Dogmatics After Babel: Beyond the Theologies of Word and Culture by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez (review)

Despite the contemporary proliferation of diverse theological perspectives, argues Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, the Western theological landscape continues to be significantly shaped by the two predominant methodologies of the twentieth century: Paul Tillich's anthropological theology of culture and Karl Barth's revelational retrieval of orthodoxy. For Rosario, this status quo is unfortunate, given the vastly different theological priorities of the majority of Christians globally. He wonders, "What happens when we stop viewing theological pluralism as a problem to be solved (Babel) and embrace it as a gift of the Spirit (Pentecost)?" (xv).

Rosario first delineates Western theology's trajectories from the Enlightenment to the present. His foci in chapter 1 include the ongoing influences of key nineteenth-century figures (especially Kierkegaard), neo-orthodoxy's strident critique of human religion, and narrative theology's literary shift. Ultimately, Rosario considers the theologies of word and culture both inadequate to face the realities of globalization and religious pluralism. Rather, he argues, "the future of dogmatic thinking demands a more comparative and inclusive methodology" (33).

In chapter 2, Rosario analyzes striking similarities between Barth and Tillich: they are reacting to the same hermeneutical crisis, mired in the same dogmatic polarities, united in the same anti-secularization goals, and marked by the same Kantian epistemology. Additionally, both embrace "the perspectivism and contextual limits of all theological traditions while affirming a divine transcendence underlying the world as we experience it" (45). Their irreconcilable conflict is between Tillich's correlation and Barth's exclusive emphasis on divine agency. A way beyond this impasse, Rosario proposes, is pneumatology, bringing together the agency of the Holy Spirit, the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, and the hiddenness of God.

Chapters 3 and 4 address the challenges of postmodernism and pluralism, respectively. Rosario explores and evaluates three paradigmatic recent attempts to navigate these contested realities: Sallie McFague (manifestation), John Milbank (proclamation), and Miguel de la Torre (liberation). In light of these, he affirms both "the need for theology to address a broader public beyond the church [and] the need for speaking from within one's own theological tradition by avoiding untenable universal claims about religiosity and allowing each tradition to enter the comparative conversation from within its own internal reasoning" (107–108). Additionally, noting that all theological language is analogical, and all three Abrahamic religions revere the mystery of divine hiddenness, Rosario arrives at conceptions of Scripture "as human witness to a divine act" (135), and of theology "as an imperfect and incomplete human endeavor" (136).

In light of this framework, as well as the conviction that "recovering some means of rationally articulating the experience of the God who acts in human history" is crucial to transcending the revelational-anthropological impasse, in chapter 5 Rosario offers his comparative, constructive pneumatological account (147). Briefly surveying accounts of S/spirit in the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur'an, Rosario discerns in all three faiths a common "ethical norm grounded in the themes of liberation, justice, and compassion" (167).

This comparative pneumatology is a particular highlight of the book. Additionally, Rosario's critiques of racism in the Western academy—theological and secular, traditional and postmodern—are apropos. Furthermore, his call "for Christian academic theology to embrace its global social location and learn to make concrete dogmatic claims in a pluralistic context without resorting to some form of theological totalitarianism" is both stirring and nuanced (109–110). Perhaps the main methodological drawback of Dogmatics After Babel is Rosario's overly close focus on the discrete components of his project, such that the complete structure is often obscured. No fewer than a dozen times does he offer some variant of the phrase "this book argues that …", which yields a lack of clarity concerning which claims constitute his priorities.