What Are They Saying about Unbelief?

By Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J. Paulist, $6.95., 84 pp.

Michael Paul Gallagher works with the Pontifical Council for Culture in the Vatican. An Irish theologian whose writings on prayer I have much admired, he now turns his hand to the problem of unbelief in the contemporary world. His little work is a survey of recent writings on unbelief (he begins with Henri de Lubac's 1945 book The Drama of Atheistic Humanism). Part of Paulist's series What Are They Saying about..., this book provides a overview of a half-century of writing by theologians on the culture of atheism.

Besides de Lubac, who wrote with an eye on the French existentialists, Gallagher has a separate chapter on Karl Rahner's many essays on the "deep" meaning of the loss of a sense of transcendence. Rahner moved from framing the issue of unbelief in terms of the problem of the concept of God to the more fundamental question concerning how the very meaning of God is being lost in modern culture. In that same chapter, Gallagher briefly adds the work of Johannes B. Metz, Walter Kasper, and the Protestant, Dorothy Solle, who refine the work of Rahner.

From the North American perspective, Gallagher rightly brings to the center of his discussion Michael Buckley's fundamental book, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987). Buckley argues, persuasively, that the modern attempt to "prove" God's existence, apart from any consideration of religious experience or Christology, had the unexpected consequence of narrowing the discussion into a philosophical argument whose cogency diminished with the rise of science--an argument not unlike that made by James Turner, in his work on American unbelief, whose conclusions were not that different from Buckley's, to wit, that the guardians of belief undermined credibility.

Two other chapers sketch out attempts to enter into dialogue with the world of unbelief with particular efforts made in Canada and France, as well as the contributions made by Hispanic theologians who have brought the perspective of liberation theology to the table. A brief epilogue highlights the efforts of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in Milan to evangelize his diocese within the context of the culture of unbelief.

This is a very brief work which makes no claim to an au fond discussion of this vexing issue for the world of believers. What is does provide, however, is an overview that frames the issues intelligently (for example, the difference between theoretical and practical atheism; the partial attempts of Vatican II to discuss the issue of unbelief; the possible resources of apophatic theology; etc.) and gives some indications of how the church should respond to the problem.

Those responses might well be diverse: from a Barthian proclamation of the revealed word to an unbelieving world to a deep encounter with the challenge of atheism. It would be foolhardy to think, however, that the evident religiosity of the American people negates the seriousness of the problem of modern atheism. Gallagher indicates what the problematic is and points out how two generations of Catholic thinkers have attempted to come to grips with it. The "select bibliography" at the end of the volume would give a first beginning to those who would like to flesh out the survey which Gallagher gives us in this handy little book.