Harvard theologian Gordon D. Kaufman, who died in 2011, was known for his pioneering work in re-assessing and reconstructing theological claims in light of modern scientific knowledge and contemporary challenges. This year, 2025, marks the fortieth anniversary of his provocative little book, Theology for a Nuclear Age. The original form of the book was a series of lectures at The University of Manchester (UK), which were, in turn, a development of some ideas Kaufman had sketched in his 1982 presidential address at the American Academy of Religion, “Nuclear Eschatology and the Study of Religion.” During those years and beyond, Kaufman was concerned to grapple with the novel circumstances in which we have gained the frightful power to end human life on earth.
We have gained the frightful power to end human life on earth
The book was a minor splash when it was published in 1985, and it seems worthwhile, forty years later, to reassess its argument. I wish to revisit some of its elements in relation to two contexts: (1) our current global political situation and its dangers, and (2) Kaufman’s theological development from 1985 until his death in 2011. The latter context, I ought to say, will be difficult for me to disentangle from my own theological work, as much of the trajectory of my thinking has been shaped by him, whether in appreciation or in reaction.
A central premise of Kaufman’s argument, which he took to be self-evident, was the novelty of the nuclear age. The dramatic character of this new capacity for destruction, for Kaufman, had to do with what he would later (in 1993) come to call the “ecological” quality of human agency. “Ecological” here has to do not with environmental concerns but with the feed-forward loops of human action. Kaufman believed that human agency has effects on its own conditions. In other words, the capacity to act, when it is well-directed, strengthens the capacity for further action. The grim alternative, expressed in various ways in human history even under the “normal” circumstances of limitation and weakness, is when human activity undermines its own conditions. In effect, we are free to make ourselves (or our neighbors, or both) less free—or, in the extreme case, unfree. While, as I say, this has always been true, the “nuclear age” exaggerates the grim aspect of this feed-forward loop because now we can act in such a way that there can never be further human acts.
The radical novelty Kaufman wanted to underscore, therefore, has to do with the fact that our fate—if not our ultimate eschatological fate, then at least our ultimate historical fate—seems to be in our hands. We can end human life. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre analyzed the dim awareness a free individual has that they can, at any time while crossing a bridge, throw themself over the railing and die. The terror of that awareness is the ease with which one could do it, together with the fact that one could do it without much rational deliberation and, indeed, without much motivation. We may have every reason not to do it—and yet, even so, the fact remains that we could do it, even in the face of the best reasons not to. But, for Kaufman, we now face the dizzying peril of that capacity on the largest conceivable scale. If an individual dies of suicide, there remain many values to which they may have been committed. In addition, there remain redemptive possibilities that are open to those who learn from, or show compassion in response to, the death. But if the human race dies at its own hands, all human values are destroyed. For Kaufman, this means that no redemptive possibilities remain.
It’s worth reflecting on the proliferation of “post-apocalyptic” stories in prose and on the screen since the advent of the nuclear age. The imaginary apocalypses in question are not always nuclear in nature, but they suggest a similar catastrophic end to human civilization. The striking feature of these stories is that, by their nature post-apocalyptic, they hold open the hope for redemption beyond catastrophe. For Kaufman, or at least for the Kaufman of Theology for a Nuclear Age, this reflects an incapacity to wrestle with the enormity of our situation. While it may be possible for human life to continue in chastened and likely degraded form after a nuclear catastrophe, it is also possible, if not likely, that human life will not be able to continue at all. There would be no heartwarming stories of courage, for example. More pointedly, there is nothing for us, in the present, to be curious about or interested in as we try to imagine such a fate.
The theological challenge Kaufman identified, and which he continued to work through for the rest of his career, is that the nuclear age seems to undermine two key planks of traditional theistic belief: divine sovereignty and God’s redemptive purposes in the ordering of the world. It is perhaps already evident why these two beliefs come under scrutiny. First, if we now have the capacity to end human life on earth, we have become, if only in a grim sense, masters of our own fate. Though we cannot strengthen our human capacities indefinitely, we can weaken them absolutely. We can bring a sort of final judgment on ourselves that is more radical than the Scriptures imagine God’s judgment to be, wiping out not only the existence of the human species, but depriving the universe of any means even to remember us. It would be, in effect, a nearly total ontological negation—one might say, god-like in its finality.
For Kaufman, in this context, claims about God’s sovereignty function in an unhelpful way; rather like post-apocalyptic dramas of recent years, it consoles us with the idea that God will not allow all human value to be destroyed. Belief in divine sovereignty, Kaufman believed, blocks us from reckoning with the danger of our situation and therefore impedes us from taking the sort of full responsibility for it that is required if we are to respond purposively and adequately. To put the point in the dramatic terms characteristic of Theology for Nuclear Age, we alone are responsible for what comes of us as a species in this fraught situation of nuclear madness, and any consoling belief in some sort of guaranteed preservation or redemption keeps us from facing the truth.
Faith in God was an acknowledgment that we live in wider contexts of creativity
Nevertheless, Kaufman did not believe that jettisoning the idea of God’s sovereignty meant that the idea of God was without value. Following his teacher H. Richard Niebuhr, Kaufman urged that faith in God has a practical meaning. “God” is a word that functions in a particular way, and the function remains significant and practically compelling even when traditional ways of understanding it have become problematic. In a nutshell, “God” has always functioned, first of all, to “relativize” human self-understanding as well as our anthropocentric values. Incorporating the word and idea of “God” into our discourse reminds us of the limitations of our capacities and the incompleteness and questionability of our values. This stark, and largely negative, meaning of “God,” for Kaufman, is important in the nuclear age because it helps us recognize and appreciate that our values and vision are always in need of challenge, debate, and reconstruction. As Kaufman’s project matured in subsequent years, this negative appreciation for “God” grew toward a more positive affirmation. In his magnum opus, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (1993), Kaufman turned toward “creativity” as the fundamental meaning of the word “God.” Faith in God was not simply a stark reminder of limitation—it was an acknowledgment that we live in wider contexts of creativity—the continual emergence of new realities, new insights, and even new values. Importantly, although Kaufman still believed that the particularly human expression of divine creativity still fell under the threat of self-destruction, creativity as such is not so threatened. Creativity remains and always will remain. So, while nuclear annihilation would make it impossible for humanity to continue, and would be the end of any creative or redemptive possibilities for humanity, creativity would continue to produce value and beauty, although of a non-human type.
By the time Kaufman wrote his last book, Jesus and Creativity (2006), he had arrived at the conviction that the second great symbol invoked in Theology for a Nuclear Age, “Christ,” has a limited scope and application. “Christ” suggests redemptive possibilities emerging from negative experiences and perhaps even from historical catastrophes. The symbol of Christ helps us understand, for example, how the sufferings of martyrs struggling for racial equality during the Civil Rights movement were part of a “redemptive trajectory” that qualifies and deepens our appreciation for and commitment to God, and gives their sufferings a more capacious meaning that survives to fuel and motivate our current struggles for freedom and justice. But, of course, as we have said, a key animating factor in Kaufman’s theology is his conviction that redemptive trajectories can be cut short. In fact, he came to believe, they always are. They operate within tiny corners of the universe, but do not characterize “creativity” as a whole.
I suggest that this clarification of a conviction that was already implicit in Theology for a Nuclear Age lends that earlier book a different aura, if you will. If the human project, and all the redemptive possibilities that occur within it, were always going to be of limited scope and duration, then it seems as if “creativity” had always hemmed us in, so to speak. In other words, perhaps the nuclear situation is not quite so radically distinctive as the somewhat younger Kaufman imagined. Whether we die by collective suicide (if it could really be described that way), or by a meteor strike, or by a plague of some sort, the fact remains that, from the perspective of God as creativity, we were always going to arise and pass away. What I’m suggesting is that Kaufman’s further theological work, until his death in 2011, suggests a soberer sort of judgment about human agency and our place in the world that erodes somewhat the fervor of his earlier provocations.
A further question we might ask is whether our current global political situation contributes to or suggests modifications of Kaufman’s assessment of the nuclear age. In particular, how does Kaufman’s claim of the radical novelty of our nuclear capacities fare in the light of nuclear proliferation, the rise of non-state actors with enormous destructive capacities, and other, non-nuclear threats that suggest similarly apocalyptic possibilities? In one sense, these additional scenarios of potential destruction lend broader credibility to Kaufman’s concerns about the possible end of human life. However, the proliferation of such considerations invites us to reconsider ancient intuitions on the fragility of life and the recalcitrance and irrationality of evil. To take one example, Claus Westermann has argued that the “Fall” stories in Genesis (in chapters three, four, nine, and eleven) all picture the fate of human beings being tied up with the tendency to attempt futilely to exceed our limitations. Do not intuitions of catastrophe in the wake of excessive ambitions already figure into ancient accounts of nemesis, tragedy, and evil, in both biblical and non-biblical traditions?
This question raises broader ones. Did Kaufman’s aim, dramatically to underscore the need to accept responsibility for our fate in a nuclear age, cause him unnecessarily to pit human agency against divine action, as if in a sort of zero-sum equation? Is it true that our capacity to destroy life on earth somehow competes with or renders null traditional claims about divine sovereignty? One could also imagine, for example, claiming (with Kathryn Tanner and others) that God’s action is an empowering rather than limiting activity—that it operates not to stifle but to enhance the human capacity to act.1For example, see Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 90ff. In such a case, jettisoning the notion of divine sovereignty over human affairs does not free our sense of responsibility from stultifying consolations as it suggests a different sort of meta-physical context for it—one in which, in existentialist fashion, human agency pushes against fate rather than seeking to consent or align with the benevolent purposes of God. I take it that Kaufman’s later reflection on the “creativity” that pervades the universe begins to recoup this ancient sense of a benevolent context of human action, though it perhaps does not go very far.
Further (and relatedly), is it to be taken without reservation as true, as Kaufman seemed to have believed, that redemptive possibilities for humans pertain only to “human life on earth?” Would it not be possible to hold that the physical world we share is not the only locus of redemption but is rather a laboratory or perhaps a crucible in which our capacity to choose the good is tested and refined, only to be perfected in some other realm?
Kaufman’s “Christ” is the very meaning of creativity itself
This last question is not a particularly friendly one, I suppose, because it questions the naturalistic and historicist framework that, for apologetic and practical reasons, Kaufman wished to keep intact. Kaufman would not entertain the possibility of a life after this one because recourse to such a hope would, in his judgment, undermine the sense of urgency we need to deal with the existential crisis of human agency he describes in Theology for a Nuclear Age. But it seems to me that it is at least worth asking whether a sense of dire emergency at the scale and with the finality Kaufman imagines doesn’t produce at least as many problems as it avoids. My sense is that, in a nuclear situation, as in any situation of possible calamity, calm and repose is better than a pins-and-needles sense of urgency. Confidence in the ultimate triumph of good is better than trying to fend off destruction for as long as we can while knowing that our efforts are doomed, in the end, to fail. Moreover, it seems to me that the unique gift of our Christian inheritance is precisely the capacity to look into the face of death and destruction and see God working to bring life and peace—if not in this age, then at least in an age to come. But this would mean that Kaufman’s “Christ” is not the denizen of a tiny corner of a universe in which creativity reigns supreme, indifferently to whatever (inevitably parochial) conceptions of the good we may hold to, but is the very meaning of creativity itself, hidden for now but destined to be revealed. But that would make for a somewhat different theology for a nuclear age.
These queries and criticisms notwithstanding, Kaufman’s 1985 volume, together with his subsequent work, continue to raise necessary questions for theology today. He invited us to reckon with the fact that death is not just an individual event for theology to grapple with. We must address the question of death today at the collective and species (and, indeed, cosmic) level. If not animated by a sense of grim urgency, then we at least need to cultivate faithful attention.
