During the three decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the ethical discussion of nuclear weapons has been preoccupied with the morality of using, or threatening to use, arms of mass annihilation. There has been a relative neglect of the ethics of nuclear arms control and disarmament. Moreover, since the late 1960's widespread complacency about the presumed efficacy of mutual deterrence and the ostensible progress of detente have tended to dissipate the nuclear anxieties of ethicists, politicians, and other citizens who attend to world affairs.

It is, of course, a matter of judgment whether or not one believes the current international situation is, as the Chinese put it, one characterized by a great disorder on earth—“the wind sweeping through the tower heralds a rising storm in the mountains.” But the general trends seem to be quite clear: a disintegration of the cold war coalitions, the emergence of nonsecurity issues as die essence of international politics, and a change toward new power configurations. In such a transitional context the current Chinese posture in international politics seems to be based on one of self-assured “providential statesmanship” exploiting all the possibilities in the “great disorder under heaven.”

For any sizable group of theologians to agree on any statement is a sign of hope that we may be moving beyond the extreme fragmentation of the recent past. Further, the tone and intent of this agreement is clearly Christian and affirmative. Hence my initial reaction to “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation” was positive. Unfortunately, this initial reaction has been superseded by a more negative judgment, and my comments will reflect this phase of my reaction.

The chief weakness of “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation” is that it consists in a series of negations. The assumption is that if only positions that are opposed can be swept aside, powerful new affirmations will rise to take their place; but surely this is a dubious reading of our current situation.

Through constant repetition over the past siderable credence has been given to a very pessimistic outlook for world agriculture. The pessimists argue that recurrent and ever more serious food shortages will occur as a result of increasing population growth, rising affluence, and decreasing availability of cultivatable land. Based largely on world consumption of food and feed grains ranging between 1.1 and 1.2 billion tons per year, with a yearly growth in volume of some 25 million tons needed to meet increased demand, it has been asserted that the world has twenty-seven days worth of food reserves left and is living on a razor's edge with respect to famine. This assertion does not bear up under close examination.

The repeated victories of Israel's Armed Forces have prevented our enemies from annihilating us. But our military successes alone did not and could not bring about peace and normalization in the relations with our neighbors. More important, our victory in the Six-Day War of June, 1967, not only failed to guarantee our security, but, paradoxically, exposed us to a major enemy attack on two fronts for which we were not prepared psychologically, politically, even militarily. Indeed, our extraordinary victory of 1967 left us with a time bomb we refused to recognize and did not defuse. All this happened because we regarded the military triumph as something of an end in itself instead of an instrument to shape a political strategy for achieving peace and stability in the region.

Some three years ago a movement calling itself the Dalit Panthers began to be heard of outside the Untouchable communities of Bombay and the surrounding coastal village of Maharashtra where it originated. By the time the Dalit (“oppressed”) Panthers had come to .the attention of the national and foreign media, they had extended their base to include other areas and language groups and broadened their appeal to reach beyond Untouchables to aboriginal people and landless peasants, and even to small landowners and cultivators.

This newest revolutionary Indian group's rallying cry is “Untouchable Power.” Admittedly influenced by the Black Panthers from which they took their name, one leader declared: “The problems of black Americans are our own. Black Power gave birth to Untouchable Power.”

The United States, as Walt Whitman said, is a “nation of nations,” a nation essentially of immigrants. Their sacrifices, courage, and imagination created factories, farms, mines, and a rich intermingling of cultures.

Our country has two traditions: one that welcomes the stranger who, as Benjamin Franklin noted, is in the forefront of defending democracy; and another that in times of crisis uses the foreign bom as a scapegoat for unsolved social problems. In Jefferson's words, “the friendless alien is the safest subject for a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow.”

Recent behavior of working-class Americans, sometimes called “new ethnics,”; has deeply shocked and bewildered many .acute commentators. The supposed return to militant self-identification has led one radical, Pete Hamill, to claim that “the working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The same display of muscular working-class behavior has led Herbert Hill, an equally radical critic, to assert that “the hard-hat labor unionists, and they are by no means limited to the building trades, have joined with the military elite and their political spokesmen. This suggests the great danger of the rise of a proto-fascdst workers” movement in the United States.

The economy of Southeast Asia has been in relatively good shape in spite of the instability of the world monetary system, trade deficits, and the worldwide oil crisis. There are promising factors for economic growth, opportunities for employment, and possibilities of rising income. But Asian development presents short-and long-term problems of a very complicated nature. One of the most serious problems is inflation and its impact on the social and political programs of individual countries. At the same time, there are severe shortages of basic commodities, such as oil and food. My own country, Japan, is among those affected.

The peddler assembled a pyramid of small, red envelopes on the grass at his feet. He was hawking a nostrum, which he declared would cure everything from impotence to corns to alcoholism. His curly black hair glistened in the milky Peruvian sun. His assistant, a young boy, was transfixed by an iguana, as the crowd was transfixed by the voluble huckster. Figuratively he held them in the palm of his hand while the boy literally held the iguana in his. He stared at it, as if waiting for it to change into something other than a lizard.

It was Saturday afternoon. In the center of town foreigners picked over Indian blankets and dickered inexpertly for ceramics, copper masks of Inca deities, and the handbags woven in bright colors that are all the rage these days in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.

An Appeal for Theological Affirmation has already proved to be an important statement in the contemporary context. Its historical and sociological significance seems assured. But whether the Appeal is theologically all that significant is still an open question. That the individual theological contributions of many of its distinguished signers will merit a secure place in the history of American theology seems sure. But to ask whether this statement itself is theologically accurate is to formulate a question mat, for my part, must be answered negatively.

I like licentious literature and hate Savonarolas. Voyages through the mysteries of the organism are not devoid of interest. We have long since become used to exploring the endless mysteries of the universe. We should now explore the wonderful potential of the body. Every body has its own biofeedback, and if probing into these hidden recesses is healing, so much the better.

But the exploitation of passing fads and lasting causes is quite another matter. Consider, for example, the recent imitation of Portnoy's Complaint entitled “Speaking From the Body” by Union Theological Seminary Professor Tom F. Driver (in Theology and Body, edited by John Fenton and published by Westminster in 1974).