Book dossier

The future of belief

by Leslie Dewart, Leslie. Dewart, Leslie Dewart

The title of this book alludes to a work of Freud on religion as an illusion and to a phrase of Bonhoeffer onthe maturing of the consciousness of Western man. The Future of Belief, then, is written in the shadow of the greatest assault on theism and of the most revolutionary defense of it in the history of Christianity. Yet this is neither "radical theology" as the term has been employed by various Protestant thinkers, nor "death of God theology" as the term is used by journalists and others. Rather it is the first fully articulated attempt by a Roman Catholic religious philosopher completely to recast traditional Christian doctrine in the light of modern man's new self-understanding. Central to this self-understanding is the sense of historical evolution and of the transcendence of the human person; and it is in the framework of these two complementary data that LesHe Dewart of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto and author of Christianity and Revolution discusses his theory of doctrinal development, the knowability of God, the dogma of the Trinity, salvation history, and the import of human achievement. The overall impact of the book is that of a brilliantly original vision—the kind of theology, one imagines, Teilhard de Chardin would have applauded — which is nevertheless utterly compatible with the most rigorously orthodox conception of Christian doctrine.