Consenting to God and Nature

Bangert shows how the work of three major contemporary Protestant thinkers, James M. Gustafson, Sallie McFague, and David Ray Griffin, may be fruitfully appropriated for the articulation of an ethics that is responsive to the Christian tradition while sharing the modern commitment's appeal to human experience and reason. Each of these three thinkers eschews a priori appeal to the authority of religious tradition, as each takes seriously scientific knowledge of our world. Each accents ways in which current scientific understandings inform, and in some cases are informed by, contemporary appropriations of the language and thought of Christian tradition. Each is also concerned to relate his or her approach to human valuing, life, and action. A critical appraisal of their work shows that none provides a sufficient basis for an intellectually and religiously adequate theological ethics, but that each contributes elements necessary to the articulation of such an ethics within the Protestant Christian tradition as it confronts the religious and intellectual challenges of today's world.
Bangert has done a remarkable job in bringing three important constructive proposals for contemporary theology into respectful dialogue with one another. In addition to presenting the positions of Gustafson, Griffin, and McFague fairly and sympathetically, he makes a convincing case that their respective contributions can only be strengthened and enriched through critical engagement with one another. This book has many virtues to commend it, not least of which are the clarity of analysis and the simple elegance of its prose style. It is a model of rigorous, yet irenic, theological argumentation.
Paul E. Capetz
author of God: A Brief History
Byron C. Bangert is Research Associate at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), with over 25 years' experience as a parish minister. His Ph.D. in religious studies is from Indiana University.