Abstract
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen,
A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013–17); Vol. 1, Christ and Reconciliation: 467 pp.: 9780802868534, $45; Vol. 2, Trinity and Revelation: 486 pp.: 9780802868541, $45; Vol. 3, Creation and Humanity: 574 pp.: 9780802868558, $45; Vol. 4, Spirit and Salvation: 516 pp.: 9780802868565, $45; Vol. 5, Hope and Community: 592 pp.: 9780802868572, $50 (all pbk)
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s five-volume work offers a literary smorgasbord of the traditional doctrinal loci in over 2,000 pages. It does this in conversation with significant interlocutors while engaging some of the most pressing questions Christian theology must grapple with in the early twenty-first century. Several English-speaking evangelical theologians have set out to complete, and some have even finished, major systematic projects of a multi-volume breadth (the late Tom Oden’s three-volume systematic theology and Alister McGrath’s A Scientific Theology, for example), and several more have attempted major tasks only to leave them incomplete. The latter include the late John Webster’s ambitious multi-volume work, which should see publication of the posthumous second volume in 2019, while perhaps most ambitious was the proposed six-volume series by Stanley Grenz, which only barely completed volume two, also posthumously published. However, Kärkkäinen has actually completed the longest and most perambulatory treatment of the systematic loci that has ever been produced in English.
English is not Kärkkäinen’s first language. He started his career in Finland and spent three years in Bangkok. It is difficult to say just how much the Finnish context, his own evolving Lutheran and Pentecostal ecclesial identities (not to mention Catholic and ecumenical), and his arrival to teach at Fuller Seminary in California shaped his outlook on theology, as well as providing the opportunity and inspiration for such an extensive and masterful project. I would venture that the multicultural context of Los Angeles, and the exploratory openness of Fuller in particular, provided the catalyst and space for this work to be completed in the timely fashion that it was, with roughly one volume finished each year from 2013 to 2017. Such an accomplishment, virtually unprecedented in the field of contemporary English-speaking theology, also built upon the various introductory survey volumes exploring doctrines such as the Trinity, pneumatology and ecclesiology in ecumenical, international and contextualized perspectives that had been published earlier by presses including Baker, InterVarsity Press and Westminster John Knox. It is difficult to say, and we shall leave it unexplored at present, what the marks of ‘California’ may be on this project or on his earlier work; this may be a matter for consideration by later cultural theologians. And yet there is no question that Kärkkäinen is also a ‘contextual’ theologian in every sense of the term.
This recently completed five-volume project is an exercise in comparative theology, developing a constructive Christian theological vision in dialogue with the Christian tradition, with the sciences, with contemporary theology in its global and contextual diversity, and with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, highlighting our current situation in a religiously pluralistic and secular society. The focused attention on the doctrinal loci of each of the five volumes underscores the systematic nature of the project. Contrasting his efforts with classic liberal and post-liberal approaches, in the introduction to the first volume Kärkkäinen explains: ‘The present work argues that it belongs to the nature and inner structure of Christian theology to pursue the truth of its statements [as] if it is based on the conviction that its “object” is God and everything in relation to God’ (Vol. 1, p. 11). This is not dissimilar to definitions of theology as conceived by Webster, Grenz, or even Pannenberg, from whom Kärkkäinen draws heavily throughout, and from whom he perhaps even finds inspiration and guidance for his task, not unlike the late Stanley Grenz. And yet Kärkkäinen is working in a setting that grapples with considerations not necessarily on Grenz’s radar, and most certainly works in a context that is very different from that of Pannenberg, as a Lutheran theologian working within post-war German universities.
Kärkkäinen is acutely aware of interreligious (as well as ecumenical) and interdisciplinary conversations happening throughout the wider world of academic discourse, which highlight the comparative nature of this series in ways that, following Francis Clooney, allow for ‘theologies’ from elsewhere (religious traditions and other ultimate assertions coming from fields including the hard sciences, among others) to weigh in with claims that stand in contestable relation to Christianity. This is similar to Pannenberg in many ways. Yet Kärkkäinen goes beyond allowing these theologies their contestable space, finding that they raise important questions (with their respective epistemologies and languages) that Christianity has not considered adequately. In this sense, Kärkkäinen’s approach reflects a much older, stranger way of doing theology, one that can be seen as happening in the first century and throughout the Christian tradition when Christianity was not the dominant religion.
The posture of Kärkkäinen’s theology exhibits a remarkable beauty, skill and breadth, and he spends a great deal of time articulating other views while weaving his own constructive narrative through each of his five volumes, offering a kind of post-foundational Christian theology for the current moment. Of course, with any lengthy examination of other world views, offering robust descriptions of their contours and claims, one may wonder where theology ends and begins within the process of listening to other traditions. And yet, this posture seems foreign to a Western missionary impulse (especially among evangelicals), which is far too hasty to ‘proclaim’, even when the relevant questions and receptor language may have not been grasped adequately. Here, Kärkkäinen shows his methodological and missiological genius.
The kind of theology on offer here is one from the ground, with the people. This is not only seen in its posture of listening to other voices from other traditions and from the disciplines; it also maintains a sensitivity to a liberationist impulse, in which Black and Latino liberationist theologies become helpful (Vol. 2, pp. 44–60). One oversight of the work, I believe, is that Kärkkäinen does not consider the work of Willie James Jennings and how such a theology informs a doctrine of creation and anthropology. On this point – a doctrine of creation – James Cone is invoked in important places (Vol. 3, p. 445), with further regard to matters of liberation and whiteness. And yet, overall, the project also does not grapple with the weaknesses of American theology. Pannenberg and Moltmann fund much of the intellectual underpinnings of this work, making its embrace of a kind of panentheism unsurprising, especially in how this enables a sensitivity to issues from the tradition (classical concepts of infinity and simplicity, for example) and the contemporary experience, as well as to those of theology and science. The work’s deeply trinitarian approach also follows Pannenberg in seeing God as the all-determining reality.
If there is any weakness in the methodology of this theology – and it is really hard to fault it for its rigour and intellectual breadth – it may be that the effort does not ever quite lock into any careful biblical exegesis for the formulation of its statements, and especially not for its overall constructive project. Where, then, does Kärkkäinen's theology and its prophetic voice enter the scene? If Scripture is the ‘ultimate’ norm of theology (Vol. 2, pp. 89–95), where does its voice cut through the terrain of the constructive effort? Perhaps one might say that this exegesis is a reception project, finding Scripture rattling around in the tradition, which Kärkkäinen carefully handles throughout; but then what about the liberationist traditions that enable new peoples (as well as those who have had Christianity and the Bible for some time) to see things afresh, reading the Bible anew, encountering the relational beauty, power and wonder of revelation once again?
A theology of everything makes it possible to map the field widely in a way that no other theologian has done, perhaps ever, in ‘big history’ fashion. This theology, while it lands definitely on just about every question it raises, also offers a theology of both/and, which may be helpful and may not be. On a number of points it completely skirts big issues, such as the nature of human desire, along with questions of sexuality and sexual orientation, among other related issues. All of this certainly takes any perceived ‘whiteness’ of this theology well beyond any supposed ‘American theology’, and goes beyond even the Eurocentric traditions (Vol. 1, p. 405). Yet, on some points where it does not land, constructive alternatives stand in, in one instance offering no resolution but resistance (Vol. 5, p. 164). All of this may, on the one hand, suggest that perhaps the Churches, especially in the West, are not really asking the right questions today and have not been for some time, as this series demonstrates. On the other hand, perhaps this highlights the kind of theology that not only is some of the most interesting work happening today in evangelical theology, but also may serve the Churches as they reconsider how best to formulate their message for the contemporary world.