THE BOOK OF FOURS A Postmodern Christian Theology

This book addresses the strange place held by Christian theology in the West as of the emerging 21st century. Because theology should address the world as it is rather than the world as we hope it might be, it is a postmodern theology. As such, it does not try toeither force or convince anyone to reject their deconstructive passions or to adhere to a theology that seemed to work a few decades or centuries ago.The format of The Book of Fours is a presentation in terms of four. From the Four Fundamental Forces of the Universe to the Four Winds and the Four Gospels, four conclusive statements about reality and truth have sufficed to be a boundary condition of the quest for a complete understanding of the reality we live in. From the search for the Holy Grail to the scientific ideal of formulating the iconic Unified Field Theory, Western wisdom has desired to understand how it all works. The answer, of course, depends onwhat you mean by how, it, all, and works. The language question was addressed in Krueger's book, The Broken Window; The Book of Fours equates history with science, philosophical investigation, the Bible, and the various confusions and uncertainties that beset Western culture today.Western Civilization has experienced several radical changes in its 1200-year journey through historical time. Although its unifying and centering ideal or ultimate concern has evaded analysis, it has held true until relatively recently. Now it is not holding true, and itis becoming evermore difficult to relate what it has been to what it might become. In short, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment were apocalyptic enough: The present apocalypse makes those changes shrink to insignificance on a civilizational scale.The thesis of The Book of Fours is generally that Western Civilization ended with World War I. This is the author's favorite breakpoint, but he is indebted to the wisdom of the historian Barbara Tuchman especially for this idea. Since that time, the civilizationhas been in an interim period, much like the Dark Ages, so-called, between the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in ca. 400 CE and the establishment of Charlemagne's imperial domain in 800 CE. Four eras passed to bring Western Civilization to its breakpoint, therefore, there is a wholeness to it, now, that bears the character of changelessness. What we think of as cultural change is, in effect, anaccelerating concretizing or reifying of what has already been assumed.The Change, with a capital 'C', can be characterized by apocalyptic references and language. This style of characterizing the character of the present Western Moment is almost ubiquitous. Some kind of apocalypse is virtually expected.