[In the following review, Crews discusses the exploration of pardigmatic studies by major theologians in Paradigm Change in Theology, edited by Küng and David Tracy.]

“Take my hand,” began a song in the 1953 musical Kismet, “I'm a stranger in paradise.” Those who have been off the theological planet for the past few years could substitute the word “paradigm” at the end of that phrase. Paradigmatic studies became coin of the realm in the '80s. To round out the decade, Hans Küng and David Tracy directed an international symposium of some 70 thinkers to explore the topic in occasionally exhausting detail. A gathering at the University of Tübingen brought together both Protestant and Catholic theologians, including Baum, Boff, Cobb, Gilkey, Marty, Metz, Moltmann, Ogden, Ricoeur and Schillebeeckx. The resulting text[, Paradigm Change in Theology,] provides some wonderful summations of postwar developments in science (Matthew Lamb and Stephen Toulmin) and in theology (Anne Carr and Leonardo Boff). But this book calls for intensive reading and is far from being a primer on the subject. Strangers in paradigm need not apply.

The study is divided into preparatory papers—three in systematics and four in historical analysis—and the symposium presentations themselves, covering such areas as scientific theory, biblical theology, philosophy, history and political and global issues. The symposium responded to Thomas Kuhn's nearly classic definition of paradigm as “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community,” alongside the postmodern awareness that theology and science both go about their business paradigmatically. In addition, Küng provided a leitmotif for the proceedings with his insistent question: “Where do we stand, those of us who have to do theology with Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag Archipelago at our backs?” Küng's preparatory paper is especially useful in its delineation of a series of macromodels in theology: Greek Alexandrine, Latin Augustinian, medieval Thomist, Reformation, Protestant orthodox and contemporary interpretive.

In a text as complex as this one, there are some surprisingly epigrammatic moments: “Theology,” writes Gregory Baum, “unlike the sciences, may and must learn from the unlearned.” And Tracy suggests, “We belong to history far more than history belongs to us.” While the participants became a bit recondite at times, there are dashes of reality: Norbert Geinacher points to nuclear missiles and devastated forests near the conference site, while Martin Marty notes that traditional bases of the theological enterprise—the printed text and the exclusive academic setting—are themselves undergoing rapid transformation.

Küng himself provides the best review of the symposium, masterfully assessing the differences between and commonalities among the participants. In the process he provides a catalog of the crises facing both theology and science, including the end of Western hegemony, the social antagonism of repressive structures, the undermining of solidifying symbols of a culture, and historical catastrophe.

One final and minimal irony of this book: some of the foremost theological historians met, yet in 488 pages no one thought to provide the reader with the date of the convocation—May 23-26, 1983. A slight and forgivable fact surely, but for an enterprise so deeply concerned with gestalt and contextualization, perhaps just a trifle embarrassing.