First he discusses Jesus Christ as a cultural icon in Western society "present in manifold ways" with the effect that "his presence is desensitizing" (p28). At the same time as Christ's ubiquitous cultrual presence there is a manifest resistance to any sense in which Christ might shape and influence the lives of individuals and societies in any concrete way. Generally this is present in a form of "Christophobia" (a term coined by Joseph Weiler). Even those who speak in terms of "Christian Europe" or "Christian values" in fact "operate within a not inconsiderable Christological void" as "they are actually harboring culturally chauvinistic ideas only externally associated with Jesus Christ" (p30). He attacks both the western church in its failure to acknowledge the contextualization of its own theology and contextually motivated theology that "functionalizes" Jesus "for moral and political conflict engagement and goals" (p37).
His chapter on subjectivist faith suggests that the Copernican shift in knowlege of self and world came about through Descartes and Kant who advanced the idea that "modern human beings disclose reality by concentrating first on their own consciousness and self-consciousness" (p39). This replaces theocentric and cosmocentric worldviews with anthropocentric ones. Then with the subjectivist faith of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between a person's relationship with their self and the persons relationship with the transcendent divine. While Welker admits there are advantages to such a view, not least because it enables religious conversation "at every point of individual experience and interpersonal communication" (p42) at the same time it is an "abstract and empty faith" (p43). He concludes, "Although subjectivist faith can be criticized as a conceptually amorphous and theologically irresponsible accommodation of religiosity to modern popular philosophy, one must also recognize that a christologically confused situation made it extremely difficult to make comprehensible theological sense of the message of the imminent God in Jesus Christ." (p46)
To cultural Christophobia and subjectivism Welker promises to apply Pneumatological and Multicontextual turns. This, presumably, will be the constructive work of the rest of the book. He concludes his prolegomenon with a warning that "although the power of the divine Spirit and the reign of the resurrected Christ are indeed enormously expansive and far-reaching, they do nonetheless have clear contours." (p53)
So Welker has laid down his critique of the western world, the church, and the academy! He has certainly raised some fascinating and important issues. The question will be, can he succeed in explaining who Jesus Christ is for us in the world today? I'm also particularly interested in how he draws the contours of Spirit and Kingdom. Rightly or wrongly there are many trying to redefine those contours themselves (on various sides of the theological and political camps). Will Welker have anything new to say, or is this book just a Trojan horse for the same old agendas?
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