The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong [Paperback]

William C. Placher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

William Placher looks at "classical" Christian theology (Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther) and contrasts it with the Christian discourse about God that evolved in the seventeenth century. In particular, he deals with the notion of transcendence that gained prominence in this era and its impact on modern theology and modern thinking today. He persuasively argues that useful lessons can be drawn from premodern thinking about God, especially when viewed within the context of contemporary objections to it. This reexamination, according to Placher, has practical and profound implications for modern theology.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Placher (theology, Wabash Coll.) argues that much contemporary discourse about God is directed at a mistaken understanding of the classical Christian doctrines of God. Placher uses the doctrines formulated by Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin to recapture a sense of God's transcendence in the modern age. Placher's book is an elegant theological essay that exposes the wealth of Christian history as well as the bankruptcy of much modern God-talk. Recommended for most libraries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

To the extent that Placher's purpose is to convince us that--in their radical visions of divine transcendence--premodern theologians have lessons to teach us, he succeeds brilliantly. The great strength of this book is its reintroduction of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin to the postmodern theological conversation. Readers will encounter them here in ways that, to Placher's credit, will render the object of postmodern criticisms of "classical theism" thoroughly strange. That object, Placher maintains, is much more appropriately identified with a wrong turn taken by philosophy and theology in the seventeenth century, which he describes as a domestication of transcendence. Even readers who are not convinced by Placher's critiques of process thought and Mark C. Taylor's a-theology will find much of value in this beautifully and thoughtfully written account of God's essential "wildness." And it is a timely meditation on human response to wildness which, paradoxically, inspires silence at the very moment that it enfolds us in a world of words. Steve Schroeder

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press; 1st edition (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 066425635X
• ISBN-13: 978-0664256357
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #687,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ten Stars, Actually, September 26, 2004

By 

Aidan McDowell (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Paperback)

I am sorry that this book is not available in hardcover; it's one that my library cannot be without. One cannot describe it without superlatives. Although I am an Orthodox Christian, the author has convinced me that there is profound theological thought outside Orthodoxy. (Not all Orthodox Christians feel this way.) Placher's thesis, that the way we think about God went awry back at the dawn of modernity, and that theology has not recovered from its ill-advised dalliance with the moderns, is superbly argued from cover to cover. If one reads between the lines, however, one realizes that the book raises questions which no religious believer can afford to ignore--questions such as "what does it mean to be a believer?", and "what does it mean to be human?" The epistemological ideal which animates the discourse of modernity is that of the detached, disinterested, impersonal spectator of reality. It started with Descartes and we've not seen the end of it yet. Placher understands that when this cognitivist presupposition informs our theological enterprise, the result is a "theology" which is more like Vedanta, Buddhism, or New Age monism than Christianity. (He doesn't mention them, but he would, if he were interested in getting into comparative religion.) In truth, these "Eastern" religions, especially as they appear in the West as "the New Spirituality," owe more to modernity and the ideals of the European Enlightenment than they would care to admit. A corollary of the Cartesian model is that man is cognitively self-sufficient. And since knowledge is our human way of making sense of the world, it's a short step to the notion that human being is wholly self-sufficient. We all know that Spinoza took up this idea and ran with it. Be that as it may, how anyone (except, perhaps, Bishop Spong) can square this idea with the fundamental Christian tenet of finite, fallen man is a mystery to me, as it must be to any Christian inclined to critical thinking. To endeavor to have a "God's eye view" of God (or anything else) is, in essence, to forsake one's humanity for the sake of becoming God. This is the cardinal sin, which is responsible for our fallen state in the first place. And it is just what "the New Spirituality," however it is packaged, would have us believe. It all started here in the West when one Swami Vivekananda gave an electrifying speech at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893. Ever since, people who are for one reason or another disenchanted with their own religious tradition have been standing in line to get their share of whatever it is that works the marvelous alchemy of transforming men into gods. (Why is it that so many people manage to read Genesis 1 and 2 nowadays, and come away believing that the point of the story of man's fall is that Adam and Eve ate a piece of fruit?)

Placher does a masterly job of discussing Luther and Calvin, as I would expect him to. But his knowledge of and appreciation for the Scholastics make this book an excellent source of information for anyone working in that area. His chapter on the use of analogy in Aquinas and Cajetan is the best introduction to that subject I've ever seen. What tipped me off that Placher really knows what he's talking about is that he referred to Aquinas' magnum opus by its correct name "Summa Theologiae," rather than "Summa Theologica"--the variant preferred by pedants, dabblers, and name droppers since time immemorial.

In the coming years, I believe, Placher's thesis or something very much like it will come to dominate theological discourse, especially when Christian theologians wake up to the fact that to do theology in slavish deference to modernity is to take it down a dead-end road. Nowadays, even honest religious seekers are running with the herd headlong into the abyss of "the New Spirituality." They don't need any encouragement in that direction from misguided theologians. The professionals would do well to read and learn from a theologian's theologian. For my part, I'm no theologian, but I've been reading Placher's book along with Heidegger's "Being and Time," with tantalizing results. (Again, the section in "Domestication" on analogy is a gold mine.) I don't know whether Prof. Placher would approve of his work being used this way, but if he wants to know, he's invited to contact me.
Las Vegas, Nevada, September, 2004.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Fantastic Book, Super Enlightening, December 14, 2010

By 

Christian Smith (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Paperback)

Provides an excellent, well-written historical account of how modern thinking about God got screwed up in the 17th century. So many people need to understand this history--perhaps especially modern confessional Protestants, perhaps particularly in the Reformed tradition, perhaps especially those in the PCA and OPC. I highly recommend it as well worth the read. In fact (contrary to the three-star review here), it is not that challenging intellectually. The book does presumes a serious interest in the matter and some historical background knowledge, but it couldn't have been more clearly written. The book also helps to make very clear why Karl Barth is so important in the 20th century, which is important.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars One agenda hiding another, February 8, 2011

By 

Charles Wenzel "Sold Out For Truth" (EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, NEW JERSEY, US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Paperback)

Any book that has me writing notes in its margins as much as this one did is at minimum, provocative. So, for me, it certainly was not a "been there, done that," common themed work.

Early on, however, I {correctly} sensed that Placher's theology was of the Reformed tradition i.e. so-called "Calvinism". I thereafter surmised that perhaps the origional motivation for Placher's chosen subject i.e. God's transcendent "otherness", was to give support to such Reformed Theology ironies as "God's not desiring that any should perish" yet "His choosing only the elect not to perish."

On page 200 the author {finally} succenctly stated both themes of his work: the upfront one (the book's title) and the underlying one (divine grace and human freedom), when he wrote, "Whether reflecting about the action of God in creation or the interplay of divine grace and human freedom, they {17th cent. theologians} were trying to domesticate God's transcendence into the categories of human understanding. Absent a Triune God, they had only human efforts to account for our internal appropriation of faith....And therefore, they lost God's transcendence."

That quote made the one on page 181 all the more clear: "On the one hand, this leads to niggling accounts of grace, in which we debate the degree of our own contribution rather than simply acknowledging in gratitude that we owe all things to God."

Therefore, per Placher, one only needs to understand God as beyond our understanding i.e. transcendence, to understand why a number of the tenets of Reformed Theology are beyond our understanding, as well.

His historical accounting of the debate was worth the read. Yet a more honest subtitle to his The Domestication of Transcendence would have been, not "How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong," but rather, "How Modern Thinking about Grace Went Wrong." i.e. his stealth title was misleading.