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Remembering the Christian Past, by Robert L. Wilken (Eerdmans, 180 pp.; $17, paper). Reviewed by Christopher Hall, who teaches biblical and theological studies at Eastern College.

Robert Wilken, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia, possesses a well-developed memory, and he clearly desires to lengthen that of his readers. Wilken has spent many fruitful years exploring the world of the early church. His books include an analysis of Saint John Chrysostom's response to Judaism in the fourth century (John Chrysostom and the Jews), an insightful study of how the Roman world understood the early Christians (The Christians as the Romans Saw Them), and more recently a treatise on the central place of Palestine in Christian history and reflection (The Land Called Holy). In Remembering the Christian Past, Wilken gathers together a series of essays, many previously published in journals including Pro Ecclesia, First Things, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Throughout these essays, one clear theme surfaces repeatedly. Many modern Christians find themselves rootless and drifting in a barren secular and ecclesiastical landscape, largely because they have forgotten their past. Indeed, the modern mind, Wilken argues, has lost any "sense of obligation to the past." Instead, modern thinkers, including a number of modern theologians, have purposely limited their reliance upon past ideas and traditions, viewing autonomous reflection as the heart of rationality. One discovers truth only by purposefully separating oneself from the object of knowledge. For the modern Christian, this autonomous stance has spawned an unrelenting suspicion of tradition.

David Tracy, for example, contends that while the "traditional Christian theologian … preached and practiced a morality of belief in and obedience to the tradition and a fundamental loyalty to the church-community's beliefs," modern theologians must commit themselves to the methodology of the natural and social sciences, what Tracy identifies as the "ethical model of the autonomous inquirer."

The result is a tendency to produce theology in a context (the university) and with a stance (Tracy's autonomous inquiry) that ironically and unnecessarily divorces the theologian from the very religious community in which theological exploration and reflection finds its roots. Wilken observes that while "Christian faith has always been a critical and rational enterprise, and at its best has welcomed the wisdom of the world into the household of faith," the wisest Christian thinkers also recognized they were "bearers of tradition," a tradition founded on Scripture, subjected to critical examination, tested in the lives of "countless men and women," defended against critics, and "elaborated in myriad social and cultural settings."

Hence Wilken's bafflement over "why one should assume, as Tracy apparently does, that reason is to be found only outside of tradition, and that genuine rationality requires 'autonomy.' This premise seems to invite a willful amnesia, a self-imposed affliction that would rob our lives of depth and direction."

The short memory of modern theology too often creates insularity rather than insight. Do other fields of intellectual endeavor so peremptorily dismiss the contributions of the past? Most assume that "immersion in tradition is the presupposition for excellence and originality." Take, Wilken urges, the example of the jazz musician. "How often we are admonished not to let the old traditions be forgotten. Why? Surely not for historical or archaeological reasons, but because musicians, like painters and writers and sculptors, know in their fingertips or vocal cords or ears that imitation is the way to excellence and originality."

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December 9 1996, Vol. 40, No. 14