I see myself as a theologian of crisis. This mode has a pedigree in the development and history of theological ideas and movements. Theology of crisis often is understood in synonymy with the more pejorative label of NeoOrthodoxy. Karl Barth, in its most fulsome iteration, is known as one of its primary progenitors. Some might see this from within the frame of an existentialist mode, and that’s fine. It clearly has that element to it, but it cannot be reduced to that. In general terms Martin Luther might be understood as theology of crisis’s originator (or maybe even Jesus Himself, in his office as Prophet and Priest ought to be understood as its originator). Peter Fischer describes theology of crisis this way:

The theology of crisis had its origin from the revival of Reformation studies. The so-called “Luther renaissance,” perhaps stimulated by the approach of the jubilee year of 1917, produced a number of monographs of significance and also saw the publication of several major journals. Barth’s now famous Römerbrief appeared soon after the onrush of Reformation studies and in a sense can be considered as part of the “renaissance.” In it Barth addressed the twentieth-century church in the name of the first century church interpreted in the spirit of the sixteenth. It will therefore serve our purpose to consider crucial changes in Protestant theology against which the theology of crisis movement reacted. This will of necessity be an abbreviated image, telescoped, foreshortened, even caricatured. But it ought to serve to establish a perspective.

Like its twin, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation has been viewed from all sides, and with each new angle of view has appeared to be something different. It has also changed hues according to each interpreter’s set of values. But also like the Renaissance, it has retained certain persistently recurring emphases; and none of these is more persistent or more characteristic than the freedom of the living God in relation to man (a fine study of Luther’s theology by P. Watson is appropriately entitled: Let God be God). This emphasis is so strong that critics have frequently confused Luther’s free God with Ockham’s arbitrary God. In its own judgment, the Magisterial Reformation had the primary task of reminding Christendom that God’s free mercy and grace alone are the reason of human salvation. This is the essence of the doctrine of predestination held by all sixteenth century reformers. In the manner of the Old Testament prophets, they pointed to the transcendent, all-powerful one who had shown himself freely when and where he chose, who was not to be confused with philosophical ideas of his existence or attributes. Broadly speaking, the Protestant Reformation was a part of that large revival of piety of the period, which accused the church of having lulled to sleep the consciences it should have awakened. The Brethren of the Common Life, the Christian Humanists, the Oratory of the Divine Love, the congregation of Clerks Regular, individual daring preachers of reform, not to speak of the whole Anabaptist stirring, are other examples of the vast movement of revival of vital piety. It was the outcry of the age against the cheapening of grace, against religious superficiality, against the familiarity with holy things, against the reliance on quasi-magic religious practices that made for easy religion. Luther’s “justification by faith alone” and his “theology of the cross” epitomized the Protestant form of this protest.[1]

This was a development of theology, as far as intentional movement, that developed in the wake of the shocking atrocities of WWI. The human suffering exposed and perpetrated during that time, one that the world itself could not escape, confronted a whole stable of [German/Swiss] theologians, inclusive of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. But the material point of theology of crisis is that the theologian is confronted, afresh, with some sort of human crisis, and then God in the midst of that crisis. It is an attempt to think God afresh and anew prompted by the uncomfortable circumstances the viator is constantly confronted with as they live in this fallen and chaotic world. It is in the verities of human crises where the person, like the Apostle Paul, who ‘had the sentence of death written on him, that he would not trust himself, but the One who raises the dead’ (cf. II Cor 1.8-9), is forced into encounter with the living God / the risen Christ. In this encounter, the Christian theologian learns to submit all that has come before, in the theologies of the past, and all her categories and emphases, under the specter of Christ’s fresh and forging face.

This is my experience and mode of theology. It is an attempt to think God from within the crises of daily life; with the Pauline sense of the sentence of death being upon me. It is with Luther’s sense of anxiety and torment that I operate, only able to find refreshment and theological reality in the One who raises the dead. As I am ‘constantly being given over to Christ’s death, that His life might be made manifest in the mortal members of my body,’ that I come to know who God is; and thus come to have the capacity to genuinely bear witness to Him in all speech seasoned with Grace. This will always be my mode as a Christian theologian. This means I will repudiate speculative or analytic modes for thinking God. I will only think God from a dialogical or relational mode wherein I first came to know the voice of Christ as a 3 year old little boy. That’s who I have known, do know, and will know finally in beatifico visio. This is my confession coram Deo.

[1] Petr B. Fischer, “Theology of Crisis in Perspective,” The Centennial Review Vol. 8, No. 2 Theology Issue (Spring 1964): 218-19.