Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology (review)

Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology is a scholarly text, geared toward, but not written exclusively for, teachers and students of theology, religion, and ethics. Anyone who has ever struggled with reconciling belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God with the enormity of evil or random suffering, or asked the "Why do bad things happen to good people?" question, is wrestling, as Buhring does in this work, with the issue of theodicy, the branch of theology and philosophy that deals with the problem of the existence of evil. The existential insecurity that can result is derived from cognitive dissonance between our understanding of who or what God is, who we are in relationship to God, and our responsibility as human beings for what happens to us.

Readers from other disciplines, with an interest in the foundation, form, and content of ideas that have contributed to social policy, can derive some benefit from Buhring's in-depth analyses of the work of the theologians that he has chosen to interrogate for this study. His primary thinkers, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim and the supporting cast of eight theologians included in the text, in discussing theodicy have raised issues and concerns of broad applicability, well beyond the sphere of religion.

Within this deceptively compact text, Buhring uses an efficient "compare and contrast" strategy to explain some rather complex liberative theologies, alongside his distinctive perspective on the nature of God, suffering, and evil that he describes as humanocentric theism. He borrows the term from theologian William R. Jones, without necessarily rejecting out of hand, as Jones does, an underlying methodological and theological assumption of an all good and all powerful God. Chapters Two and Four provide the essence of the theologies that he has selected from his primary pillars, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim respectively, while Chapters Three and Five speak to critiques and affirmations of Cone and Fackenheim from the eight theologians (described here as secondary thinkers) that are as broad and balanced as Buhring promises in Chapter One.

From the very beginning Buhring makes it clear that in proposing humanocentric theism as his response to the "theodicy question" he is "affirm[ing] the reality of evil, the goodness of God, and reinterpret[ing] the nature of God's power" (p. 7). Like Fackenheim, who has written extensively on post-Holocaust Jewish theology, and James Cone, the foremost apologist for Black Theology in the United States, Buhring maintains that social, cultural, and historical forces are inseparable from the form and content of one's theology. To that end, with no shortage of events with which to illustrate the challenge that theodicy presents to belief in a benevolent and all powerful God, Buhring chooses two of the more extreme examples that, as he says, "so profoundly rupture[s] our conceptions of God" (p. 5). It is certainly likely that the notion of God for people of faith affected directly and indirectly by the horrific events of the Shoah or genocide of approximately six million Jews, and the enslavement and oppression of African Americans caused in part by continuing individual and systemic racism, would, at the very least, have undergone a metamorphosis.

Chapter Two is a careful analysis of James Cone's theology, which Buhring describes as a "response to the problem of suffering and moral evil more than . . . a solution" (p. 59). He supports Cone's insistence on humanity's responsibility to seek justice but finds the weight that Cone places on divine power in that process "dominating and patriarchal" (p. 60). He follows a similar method in Chapter Four, in explaining Emil Fackenheim's advocacy of the need for Jews to endure and resist evil. Resistance is a theme that runs through Fackenheim, and Buhring highlights that by citing three of Fackenheim's examples of contemporary resistance in response to the commanding presence of God...