in order to revitalize the church's mission in the world. For Moltmann, such doctrines as the Atonement and the Second Coming are not invitations to escape from the world but imperatives for increased involvement in it, since Christ is involved in both past and future human history. Moltmann has no quarrel with conversion-minded missionary activity. But he emphasizes a "qualitative mission" that works for human understanding. His vision is also profoundly political: he believes that the church must suffer with the oppressed and reject the materialistic values that are "the driving power behind our modern economy." Christians in rich countries, he says, must renounce further economic expansion in order to help hungry nations.

In one aspect of doctrine, Moltmann has come to a radical conclusion for a theologian nurtured in a state church. He argues that infant baptism should be phased out because it signifies ties to "family, nation and society" as much as a person's identification with Christ. The church, he says, should baptize only those who "confess their faith." If Moltmann had added total immersion in water, a Southern Baptist would have felt right at home.

Jesus Son of Man, by Rudolf Augstein (Urizen; 408 pages; $12.95). Founder and publisher of Der Spiegel, the West German weekly newsmagazine, Agnostic Augstein is an angry product of Catholic schooling. He asks how the church "dares to appeal to a Jesus who never existed, to teachings he never taught, to a mandate he never issued, and to a claim that he was God's son which he never presumed for himself." When it came out in Germany in 1972, the book was attacked by Christian thinkers of all varieties; Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner condemned it as a "frontal and total attack" on Christ. Augstein, however, has merely selected and exaggerated ideas propounded by some eminently respectable German theologians.

The Death of Classical Paganism, by John Holland Smith (Scribner's; 280 pages; $12.95). A British novelist and historian, Smith declares himself a "pagan" and expresses his regret that the Christian God ever overwhelmed Jupiter and his court of divinities. Most historians believe that the classical gods were already moribund when Christianity arose; Smith argues that they were alive and well until they were "assassinated" by the new faith. The early Christians' Jupiter-is-dead movement, he concludes, was the worst of "all the crimes committed in Christ's name" because it impoverished Western culture.

Why Churches Should Not Pay Taxes, by the Rev. Dean M. Kelley (Harper & Row; 151 pages; $6.95). Kelley, religious-liberty director of the National Council of Churches, takes up arms against a recent trend toward taxing religious institutions (hard-pressed New York City, for example, has withdrawn exemption from the property of the American Bible Society). Kelley argues that churches should be protected as the only institutions that provide meaning in people's lives on a massive scale, a function of great social value even to nonbelievers. He points out that tax-exempt church properties are not a big cause of municipal deficits (95.5% of exempt property in New York City is non-religious). Responsible church groups, Kelley notes, have long advocated taxation of profit-making businesses owned by religions. But churches themselves do not generate wealth, he says, and thus "do not need to explain why they are not taxed any more than do the birds of the air."

Richard N. Ostling

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