Ephraim Radner, A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption

Some readers will complain that A Profound Ignorance is a challenging book. Whatever the challenge, it cannot be attributed fully either to the book’s material and prose, or to the “coddling of the American mind” (to borrow a phrase from Haidt and Lukianoff) which predisposes readers today to cry wolf at the scent of alterity and burst into flight. The challenge of Radner’s work in both authorial and readerly aspects is a more complex matter. It comprises not merely linguistic and intellectual demands, but obediential and penitential ones. The potential fruits of engaging Radner thus proceed from the superficiality of learning fascinating historical tidbits, to a deeply transformed understanding of the modern Christian predicament, to the utter profundity of divine encounter. Eminent Jewish scholar Peter Ochs once observed, as he commented on one of Radner’s other volumes, that Radner’s text propelled him, in a way that few texts other than the Torah had, to fumble about for his headcovering. Caveat Lector: like Radner’s other volumes, A Profound Ignorance needs to be confronted, wrestled with, lingered over, and accompanied by prayer. There are three aspects of the book’s challenge that demand comment. The first is that, as his “subversive pneumatology,” A Profound Ignorance asks readers to step outside of a particular pneumatological orientation that is now taken for granted in the West. In the twentieth-century, this orientation birthed the contemporary theological discipline of Pneumatology. For Radner, this new birth is not the triumphant overcoming of a primitive binitarianism. It is, rather, the decoupling of the theology of the Holy Spirit from its maternal Christological and ecclesial moorings. As Radner puts it, “the problem of modern Pneumatology is that it seeks to escape the world of flesh and blood which is the body and blood of our Lord” (p. 84). Yet Radner spends little time condemning contemporary culprit theologians, much less naming them. For 952309 PRE0010.1177/1063851220952309Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical TheologyBook Review book-review2020