That theology is more interesting than politics is one impression gained in talking to Christians from abroad during a six-month stay in Jerusalem during the first part of 1979. Their political opinions, like those of other inhabitants of this city, are for the most part too passionately partisan and polarized to carry much weight. Pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians tend to cancel each other, at least for someone like myself who has been trying to talk to both sides. One longs for other viewpoints that might restore balance and perspective. In Jerusalem masses of information are available, but there are few political ideas that transcend the present fronts.

Can security in the NATO/Warsaw Pact area be achieved without nuclear-weapons, or with significantly reduced reliance on them?" Many religious leaders and other concerned citizens in Europe and America are asking this question while NATO political and military authorities are deliberating about how NATO should improve its nuclear posture in Europe (the so-called theater nuclear posture).

No one can be smug or even satisfied about depending on nuclear weapons for security. One hardly need recount the destructive power of individual nuclear weapons (up to twenty-five or fifty times the explosive power of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or count the thousands of warheads in current nuclear inventories on both sides.

As President Carter prepared for his first official visit to Mexico in February, 1979, to discuss, among other things, U.S. access to its neighbor's new-found oil, the U.S. secretary of energy, James R. Schlesinger, warned that the security of the Western democracies could be completely undermined if instability became endemic in the Persian Gulf and the flow of oil to Europe, Japan, and the United States was sharply curtailed.

There was considerable irony in this situation. As columnist James Reston observed in the New York Times, the president was not going to Mexico "to deal with the price of Mexican gas—though that is an immediate and divisive problem—but with the price of neglect.

For better or worse United States foreign policy is now identified with human rights, setting moral standards for other nations. Human rights guidelines have become a screen filtering Washington's relations with virtually all countries. Among the most controversial of these is South Korea, where we are accused on the one hand of condoning human rights violations in order to protect our regional security interests and on the other of undercutting our security interests by pressing human rights policies that weaken South Korea.

History rarely gives civilizations a second chance. The record of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mohenjo-Daro, the Incas, the Khmers, Spain, Turkey, Britain, and many other nations suggests that civilizational excellence is impermanent and, once lost, remains beyond resurrection. Of all these great societies China appeared the most enduring. For close to two thousand years, from the Han Dynasty at the turn of the Christian era to the early Ch'ing Dynasty about two hundred years ago, the Middle Kingdom was one of the best governed and most advanced countries on earth. Cultural and technological achievements combined to make China a superpower among states for a longer period than that experienced by any other major nation. Eventually, however, the norms of history prevailed. Foreign intrusion and internal confusion brought decline throughout the nineteenth century. By the time China entered the twentieth century the Confucian order had collapsed—its greatness an historic memory, its claim to empire a semantic fiction.

The Japan-America trade war, which our authorities are pressing on many fronts, is only part of a much broader offensive. There are skirmishes or battles going on all around the globe. The European Community claps restrictions or imposes “voluntary” restraint. Australia and New Zealand pound on the table and make threats. The ASEAN countries hint that it will be hard to cooperate while they suffer negative trade balances. The Third World countries whine that they would appreciate more Japanese development aid. And the Arab nations roar that Japan will go energy hungry if it doesn't help them build up their industry (and reverse its earlier policy on the Middle East).

This little book will be as offensive to some Christian and Jewish believers as it certainly will be to determined secularists. That, plus a demanding style of presentation, will keep Pannenberg's Human Nature, Election, and History (Westminster; 116 pp.; $4.95) off anybody's best seller list, but that may be just as well. Arguments that relentlessly probe first principles and aim to upset our most deeply rooted assumptions need to be conditioned, as it were, in smaller and more disciplined discussion before they are readied for popular dissemination. Such a statement may seem frightfully elitist, but it would in no way embarrass Wolfhart Pannenberg.