Category Archives: David Congdon

Who Is a True Christian? And AAR

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Dr. David Congdon has written a new book. Published by Cambridge University Press (2024), it is titled: Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture. I have some history with ole’ Congdon, particularly from back in the good old days of the blogosphere. Anyway, his new book might sound provocative; but I don’t think it does, really. Congdon, these days, rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; the bodily return of Jesus Christ; a conscious afterlife (eschatological life), so on and so forth. With these identifiable positions, what in God’s green earth qualifies someone like Congdon to write a book on identifying ‘who a true Christian is?’ He has already walked away from any semblance of what the biblical identifier, “Christian,” had come to mean; particularly in the book of Acts. At best, Congdon’s tools for identifying who the true Christian is are going to be those provided for him through sociology. But then in what sort of meaningful way would this give him privy to be a self-proclaimed identifier of who the true Christian is? Being a Christian isn’t a sociological category; it is a revelational-apocalyptic category, indeed, a biblical category. Thusly, its contours and themes, as those might be successfully and intelligibly understood, are purely theological and biblical. As a good Bultmannian, Congdon would and should know all of this. And yet he remains in the mode of deconstruction that he has seemingly been in for years now; long before I came to know him (circa 2006).

Here is the blurb from Congdon’s book:

‘No true Christian could vote for Donald Trump.’ ‘Real Christians are pro-life.’ ‘You can’t be a Christian and support gay marriage.’ Assertive statements like these not only reflect growing religious polarization but also express the anxiety over religious identity that pervades modern American Christianity. To address this disquiet, conservative Christians have sought security and stability: whether by retrieving ‘historic Christian’ doctrines, reconceptualizing their faith as a distinct culture, or reinforcing a political vision of what it means to be a follower of God in a corrupt world. The result is a concerted effort ‘Make Christianity Great Again’: a religious project predating the corresponding political effort to ‘Make America Great Again.’ Part intellectual history, part nuanced argument for change, this timely book explores why the question of what defines Christianity has become, over the last century, so damagingly vexatious – and how believers might conceive of it differently in future.[1]

Call me skeptical. That isn’t to say that Congdon might not offer any good insights or critiques say of evangelical Christianity; or even, mainline Christianity (and yet, Job’s “friends” thought they had good insights on God too). But it is to say, that I find it extremely ironic for someone who is no longer a professing Christian (at best he is a pluralist, something like we find with the late John Hick), to uplift himself as someone who might have the capacity to construct a mechanism that might tell us “Who Is a True Christian.”

The American Academy of Religion (AAR) is having its national-international meeting in San Diego, CA this next Thanksgiving week; along with the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). At these types of theological conferences, they have breakout and panel sessions, devoted to various groups and fellowships within the AAR. There is going to be a panel engaging directly with Congdon’s book, and apparently the panel is made up of critics, at one level or the other. In my view, Congdon’s book doesn’t warrant a panel review and engagement. Now, the AAR is expansive, and as such, has latitude in regard to its membership and focuses. Even so, just because something is published, even if it has acuity and academic eloquence, for my money, this doesn’t in itself warrant a response. I say this because whenever something is responded to in academia it elevates the subject matter, and amplifies its ostensible credibility. I don’t see how Congdon’s book achieves this level of credibility for a theological organization. If anything, it maybe could be paneled at some academic sociological conference, or something; this would be much more fitting. But such has the AAR become.

I simply wanted to acknowledge that this is happening. Congdon still has some influence on various Christians out there, and not for the good. I used to point some of my readers, here at the blog, to some of Congdon’s work in the past. I regret that. And so, I feel like I have some responsibility for alerting folks to what Congdon is doing these days, if only to keep them from falling into the trap of his neo-Gnostic maneuverings within the broader frame of the ‘body of Christ.’

[1] See Congdon, Who Is a True Christian?

On Being Apocalyptic and Anti-Natural Theology in Theological Orientation

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I wrote the following four years ago. This locus remains my primary point of theological interest. That is, how the Christian claims to know God, under what pressures, has the greatest theological, political, sociological, and ethical implications we could fathom. As you will see, beyond the programmatic entailments engaged with in the following, natural theology, and adherence to it, has clear and present impact on the daily lives of real-life people; whether personally or collectively (as a society). If it is maintained that God and His ways can be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself, then this will frame the way the Christians under this specter develop their respective ethics and politics; indeed, in light of their ostensible theological soundings. This is why, for Barth, this was all so pressing; particularly as he inhabited the range of two World Wars. In the Reich context it was evident for all to see how a form of natural theology could be deployed for the evilest of ends. In my view, there is no way to massage natural theology into a form that magnifies the name of Jesus Christ. Thus, along with Barth, I believe that the analogia entis (as a subset of natural theology) is Antichrist! We can see how so-called Christian leaders today are equally committed to natural theology, and how that is allowing them to capitulate to the global politics of the day; particularly as that is focused on the politicization of the “health crisis,” so-called “climate change,” and the deployment of critical race theory. All of these things fall under the rubric of natural theology. Confidence in the natural human capacities leads people to the conclusion that we have the powers to manipulate “naked” ideas, or brute natural forces, just the same, to our own beneficial ends. All we end up doing under this sort of posture, though, in my view, is to take by force what alone belongs to God; who alone searches the hearts and minds of all humanity.

With the aforementioned, we now turn to the body of this post.

How do we know God? There are traditions for answering that very question; I follow a particular tradition in contrast to another prominent tradition. This post will explore this question by providing some lengthy description of its unfolding in 20th century modern theology. We will read along with David Congdon, at length, as he describes Karl Barth’s relationship to the analogia entis tradition, and the alternative that is situated in Barth’s dialectical theology. After we have read along with Congdon, we will bring what Congdon has surfaced for us in Barth’s theology into a brief discussion on a doctrine of creation in general. I recognize that I write about this issue frequently and often here at the blog, and this should alert you to the importance I see in it.

In the process of developing Barth’s (and Bultmann’s) style of dialectical theology Congdon breaks off in a section and gets into the issue of knowledge of God vis-à-vis the infamous analogy of being; most commonly associated, in medieval theology, with Thomas Aquinas, and in modern theology with Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara. The version of analogia entis that Barth is most animated by is the version of his German theological counterpart, Przywara. Barth’s reasons for being so animated are indeed contextual to the Third Reich milieu he was situated within, and the way that the Volk (national) church deployed things like the analogy of being, and natural theology in general, towards their evil ends. Some want to relativize or marginalize Barth’s animus towards the analogy of being by arguing that that was only a consequent and development per his idiosyncratic situatedness. Thus, the marginalization goes, Barth’s stance against the analogy of being may have served his purposes towards an attempt at assassinating the Nazi conflation of church and state, but for our current purposes, theologically, such animus would be misdirected. But what this critique fails to appreciate is that the forces Barth was contesting are the dark forces and principalities and powers that have always already been present in this space-time continuum. In other words, there is nothing idiosyncratic about Barth’s stance against the analogy of being or natural theology in general that aren’t just as prescient and present in the 21st century—look around, we are currently in a corporatist oligarchic globalist state wherein the principalities and powers are just as heavy upon us (in their own expressions) as they were in the Deutschland of Barth and the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer.

In the following David Congdon helps elucidate what in fact this whole debate is about; in particular in Barth’s contest with Przywara (and then by application to the German civilization and Emil Brunner). You will also see the way Condgon, per his thesis, ties this particular debate into a theology of mission (which ties into colonialism and nationalism). We will leave that particular discussion to the side (i.e., mission) to focus on Barth’s problem with the analogia. Congdon writes (in extenso):

The year 1932 marks the climax of the confrontation between Barth and Erich Przywara. Three years earlier, in February 1929, Barth invited Przywara to Münster to participate in his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. In December 1931, Przywara visited Barth again in his seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology” while at Bonn. These debates, together with Przywara’s request in April 1932 that Barth review his book, Analogia Entis, and the rising political unease in Germany, resulted in Barth’s famous statement in the preface to KD 1.1 that the analogia entis is “the  invention of the anti-Christ.” It was the 1929 meeting that really set the stage for their disagreement, and in particular a comment Przywara made on the morning of February 6. According to the student protocols of the seminary, Przywara began by defending his position regarding the manifestation of God’s revelation in history, including in human consciousness. In his defense he cited the Thomistic axiom “gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam” (grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature). Przywara understood grace to be both created and uncreated, both native and alien. The justification of the sinner does not annul but rather brings to fulfillment the grace already present in us by virtue of our creaturely participation in the being of God.

Within weeks after this seminar visit Barth delivered his response to Przywara in the form of his lecture in Dortmund, “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie.” While Przywara is not mentioned, he is the “silent conversation partner throughout.” This is especially clear when he addresses the Thomistic axiom directly:

“Gratia non destruit, sed supponti et perficit naturam.” Analogia entis: thus each existing being as such and also we human beings as existing beings participate in the similitudo Dei. The experience of God is for us an inherent possibility and necessity. . . . The word of God does not mean for human beings a confirmation and reassurance of the naïve confidence that the experience of God is, but rather . . . in contrast to the whole range of possible experience it says something new and not merely more strongly and clearly what people could know anyway and even experience elsewhere. Indeed, this is how things always stand between God’s word and human beings, in that it proclaims something new to them and comes to them like light in the darkness. It always comes to them as to sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace. . . . Therefore that ability and necessity, that capacity for experiencing God, cannot be understood at any rate as something “natural”—meaning something given with our existence as such or subsequently associated with our existence as such, nor can it be understood by an appeal to a “gratia inhaerens,” by virtue of which the knower and known would simply and in themselves be in the relation to God of the analogia entis.

Barth explicitly rejects the very axiom to which Przywara appealed to support his position. Grace, Barth says, neither has a basis in nature nor does it become subsequently part of nature. The grace of God is always a judging and forgiving grace, and for this reason it never becomes a “given” (datum) that lies at our disposal. It remains wholly nongiven even in the concrete event of Christ wherein God gives Godself to us. Grace always confronts us as a new event.

Keith Johnson makes this astute observation that much more is at stake here for Barth than simply the old Protestant-Catholic debate over justification, though that is certainly at the heart of the dispute. What concerns Barth is, in fact, the same colonialist logic of the gospel’s cultural captivity that prompted his dialectical revolt against liberal theology fifteen years earlier.

The link between humanity and God [Barth] recognized in 1929 followed the pattern he had seen in 1914 when his former teachers enlisted God in support of their own cause by giving their blessing to the war. Barth’s theology, from that moment on, had been driven by his goal of overcoming this mistake. In Przywara’s analogia entis, he discovered a sophisticated version of the same error, and in the Germany of 1932, the political winds were stirring in much the same way they had in 1914.

Barth’s remark in 1932 about the analogia entis as the “invention of the anti-Christ” is therefore “a direct function of his context. . .. The political turmoil around him had to be on Barth’s mind, and in his view, the church appeared to be complicit in the events that were unfolding.” In other words, the danger in Przywara’s thinking was that he provided a robust theological framework capable of justifying the nationalist propaganda and colonialist endeavors of the German nation. The fact that Przywara’s theology had such a strong internal consistency and grounding in the tradition made if far more dangerous than the liberalism of Barth’s teachers and Protestant contemporaries. It is for this reason that Barth was compelled to sound a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the analogia entis.

To make matters even more interesting, Przywara developed his account of analogy for missionary reasons. He understood the analogia entis as a “missionary principle” whose purpose is to prompt the church to positively engage German culture as the place where God is presently at work. The analogia entis accomplishes this task because “it attempts to meet the world on its own ground rather than insist that the world move to its ground.” We have to recall that, during these years of conversation with Przywara, Barth was simultaneously engaged in a debate with Brunner regarding the “point of connection” between nature and grace. And like Przywara, Brunner also viewed his account of the Anknüpfungspunkt as a missionary concept. A pattern quickly began to emerge. In each of these three situations—the liberal capitulation in 1914, Przywara’s analogia entis in 1929–32, Brunner’s Anknüpfungspunkt in 1929–35—Barth faced a theological position that claimed mission as its ground and aim, and on the basis of this appeal to mission sought to find a point of connection or continuity between God and humanity. The liberal theologians found it in German civilization, Przywara in human consciousness and experience, Brunner in the faculty of reason. In each case the will and work of God became continuous with what is already given and native to human beings in their creaturely existence, and so in each case Barth rendered a decisive verdict in the form of, respectively, the “No-God” in Der Römerbrief (1922), the “invention of the anti-Christ” in KD 1.1 (1932), and the famous Nein (1934).[1]

After this lengthy and enlightening treatment offered by Congdon, I think the primary point of reduction comes to the issue orbiting around a “point of connection” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and humanity. As Congdon underscores this has taken various expressions through the centuries, whether that be with Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Przywara, the German nation (of the third reich), or Brunner; it is the issue of ‘the point of contact’ between God and humanity that is significant. It is significant, particularly in Barth’s context, because of the ethical and theopolitical implications this locus entails.

If God can be thought from nature (or natural capacity), if the boundaries between God and humanity, God and the nations can be forcefully brought together by identifying an inherent capacity with nature itself that is gestationally waiting for God to activate and give it birth, then who’s to regulate this sort of grounding between God and humanity; the theologians, the politicians? Barth says Nein. He seeks to take away this seduction for the ‘natural’ human heart, and place the ground for “the point of connection” within the life of Godself in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why the type of analogical knowledge of God that Barth supports is grounded in what he calls an analogia fidei/relationis (analogy of faith-relation). Barth recognizes the role that analogy plays in the correspondence of our knowledge of God with God’s knowledge of Godself; but again, even as Barth recognizes the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity, and precisely because of that, the shape of analogy he can support is one where it is objectively grounded not in a faceless apophatic God, but only in and from a center in himself that is for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, within the Calvinian frame, faith is knowledge of God, and faith itself is the bond that God alone in the humanity of Christ has in se but for us as he transcends the ditch between himself and us within a creational nexus wherein all of creation has always already been attenuated and teleologized by Christ who is the Supreme and Firstborn of and for Creation.

I said at the beginning of my post that I was going to also get into a doctrine of creation. At the close of my paragraph above I start to hint at that discussion, but because of the length of this post I am going to close it now. I hope you can at least appreciate what is at issue in this discussion as a result of reading this post. Indeed, Barth had a context, but so has all of theological development; even so called catholic or ecumenical developments. The contextual and conditioned nature of theological development doesn’t negate its global availability or reduce its force to the period or circumstances of its locational unfolding; instead, the merit and weight of various theological developments, such as Barth’s anti-natural theological / anti-analogia entis posture, are weighed strictly by their proximate value in bearing witness to the res (the reality) and power of God’s Gospel who is Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll consider that if you are prone to writing Barth’s position off simply because Barth wrote his theology in the context and shadow of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Just maybe Barth’s theology, even though his heretic was partly German nationalism instead of Arius, has angel’s wings under it; in such a way that it might be a ministering spirit to the thirsty souls adrift in the 21st century evangelical theological wasteland (and I’m referring to the lacuna of Christian Dogmatics for the evangelical world).

 

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 292-95.

On a Knowledge of God: Natural Theology and its Antichrist Nature

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I wrote the following three years ago. This locus remains my primary point of theological interest. That is, how the Christian claims to know God, under what pressures, has the greatest theological, political, sociological, and ethical implications we could fathom. As you will see, beyond the programmatic entailments engaged with in the following, natural theology, and adherence to it, has clear and present impact on the daily lives of real-life people; whether personally or collectively (as a society). If it is maintained that God and His ways can be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself, then this will frame the way the Christians under this specter develop their respective ethics and politics; indeed, in light of their ostensible theological soundings. This is why, for Barth, this was all so pressing; particularly as he inhabited the range of two World Wars. In the Reich context it was evident for all to see how a form of natural theology could be deployed for the evilest of ends. In my view, there is no way to massage natural theology into a form that magnifies the name of Jesus Christ. Thus, along with Barth, I believe that the analogia entis (as a subset of natural theology) is Antichrist! We can see how so-called Christian leaders today are equally committed to natural theology, and how that is allowing them to capitulate to the global politics of the day; particularly as that is focused on the politicization of the “health crisis,” so-called “climate change,” and the deployment of critical race theory. All of these things fall under the rubric of natural theology. Confidence in the natural human capacities leads people to the conclusion that we have the powers to manipulate “naked” ideas, or brute natural forces, just the same, to our own beneficial ends. All we end up doing under this sort of posture, though, in my view, is to take by force what alone belongs to God; who alone searches the hearts and minds of all humanity.  

With the aforementioned, we now turn to the body of this post.  

How do we know God? There are traditions for answering that very question; I follow a particular tradition in contrast to another prominent tradition. This post will explore this question by providing some lengthy description of its unfolding in 20th century modern theology. We will read along with David Congdon, at length, as he describes Karl Barth’s relationship to the analogia entis tradition, and the alternative that is situated in Barth’s dialectical theology. After we have read along with Congdon we will bring what Congdon has surfaced for us in Barth’s theology into a brief discussion on a doctrine of creation in general. I recognize that I write about this issue frequently and often here at the blog, and this should alert you to the importance I see in it. 

In the process of developing Barth’s (and Bultmann’s) style of dialectical theology Congdon breaks off in a section and gets into the issue of knowledge of God vis-à-vis the infamous analogy of being; most commonly associated, in medieval theology, with Thomas Aquinas, and in modern theology with Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara. The version of analogia entis that Barth is most animated by is the version of his German theological counterpart, Przywara. Barth’s reasons for being so animated are indeed contextual to the Third Reich milieu he was situated within, and the way that the Volk (national) church deployed things like the analogy of being, and natural theology in general, towards their evil ends. Some want to relativize or marginalize Barth’s animus towards the analogy of being by arguing that that was only a consequent and development per his idiosyncratic situatedness. Thus the marginalization goes, Barth’s stance against the analogy of being may have served his purposes towards an attempt at assassinating the Nazi conflation of church and state, but for our current purposes, theologically, such animus would be misdirected. But what this critique fails to appreciate is that the forces Barth was contesting are the dark forces and principalities and powers that have always already been present in this space-time continuum. In other words, there is nothing idiosyncratic about Barth’s stance against the analogy of being or natural theology in general that aren’t just as prescient and present in the 21st century—look around, we are currently in a corporatist oligarchic globalist state wherein the principalities and powers are just as heavy upon us (in their own expressions) as they were in the Deutschland of Barth and the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer. 

In the following David Congdon helps elucidate what in fact this whole debate is about; in particular in Barth’s contest with Przywara (and then by application to the German civilization and Emil Brunner). You will also see the way Condgon, per his thesis, ties this particular debate into a theology of mission (which ties into colonialism and nationalism). We will leave that particular discussion to the side (i.e. mission) to focus on Barth’s problem with the analogia. Congdon writes (in extenso): 

The year 1932 marks the climax of the confrontation between Barth and Erich Przywara. Three years earlier, in February 1929, Barth invited Przywara to Münster to participate in his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. In December 1931, Przywara visited Barth again in his seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology” while at Bonn. These debates, together with Przywara’s request in April 1932 that Barth review his book, Analogia Entis, and the rising political unease in Germany, resulted in Barth’s famous statement in the preface to KD 1.1 that the analogia entis is “the  invention of the anti-Christ.” It was the 1929 meeting that really set the stage for their disagreement, and in particular a comment Przywara made on the morning of February 6. According to the student protocols of the seminary, Przywara began by defending his position regarding the manifestation of God’s revelation in history, including in human consciousness. In his defense he cited the Thomistic axiom “gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam” (grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature). Przywara understood grace to be both created and uncreated, both native and alien. The justification of the sinner does not annul but rather brings to fulfillment the grace already present in us by virtue of our creaturely participation in the being of God. 

Within weeks after this seminar visit Barth delivered his response to Przywara in the form of his lecture in Dortmund, “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie.” While Przywara is not mentioned, he is the “silent conversation partner throughout.” This is especially clear when he addresses the Thomistic axiom directly: 

“Gratia non destruit, sed supponti et perficit naturam.” Analogia entis: thus each existing being as such and also we human beings as existing beings participate in the similitudo Dei. The experience of God is for us an inherent possibility and necessity. . . . The word of God does not mean for human beings a confirmation and reassurance of the naïve confidence that the experience of God is, but rather . . . in contrast to the whole range of possible experience it says something new and not merely more strongly and clearly what people could know anyway and even experience elsewhere. Indeed, this is how things always stand between God’s word and human beings, in that it proclaims something new to them and comes to them like light in the darkness. It always comes to them as to sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace. . . . Therefore that ability and necessity, that capacity for experiencing God, cannot be understood at any rate as something “natural”—meaning something given with our existence as such or subsequently associated with our existence as such, nor can it be understood by an appeal to a “gratia inhaerens,” by virtue of which the knower and known would simply and in themselves be in the relation to God of the analogia entis. 

Barth explicitly rejects the very axiom to which Przywara appealed to support his position. Grace, Barth says, neither has a basis in nature nor does it become subsequently part of nature. The grace of God is always a judging and forgiving grace, and for this reason it never becomes a “given” (datum) that lies at our disposal. It remains wholly nongiven even in the concrete event of Christ wherein God gives Godself to us. Grace always confronts us as a new event. 

Keith Johnson makes this astute observation that much more is at stake here for Barth than simply the old Protestant-Catholic debate over justification, though that is certainly at the heart of the dispute. What concerns Barth is, in fact, the same colonialist logic of the gospel’s cultural captivity that prompted his dialectical revolt against liberal theology fifteen years earlier. 

The link between humanity and God [Barth] recognized in 1929 followed the pattern he had seen in 1914 when his former teachers enlisted God in support of their own cause by giving their blessing to the war. Barth’s theology, from that moment on, had been driven by his goal of overcoming this mistake. In Przywara’s analogia entis, he discovered a sophisticated version of the same error, and in the Germany of 1932, the political winds were stirring in much the same way they had in 1914. 

Barth’s remark in 1932 about the analogia entis as the “invention of the anti-Christ” is therefore “a direct function of his context. . . . The political turmoil around him had to be on Barth’s mind, and in his view, the church appeared to be complicit in the events that were unfolding.” In other words, the danger in Przywara’s thinking was that he provided a robust theological framework capable of justifying the nationalist propaganda and colonialist endeavors of the German nation. The fact that Przywara’s theology had such a strong internal consistency and grounding in the tradition made if far more dangerous than the liberalism of Barth’s teachers and Protestant contemporaries. It is for this reason that Barth was compelled to sound a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the analogia entis. 

To make matters even more interesting, Przywara developed his account of analogy for missionary reasons. He understood the analogia entis as a “missionary principle” whose purpose is to prompt the church to positively engage German culture as the place where God is presently at work. The analogia entis accomplishes this task because “it attempts to meet the world on its own ground rather than insist that the world move to its ground.” We have to recall that, during these years of conversation with Przywara, Barth was simultaneously engaged in a debate with Brunner regarding the “point of connection” between nature and grace. And like Przywara, Brunner also viewed his account of the Anknüpfungspunkt as a missionary concept. A pattern quickly began to emerge. In each of these three situations—the liberal capitulation in 1914, Przywara’s analogia entis in 1929–32, Brunner’s Anknüpfungspunkt in 1929–35—Barth faced a theological position that claimed mission as its ground and aim, and on the basis of this appeal to mission sought to find a point of connection or continuity between God and humanity. The liberal theologians found it in German civilization, Przywara in human consciousness and experience, Brunner in the faculty of reason. In each case the will and work of God became continuous with what is already given and native to human beings in their creaturely existence, and so in each case Barth rendered a decisive verdict in the form of, respectively, the “No-God” in Der Römerbrief (1922), the “invention of the anti-Christ” in KD 1.1 (1932), and the famous Nein (1934).1 

After this lengthy and enlightening treatment offered by Congdon, I think the primary point of reduction comes to the issue orbiting around a “point of connection” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and humanity. As Congdon underscores this has taken various expressions through the centuries, whether that be with Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Przywara, the German nation (of the third reich), or Brunner; it is the issue of ‘the point of contact’ between God and humanity that is significant. It is significant, particularly in Barth’s context, because of the ethical and theopolitical implications this locus entails. 

If God can be thought from nature (or natural capacity), if the boundaries between God and humanity, God and the nations can be forcefully brought together by identifying an inherent capacity with nature itself that is gestationally waiting for God to activate and give it birth, then who’s to regulate this sort of grounding between God and humanity; the theologians, the politicians? Barth says Nein. He seeks to take away this seduction for the ‘natural’ human heart, and place the ground for “the point of connection” within the life of Godself in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why the type of analogical knowledge of God that Barth supports is grounded in what he calls an analogia fidei/relationis (analogy of faith-relation). Barth recognizes the role that analogy plays in the correspondence of our knowledge of God with God’s knowledge of Godself; but again, even as Barth recognizes the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity, and precisely because of that, the shape of analogy he can support is one where it is objectively grounded not in a faceless apophatic God, but only in and from a center in himself that is for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, within the Calvinian frame, faith is knowledge of God, and faith itself is the bond that God alone in the humanity of Christ has in se but for us as he transcends the ditch between himself and us within a creational nexus wherein all of creation has always already been attenuated and teleologized by Christ who is the Supreme and Firstborn of and for Creation. 

I said at the beginning of my post that I was going to also get into a doctrine of creation. At the close of my paragraph above I start to hint at that discussion, but because of the length of this post I am going to close it now. I hope you can at least appreciate what is at issue in this discussion as a result of reading this post. Indeed, Barth had a context, but so has all of theological development; even so called catholic or ecumenical developments. The contextual and conditioned nature of theological development doesn’t negate its global availability or reduce its force to the period or circumstances of its locational unfolding; instead, the merit and weight of various theological developments, such as Barth’s anti-natural theological / anti-analogia entis posture, are weighed strictly by their proximate value in bearing witness to the res (the reality) and power of God’s Gospel who is Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll consider that if you are prone to writing Barth’s position off simply because Barth wrote his theology in the context and shadow of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Just maybe Barth’s theology, even though his heretic was partly German nationalism instead of Arius, has angel’s wings under it; in such a way that it might be a ministering spirit to the thirsty souls adrift in the 21st century evangelical theological wasteland (and I’m referring to the lacuna of Christian Dogmatics for the evangelical world). 

 

 1 David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 292-95.

A Reflection on David Congdon’s Thought and Move From orthodoxy

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I once posted this, and then took it down. I wanted to post it again because I think it is important for my readers to see. Why? Because back in the day I pointed many to Congdon. If I could I’d un-point them. The following is why.

I wanted to offer something of a response, or actually a reflection on David Congdon’s move from orthodox historic Christianity to something else. For some background: I came into contact with David probably all the way back in 2006 through blogging (when blogging was all the rage). In fact, through Halden Doerge, I came into contact not only with David, but with his bosom buddy, Travis McMaken (and a whole orbit of other folks, in their orbit, who I normally wouldn’t have had exposure to theologically). My contact with David has always been of the contentious sort, indeed one of our first real interactions came when he posted a response post to a blog post that I wrote on Barth and inerrancy (he has since taken that post down). The contention only really increased, apparently, to the point that both David and Travis completely cut me off from being able to access their social media outlets (Facebook and Twitter) at the same time. To this day I have no contact with David; it is what it is.

I say all of the above to provide some context for what I am going to write next. In other words, I don’t want this to appear as if this is simply out of the blue and that I just randomly came across David Congdon, and his writings; no, I have a past with David, and it is out of that exposure to his thought and development that I wanted to at least register the following.

In 2016 Congdon published his book The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch. In this book, which I have only read an extensive summary of from David himself, David comes out from orthodoxy, as it were, and attempts to reformulate a doctrine of salvation (and really the whole of the Christian faith) within and from the confines of the existentialist Christianity he has been in-formed by via his PhD work on Rudolf Bultmann. David writes:

What I set out to do instead in TGWS is rethink salvation from the ground up…. I define salvation existentially as the divine act of interruption that places us outside ourselves in solidarity with our neighbors, and specifically in solidarity with those who have been abandoned by the world and so participate in the Christ who died in God-abandonment. To be “saved” is to ally ourselves with those who already participate in Christ. Salvation already belongs to them in the sense that God is already with them and for them. Faith thus calls each person to follow the way God has already trod and continues to tread in each moment. Discipleship has nothing to do with moral purity, biblical knowledge, or theological correctness; it is in fact a willing abandonment of all such religious achievement and spiritual security in pursuit of the one and only thing that matters: a life shared in community and solidarity with others. Such a life alone counts as Christian, since such a life alone is faithful to the crucified one.[1]

This comes in response to two book reviews of David’s book—two favorable reviews—indeed the whole of my post here will be engaging only with what David references in that particular response of his. But what immediately stands out from the quote is David’s desire to rethink salvation from the ground up. Now, this isn’t necessarily a novel move, many constructive theologians through the centuries have attempted to think salvation (theoretically) from the ground up; indeed what we count as ‘orthodox’ today is a result of certain thinkers in the history of the church doing exactly this. So it isn’t this impulse that is ultimately problematic in David’s approach; instead, there’s something else, materially, that evinces as a result of David’s rethinking that becomes quite concerning—indeed, exceedingly sad. Yes, even in the quote we just shared from David we can see inklings that might begin to raise our antennas, but nothing, as of yet, that fundamentally represents an abandonment of the orthodox Christian faith.

Before I share what I found particularly disheartening from David’s personal development, I wanted to make one more point; an observation that I think might represent a cautionary for us all. What we find in Congdon’s approach is what we might want to call, in a typological fashion, a Cartesian Methodological Skepticism and deconstructionism. As critical thinkers we will all engage in the deconstruction and reconstruction of ideas; again, there is nothing unique to see here. But when such deconstruction is driven by a principled or methodic skepticism what was at first merely a tool of critical and modal thought has now become something of an acid that once let loose almost becomes impossible to contain. This, I would suggest, is what I think has happened in Congdon’s thought. I believe David, as many before him, started out in a very good place. Armed with his voracious appetite to learn, and an intellect and wit, just as voracious and tuned-in, Congdon moved into the theological world and made a series of decisions, for a complex of reasons that ultimately led him to conclude things about orthodox Christianity that led him away from orthodoxy itself. Here is the conclusion that reflects most what I am asserting in regard to David’s abandonment of what has counted as the historic orthodox Christian confession:

I should clarify here, for those who have not read the book, that universalism is no longer the concern it once was for me. I contracted the book because I was a convinced universalist, but by the time I wrote it, I had serious misgivings about all universalisms and no longer believed in a conscious afterlife anyway, so the driving question of most Christian universalisms—will everyone be saved from damnation and live with God for eternity?—had become moot for me.[2]

Right away, for most Christians their red flag rose up as they saw that David was a universalist; this in and of itself, for many Christians is a test for orthodoxy. For me, that is not the ultimate test. In other words, a person can hold a Christian or ‘evangelical’ universalism and not deny any of the tenets of what makes someone an orthodox Christian confessor (i.e. doctrine of God; doctrine of Christ; doctrine of salvation; authority of Scripture; etc.). Personally I repudiate universalisms (meaning views that see that all people one way or the other ending up in beatific vision, included in the heavenly kingdom, whether or not they said ‘yes’ to God in Christ pre-mortem), but this is not ultimately the problematic thing, I think, in David’s belief. It’s his rejection of a conscious afterlife. Belief in a ‘conscious afterlife’ in a noetic web of beliefs touches upon an extensive amount of interrelated beliefs, in a Christian dogmatic account, in such a way that it undoes some very basic touchstone and informing ideas that orthodox Christian belief has maintained through the centuries (in all expressions of orthodox Christian tradition). Most primary, and what may be the ultimate touchstone implicated by this rejection, is belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ himself. As we know, as Christians, the Apostle Paul sees this belief as the centraldogma of what makes Christianity viable

 12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; 14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. 17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.18 Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. 19 If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.[3]

It can’t be articulated any clearer. Congdon’s rejection of a conscious afterlife undercuts not only the hope of the Christian through millennia, but it undercuts the very foundation of Christian belief itself; i.e. the concrete, bodily resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. Without the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ Christians have no hope, not only for the present, but for the future; and as such ought to go eat, drink, and be merry, along with Epicurus, for tomorrow we die.[4]

I wanted to highlight this because Congdon has verbosely highlighted all of this and more through his many publications and writings. I have known about this for awhile, but just as of yesterday read the blog post from David that has prompted me to write this. David has made it public, and as such has asked for public responses; indeed David ends his blog post this way: “…I am grateful to Juan Torres and David Roberts for continuing the conversation and look forward to future dialogues, both critical and constructive, not only about my work but more importantly about the fundamental question: what is the gospel for us today?”[5] I am afraid the concern goes beyond mere academic or internecine jousting, but indeed is of such a sober nature that it requires at least acknowledgement of the sort that David leaves off his post; i.e. ‘what is the gospel for us today?’

The reality is such that David Congdon has young minds, learning minds and hearts who pay attention to what he thinks and has to say. The concern is that if such minds and hearts were to follow David’s lead they will end up abandoning, just as David has, the historic orthodox Christian faith; they will abandon the real Jesus and the eternal life that he is in himself for them; and will ultimately be separate from the reality of God’s triune life and the attendant beatific vision that comes through communion and participation with the physically risen Savior of the world, Jesus Christ. This issue is really that sobering, and as such ought to be considered with this type of reality in mind. I am not suggesting that David is ultimately anathema, that is not my place to discern. What I am noting is that if someone, not a believer, came across David’s teaching, and internalized it, the Jesus they encounter there would have no redemptive power in their lives; because the Jesus David offers to the world is dead.

As David has noted, in the same post, he has suffered immense fall-out from publishing this book. He writes:

This was a very personal book to write, and it has become even more personal to me in the months since publication. The book cost me my job, forced my family to relocate, and has been the cause of great, enduring pain. In a way, the book’s theme of cocrucifixion and existential abandonment has become more real to me since writing it. But I do not regret a single word. It was something I had to write; the words were almost drawn out of me, as if I were more their amanuensis than author.[6]

It is unfortunate indeed, the type of fall out that is produced when someone not only personally moves away from orthodox Christian confession, but the fall out that is produced when someone publically makes this move. There is always a price to be paid for such moves, and the consequences affect real life people, like David and his family, as well as those who might place themselves under Congdon’s teaching (as he articulates that for public consumption through his various publications). It genuinely saddens me to see the path David has chosen, but he has indeed, for this season anyway, chosen such a path.[7]

We all have choices to make as we wrestle with the complexities of this life. At the end of the day it is important, I suggest, to keep our feet squarely planted on the foundation that no other can lay, but Jesus Christ alone; and to prayerfully and humbly ask that the Lord keep us situated within the parameters that he has provided through the teachers of his church in such a way that most accurately represents the Way.

P.S. I will have comments closed on this particular post. If you want to respond then email me at growba@gmail.com. I think a post like this has the potential for fomenting things in such a way that might not be fruitful in general, and might make me respond in such a way that it personally would not be fruitful. So for my protection, and yours, I am keeping comments closed on this post. I think I have kept things civil and irenic enough that further expansion and more words might result in things said by multiple parties that might undercut the spirit of this post. The spirit of this post has been one that is intended to simply reflect and respond, at a level, to a guy I’ve known (at a level) for many years; it’s a response or reflection that allows me to not only process my own thoughts, but then alerts others who have remained unaware, until now, of Congdon’s own developments as a thinker and theologian.

[1] David Congdon, Reversing Theology—A Personal Reply to Torres and Roberts, by David Congdon, accessed 02-27-2018.

[2]Ibid.

[3] I Corinthians 15.12-19, NRSV.

[4] I don’t have it in print, but have heard that David rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus. As apiece, this all fits with a subsequent rejection of conscious afterlife.

[5]Congdon.

[6]Congdon.

[7] If David reads this my guess is that he’ll take my concern here as disingenuous; but it’s not.

A Clarification on My Radical Correlation B/W Thomist and Nazi Natural Theologies

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I want to clarify something I wrote in my last post, this:

The theology that most of the Reformed evangelical theologians of today are retrieving for Western Christians is rooted in Thomist realism. A realism that operates in and from natural law and the idea that there is a hierarchy of being that is absolutely and causally interconnected and thus collapses God’s being into the structures of the Church itself.[1]

I received a response from a brother on Facebook with reference to the above content, he wrote:

I get disagreeing with Aquinas, and Thomistic thought, I just don’t see how Thomism ‘’…. collapses God’s being into the structures of the Church itself.’’ Or how that is even an option or even an unintended consequence of Thomism or natural law.[2]

I struggle to see how this brother does not see how this is a consequence or unintended consequence of Thomism. Todd Billings (unfortunately I don’t have his book at hand) refers to the ecclesiology that funds Roman Catholicism as one that is grounded in an understanding that sees the (Roman) Church as the ‘prolongation of the incarnation.’ But where does such thinking come from? Seven Ozment notes this, in regard to the Thomist framework (the framework that largely funds all things Roman Catholic):

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[3]

Thomas Aquinas himself writes: “All things deriving from God are ordered to one another and to him. And that is what makes the unity of the world. Material plurality cannot be a goal, for it has no determinate limit and what is without end cannot be an end.”[4]

We can see even from this cursory gloss and engagement that embedded within Thomas’s thought there is the idea that there is a ‘real’ and substantial connection between God as the causer of all reality and reality as the effect of that cause. True, Thomas clearly makes a distinction between Creator/creature, indeed his whole structure is premised on this distinction; but in my view, his view of the nature/grace combine leaves room for the sorts of distortions we see operative in something as demonic as the Nazi program and ‘church.’

David Congdon writes the following with reference to the sort of mechanical and substance metaphysics we get from someone like Aquinas. As you read this you will notice Congdon is noting how modernity problematized the sort of ‘chain-of-being’ thinking about God and the world that is inherent to Aquinas’s et als. theology[s].

Modernity is the age in which this metaphysical understanding of history was called radically and irrevocably into question, as indicated paradigmatically by the rise of the historical-critical method. “Only with the collapse of traditional western metaphysics, i.e., with the loss of its self-evident character, did the historicity of existence fully enter into consciousness,” out of which arose “the freedom, but also the absolute necessity, to regard the historical [Historische] in its pure historicalness [Historizität].” No longer was the hierarchical and essentialist “chain of being” taken for granted. No longer was the ecclesiastical tale of our given place in God’s order accepted on faith. It was no longer assumed that the old stories could narrate each person’s identity. For those institutions and ideologies that pend on this authority, new strategies were devised to shore up faith: most notably, Roman Catholics put forward the doctrine of papal infallibility in the early 1870s, while Reformed Protestants formulated the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in the early 1880s. Both sides were able to claim that such views were held long before they were codified in their modern form, and yet it is significant that these doctrines were codified when they were.[5]

What is illuminating for our purposes, in Congdon’s quote, is the thinking he underscores in regard to a metaphysical understanding of history with its ‘chain of being’ notion in tow. It is this component, dominant not just in Thomas’s theology, but in many of the ‘pre-critical’ theologies of the period, that I think provides theological ‘precedent,’ or ideational ‘space’ for demonisms like we find in the Hiterlite protocol to take over the world. Wherever there is natural theology, as Karl Barth might say, there is the ‘anti-Christ.’ Whether it be in the Roman Catholic Church, in regard to its funding ecclesiology and theory of authority, or whether that be in the Nazi church and state that the Confessing church was protesting, therein is anti-Christ.

So, my original post operated off a generalization in regard to natural theology in the main. But I don’t think it is an ill-conceived generalization. There is cross-pollination, in principle, between all natural theologies. This is not to say that their relative applications all look the same, indeed they don’t! But just because they don’t all end up in the abyss of Third Reich theology, this doesn’t mean there is no correlation. In the case of Roman Catholicism, I do think that God’s being is collapsed into the structure of the Church itself; insofar as God’s being is present in the being-in-becoming in Jesus Christ. And I don’t think Catholicism gets this thinking from nowhere; indeed, it comes from Thomas’s chain-of-being understanding. Just because Roman Catholics aren’t Nazis doesn’t mean they don’t share in a similar appeal to a belief that God and all his effects are interconnected. It is a small step from that belief to what we end up getting in Nazi theology. That is, if I believe that an ecclesiological body is in fact the prolongation of God’s life in Christ for the world, whose to say that someone else cannot come along, like Hitler, and say the same thing about his Third Reich?

This is why I think there is a corollary between Thomist ecclesiology and Nazi theology; it is the shared commitment to natural theology. Now, I do not think Hitler was a Thomist, or that he had any genuine interest in ecclesiology. But that’s really not my point. I am only highlighting how pervasive natural theology is, to the point that even atheists, especially atheists make appeal to it every day. It is the modern project itself, ironically, to collapse God’s attributes into the human and discard God. But there is an ancient precedent to this, again, ironically, and I think someone like Aquinas with his natural theology helps set a trajectory for the world wherein Grace and Nature are too closely linked. When this linkage happens, when ‘grace is understood to perfect nature,’ the spirit of anti-Christ can sneak in and imbue nature with a pseudo-grace that presents itself as an Angel of Light when in fact it is the devil all along.

[1] Source.

[2] Anonymous Facebook comment.

[3] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550, 49.

[4] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1989), 90.

[5] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), xvii-xxii.

Some Final Impressions on Bultmann’s Theology and David Congdon’s Book: The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology

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After a couple of years I finally finished reading through, David Congdon’s tome, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. It comes in at a total of 953 pp., including the end matter (the body of the book covers 856 pp.); so not a quick read. This post is not intended to be a comprehensive review or even a review at all. Instead this will simply be concluding impression as I move on past Bultmann and Congdon. If you are interested in reading my engagement with Congdon along the way, then go to my ‘David Congdon’ category, and you will find a multitude of posts engaging with the content of this book.

My basic impression of Bultmann’s theology and methodology is this: It is unnecessary to ‘demythologize’ the kerygma, rather we are in need of being demythologized by the Gospel. In other words, the weltbild or world-picture at the time of the writing of the New Testament, in particular, is not in need of being deconstructed in order to get at the pure kernel of the kerygmatic reality. This is the contention of Bultmann, and Congdon; viz. the Gospel should not be collapsed into its cultural world-picture, instead it needs to be ‘demythologized’ and translated, thus transpropiated into its now received weltbild in the 21st century. Bultmann (and  Congdon) maintain that the kerygma is misunderstood when it is too closely wedded to its original historical milieu; i.e. under the literary, socio-historico-politico conditions present at the time. As such this mythology needs to be demythologized, deconstantinized in a way that allows the message and fresh reality of the Gospel to shine through in all its transcendent glory as that confronts us anew in our own existential existence in the present. It is only by the apperception of faith that the Gospel reality is known, and that is an apperception not contingent upon the mythos and cultural locatedness of the Gospel’s historical iteration in the first coming of Christ. To put it in Lessing’s terms: the Gospel’s reality and explication is not contingent upon the accidents of history, but through demythologizing its esse[ntial] reality can be known and forever experienced through the approach of the faith seeking heart.

Underneath Bultmann’s approach, as with any modern theologian of the time, is a serious commitment to the Kantian epistemology. As Congdon points out, Bultmann was doing his own project; but it is clear that Kant’s dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal remains an ever present voice. Further, there is, as with Barth, a significant allergy to natural theology in Bultmann’s way. But he goes to unnecessary lengths in an attempt to squash the possibility for natural theology to seep in and undercut the analogy of faith. It is unnecessary, in my view, to fear natural theology and metaphysics to the point that the theologian is led to renounce any sort of good basis in the protological norm of creation itself. This is what Bultmann attempts to do with his emphasis on the eschatological nature of his dialectical theology. That is, he wants all of Christian reality to breath and move from the eschatological reality of God to the point that all historical reality prior is gutted of any concrete meaning vis-à-vis the Gospel, who is the Christ. This is why Bultmann so emphasizes the faith in the kerygma, and deemphasizes things like the historical and concrete reality of the bodily resurrection of Christ. If the resurrection of Christ can be located in the normal or profane history of nature, then God has been subjugated to or made a predicate of nature. In order to get around this, Bultmann constructs a whole elaborate process of identifying myth, and a way for demything the husk which the myth represents. Which is to say: the Gospel or kerygmatic reality can never be contained by its natural reception. The fear for Bultmann (and Congdon) is that nature would lay hold of revelation, rather than revelation lay hold of nature. I understand and appreciate this fear, but it is unnecessary to go to the lengths that Bultmann does in order to escape this dilemma; Barth does much better in this complex by focusing on a Chalcedonian pattern for negotiating with revelation and nature in the hypostatic union of the Godman, Jesus Christ.

There are emphases and themes in Bultmann’s theology that I find helpful in regard to critique of natural theology, and a focus on the faith of Christ. But the lengths he goes to in order to undercut natural theology, driven by his modern commitment to an anti-metaphysical mode, leads him to hermeneutical positions that are too extreme; extreme to the point that they end up undercutting the Apostolic understanding of the Gospel as presented in the New Testament. And this is precisely to the point, Bultmann (and Congdon) maintain that the Apostolic times, should not be understood as the absolute form of the kerygmatic reality. So, Bultmann wants to extract the kerygmatic message from its original giveness and form in Second Temple Judaism, and translate it into its new forms in the 20th, or now 21st century (which remains an ongoing project). In this way, and this is a critique: the Gospel reality essentially becomes contingent on whatever cultural moment the receiver inhabits as they are confronted with the Gospel proclamation. Bultmann’s approach presents us with an extreme form of Gospel relativism by presuming that he has been able to penetrate the hull of the Gospel (its historical mythos), and find its essence to the point that there can no longer be anything normative about the forms within which the Gospel originally presented itself within (like in the ‘fullness of time’ as we find in Galatians 4). There is an ethical/moral implication to all of this that fits well with the suspicious hermeneutic of Post Modernity, but not does not sit well with the Gospel’s own self-understanding and sufficiency as that is presented in the Apostolic Deposit of the New Testament witness. As noted: the Apostle Paul believed that the Son of God in Jesus Christ came at just the right [fullness of] time wherein the Gospel reality could break-in and ‘turn the world upside down.’ The Apostle Paul, let alone Jesus himself, had no apparent self-understanding that the socio-cultural milieu within which Christ came was insufficient for bearing the weight of the Gospel hope. They never seemed inclined to deconstruct or demythologize the Old Testament canon through which the Christ event comes to make sense. They didn’t look for a kerygmatic essence abstract from its historical givenness.

I might share more impressions in days to come. But these are some initial ones. Congdon anticipates many of these push backs, but that does not mean his answers are sufficient or that they overcome such push back. One contemporary push back, among others that Congdon deals with, comes from Helmut Thielicke. Thielicke’s push back to Bultmann is similar to what I just sketched above. Congdon’s response, in my view, ends up being circular insofar that he simply privileges an anti-metaphysical anti-natural theological mode as a ‘just is’ the way things are (as if a basic given). But for my money, we want to examine the way that Jesus and the Apostles themselves engaged with the Old Testament witness. Did they attempt to demythologize its witness in the way that, Bultmann attempts to? Even if they only did that in an inchoate way, did they in fact engage in this sort of practice? Nein. But they were just human after all, and this is the response that Congdon would most likely push back with. With reference to Christ there is also a serious commitment to a kenoticism, and thus marginalization of Christ as simply human in regard to what he knew and how he operated. This would be the way Congdon and Bultmann might get around an appeal to Jesus’s approach to the Old Testament; they would just say: ‘yeah, Jesus himself was a product of his own mythological times, and an appeal to Him does nothing but confirm our modern need to demythologize even Jesus himself.’

 

Being ‘Self-Interpreted’ by the Living Word of God: On Theological Exegesis as Participation

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Theological exegesis goes hand in hand with what some have called ‘participatory exegesis,’ alongside of what others have called ‘self-interpretation.’ In regard to the latter, it is important to ground ‘self’ in the reality that there is an ecstatic source to the self who presents us with the knowledge to more accurately engage in this sort of self-interpretation; of the sort that Calvin is famously known for in regard to his so called duplex cognitio Dei (twofold knowledge of God). David Congdon, once again, gives us some insight on Bultmann, and from Bultmann, in regard to the way that Bultmann conceived of theological exegesis:

Bultmann, “Das Problem einer theologischen Exegese des Neuen Testaments,” 55 (21). This early essay situates existential interpretation within the specific context of a theological interpretation of Scripture. Participatory exegesis is uniquely demanded by the Bible. According to Bultmann, the biblical text is marked by an “existential liveliness” (existentielle Lebendigkeit), and thus the interpreter must be “inwardly alive” (innerlich lebendig), that is to say, “ready to let the text speak as an authority. . . .” In this early writing Bultmann describes a genuinely participatory exegesis as one in which an existentially concerned interpreter encounters the existential vitality and power of the text. This encounter occurs when the exegete confronts the claim of the text upon her, that is, when the text is no longer a historical object but becomes the occasion for her “self-interpretation.” Self-interpretation occurs when the exegete “hears the word of the text as a word” that demands a decision within her concrete situation: “The word, which enters anew into her situation, confronts the exegete with a decision, and thereby the word becomes for her an event. . . .” The question of self-interpretation, of self-understanding, is finally a question of our obedience to the authority of the biblical word.[1]

Even for non-Bultmannians (such as myself) this ought to be a good word for any Christian to hear. The ancient Christians approached Holy Scripture in the way, at least in spirit, that Bultmann underscores. The text isn’t a modern specimen ready to be analyzed, but a living Word presenting itself as gift to be interacted with and submitted to in filial attachment. This is the sense I draw from Bultmann’s teaching; i.e. that when we, personally, or collectively as a people engage with the text in the fellowship of the Spirit of Christ, we are being confronted with a knowledge of ourselves that requires an action. We are being confronted with the Word who requires holiness, and a transformative motion of singular movement into the depths of God’s bosom in Christ. The Word, as we are confronted with it, afresh and anew, requires an ‘obedience’ that the Word Himself has accomplished for us in His vicarious humanity. It is this Word who we are confronted with in the text. As such, we are invited into the banqueting table of His effervescent life, and commanded to be holy as He is Holy. The text, as we participatorily interact with it, doesn’t present us with Law, but with the Evangel of Hope that since we can never really obey to the level that God requires, that He has provided that elevated level of obedience for us in His own assumption of flesh.

The Word will never leave or forsake us. We might forsake Him, but He will never forsake us. One way to ensure that we don’t forsake Him is to be enmeshed in the text of Holy Scripture; allowing its Wordly reality to transform us from our worldly structured lives, and into the strangeness of His other-worldly life of renewal, power, hope, and eternal Life. Being in the ‘biblical word’ allows for these times of refreshment to confront us over and again, daily as we take up our crosses and follow Christ. As we lose our lives we will find them in the Word, but we won’t have the fresh capacity to lose our lives unless we are confronted with the lively Word of God as disclosed in Holy Scripture. It is in this existential complex that we come to have a genuine knowledge of ourselves; that is, as we are interpreted by the living Word through the fire of the Holy Spirit’s breath as that is pressed into our lives as we sit in and under the written Word of the living God.

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 756-57, n.150.

The ‘Community of Faith’ or Tradition of the Church as the Presupposition of Theological Exegesis

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Bultmann and Church Tradition, or the so called Great Tradition don’t seem to go together; indeed, most might think this represents an oxymoron par excellence. But this would be wrong thinking, according to David Congdon. Bultmann and Theological Exegesis, on the other hand, go together quite well; maybe not under the conditions that many ‘conservatives’ think theological exegesis. Nonetheless, Bultmann offers a theological exegetical program, in my view, and in principle that I think is laudable. I think it laudable because Bultmann, like Barth in this area!, operates from a methodological anti-natural theology mode. This is laudable, I think, because natural theology, in any form, in my view, is unlaudable. This does not mean I follow Bultmann in every step; indeed, I think he oversteps when it comes to the way he attempts to erase any form of natural theology. But I think his aim is laudable; even if he might over-existentialize things in his attempt to radicalize a non-natural theology approach.

The above noted I want to share from Congdon on Bultmann with reference to Bultmann’s sense of an anti-natural theology theological exegesis, and how that fits into the Great Tradition. This is actually an encouraging development for me, because it reflects something that I thought represented a severe weakness; not only in Bultmann, but in Barth and after Barth theological endeavor. That is, I’ve had a concern that the Tradition was so glossed by that any sense of catholicity might be lost; if not with Barth, at least with Bultmann. Bruce McCormack has corrected this misunderstanding of Barth’s theology (in his book Orthodox and Modern), and now I think Congdon helps to overcome the same misunderstanding with Bultmann.

Neither one of these virtuosos has ‘left the faith,’ as some would have us think; indeed most conservatives would have us think. Au contraire, they simply attempted to self-consciously translate the faith under the modern conditions within which they lived. Some fear, obviously, that the modern period is a lost cause, thus the attempt to repristinate or “retrieve” the past; as if that could be done via some sort of DeLorean that transports the exegete into a vacuous pre-modern mindset. The reality is that we are modern people. This does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t be critically minded modern people. But then I have to ask: By what means are we to be critical? It seems to me that the means God has supplied is the kerygmatic event itself (Bultmann); the one that apocalyptically breaks-in upon us and disrupts our locatedness from a location that is above over against and yet with our belowness (Barth). The Gospel Hisself gives us the critical way for negotiating the fall-out produced not just by modernity, but pre-modernity just the same. This is why speaking of (and thus from) God by an analogy of faith rather than being is so central to the theological exegesis of both Barth and Bultmann. We, according to them, cannot speak a right word of God apart from God first speaking Himself to us in the event of faith that we encounter afresh and anew by the Spirit’s confrontation of us in and through the Yes, No, and Amen of God in Jesus Christ.

With the aforementioned noted, let’s hear from Congdon on Bultmann and theological exegesis:

“all human speaking of God outside of faith speaks not of God but of the devil.” [Bultmann]

Similarly, in 1925 Bultmann declares that New Testament exegesis is distinct from secular exegesis in that the exegete of the New Testament confronts the text’s disruptive claim that “people do not have their existence at their disposal in such a way that they could pose the question of existence [Existenzfrage] to themselves and possess the possibility of free action; all of that is given only to faith.” Theological exegesis requires not just any questioning of existence but only a faithful or believing questioning: “A valid questioning of the text can only be a believing one, i.e., a questioning grounded in obedience to the authority of scripture.” Yet this faithful questioning would seem to beg the question, for its presupposition (viz., faith) is also the goal. The circularity of the exegetical task would therefore seem to be a serious problem. If one can only hear the word of the text in light of the questionableness of existence, and if that questionableness is only given in the word of the text, how is one able to hear and respond to the kerygma? Bultmann’s answer might come as a surprise to those who see him as an advocate of a purely individual and isolated act of interpretation. He says that the “concrete situation” for exegesis of the New Testament is “the tradition of the church of the word.” As the interpreter, I cannot stand outside my historical context, but in that “I stand in my existence in the tradition of the word there is a readiness for faithful questioning.” In a rather remarkable move, given his reputation, Bultmann actually makes the community of faith the true presupposition for the interpretation of scripture. Indeed, we can even say that for Bultmann the tradition of the church is the necessary preunderstanding for the hearing of God’s word. Tradition, in fact, funds demythologizing.[1]

This is significant towards developing a self-critical hermeneutic that is grounded not in a self-postulated nature, but a God-given Grace understood by a relation of faith that is concretely grounded in the mediating humanity of Jesus Christ. Bultmann’s approach operates from an existentialist posture, but one that I think sees God’s existence preceding our essence; which would be to flip a secular or “modern” understanding of existentialist philosophy on its head (which is to collapse God’s existence into ours, and posit our self-existence as a prius to our essence — which we then have the ability to shape whatever which way we want). If our existence, and thus our “essence” is preceded by God’s, if God’s Yes for us in Christ circumscribes our No to God, then we have graciously been given the capacity to operate in and from God’s Yes; a Yes which is situated in the faith of Christ for us. This is the basis whereby the modern, pre-modern, or even the antediluvian can be critical of their own particularity and operate as if their historical location is a gift of God and not a burden to be shirked off.

If the Gospel if the Power of God, if it has the capacity to transcend the scandal of particularity, even while accommodating to it, this should be of great encouragement to each and every one of us. We don’t have to demonize one period of history in order to get back to a pure or sanitized period wherein the Gospel supposedly has its greatest capacity for a purist expression. No. The Gospel has this purity no matter what period the human agent is enmeshed within. This means that the Gospel has the lassitude to reach into every time and place and shape it from its other-worldly reality, while at the same time working within the time and place it reaches into. This, to me, is a better way for conceiving of a framework for thinking theological exegesis. It is one that privileges not a period of history, but the period of God’s life that He has and does mediate to us through a relation or analogy of faith in and of Christ.

Church tradition, for Bultmann, according to Congdon, operates as a framework of living faith wherein as Christians today, we have a witness-base to understand the ways that God has faithfully shown up in and throughout the corridors of ecclesial history. The Tradition shows us how God acts moment by moment; how God circumscribes each of us, no matter what period, with the overshadowing of the Gospel. It is this long-view of God meeting the Church that shows us that it is the Power of God, or the Gospel that is central to theological exegetical process; insofar as that as conditioned, not by a pure nature, but a pure faith as that is held and given to us afresh and anew in the faith of Christ.

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 720-21.

Speaking OF God Rather Than ABOUT, Speaking OF the Text Rather Than ABOUT: Josh Harris and the Classical Calvinists as a Case Study

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I just recently had interaction with some classical Calvinists, once again. The topic was Josh Harris and his ‘apostatizing,’ from the faith of Christ. The claim was made that Harris was unregenerate all along: “It’s sobering that an unregenerate pastor could give God’s people great insights into the Scripture without knowing the God of the Scriptures. It’s also sobering to think that many who were with the Apostles turned away from the Gospel preached by the Apostles (2 Tim. 4:10).”[1] But at this moment I am less interested in discussing Harris, and am more focused on the hermeneutical theory to arrive at the exegetical conclusion that someone like Harris was unregenerate all along. My interlocutor references 2 Tim, but more apropos, and what I think is informing even more didactically is 1 John 2:18-19, which reads: “18 Children, it is the last hour, and just as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen, by which we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us. But they went out[, in order that it might be shown that all of them are not of us.” This represents hard teaching, which 2 Tim. is illustrative of rather than a direct teaching. But this issue, again, points up, in my view, a prior commitment to a particular theological or dogmatic construct which is used to artificially arrive at exegetical conclusions that aren’t as ‘objectively’ present in the [con]text as it might seem. Categorically we might affirm the idea, in a de jure fashion, that there are people who fabricate an appearance of salvation in order to reach certain social statuses, and other achievements; whatever vanity might drive those. But just because there are a sampling of people who meet this criteria, as laid out in passages like 1 John and 2 Timothy, does not necessarily mean at a de facto level that all people who “deny the faith,” are not ‘regenerate,’ per se. In other words, it would be wrong to simply read passages like 2 Tim. and 1 Jn. and presume that all people, at a prima facie level, simply fit that category in a reduced way. And this gets us into the issue of theological exegesis.

All people do theological exegesis when they read Holy Scripture; even atheists. If Kant has taught us anything, he has taught us that we are captive to our own enculturation and location; as such, we need to be critically aware of this, and understand how that impacts our interpretation of the biblical text. This is where many classical Calvinists, and many others (myself included) fall prey to the idea that their ‘confessions, creeds, and catechisms,’ represent some sort of objective standard by which the “most faithful” reading of Scripture can be gained in codified fashion. With this belief in hand, the classical Calvinist (just picking on them for this post) feels free to dogmatically assert that someone like Harris was never regenerate to begin with; and this having less to do with the biblical texts, and more to do with the metaphysics and doctrinal material that stands behind their reading of the text. For example, in the history of interpretation, classical Calvinists have concepts like ‘temporary faith’ and ‘experimental predestinarianism’ at play. Temporary faith (which Calvin ironically also held to) is the idea that someone can look, sound, and smell like one of the elect, but in the end never really were to begin with. We can see how this might superficially correlate with a passage like 1 Jn. 2. Conversely, experimental predestinarianism maintains that a person might indeed have only a temporary non-efficacious faith, and as such the proof in the pudding will be to see if they actually and finally persevere to the end. If not, they never were one of the elect, and thus never were “of us.” With these doctrinal loci in play the classical Calvinist will dogmatically read these into passages like we’ve had reference to, and arrive at conclusions that the text itself, in contextual array, may well not be teaching whatsoever.

All of the aforementioned noted to get us into a discussion about how our engagement of Holy Scripture always entails a level of subjectivity that cannot simply be surpassed by assertion. In order to push into this further I wanted to refer to David Congdon’s treatment of Rudolf Bultmann, and how Bultmann confronts the faulty notion of catechetical objectivity as that implicates our interpretation of the biblical text. Congdon writes:

Bultmann’s response is one he would continue to give throughout the entirety of his career: such an approach is simply impossible. “Every exegesis, as something undertaken by a subject, is subjective.” The claim by these forms of modern exegesis to have overcome subjectivity by way of a fixed method is simply a “new subjectivism,” for the chosen method is always the “perspective that follows from the underlying interpretation of human existence.” The very selection and execution of a method is a subjective act, involving specific judgments and contextual presuppositions. For that reason “there is no neutral exegesis.” The modern pursuit of a purely nonsubjective interpretation is an act of “self-delusion,” for “the interpretation [Auslegung] of the text always goes hand in hand with the self-interpretation [Selbstauslegung] of the exegete.” To interpret the text is to interpret oneself, or rather, to find oneself interpreted by another.

Here we have the hermeneutical equivalent of Bultmann’s theological-epistemological claim, also published in 1925, that “talking of God, if it were possible, would necessarily be at the same time a talking of oneself.” In the same way that there can be no meaningful talk about God, so there can be no meaningful talk about the text. Talking about each is the delusional attempt to confine either God or the text to a purportedly objective and neutral method. Instead, one can only meaningfully talk of God and of the text, which means there has to be a genuine encounter in each case, one in which the human subject participates in the reality of the subject matter. The pursuit of neutrality is the truly pernicious form of subjectivism, for there the human subject is in full control of the text that denies the text’s capacity to speak to us with authority. For this reason “exegesis must be explicitly guided by the question of self-interpretation, if it does not want to fall into subjectivism.”[2]

In order to engage Scripture under the terms outlined for us by Congdon, vis-à-vis Bultmann, requires that the interpreter live in a mode of vulnerability and humility before the living God with trust that God truly speaks and has the pneumatic capacity to confront us in all of our vainglorious certainty about just how things are. The moral of Congdon’s development is ‘the question of self-interpretation,’ this is a matter of being self-critical and understanding that we never approach the text of Scripture from a neutral standpoint. In the case of the Harris and classical Calvinist example, the reality is that the classical Calvinist exegete ends up reading an a priori theological construct onto the text of Scripture with the result leading to a view that absolutely damns Harris (and others like Harris) to an eternal hell. But maybe the classical Calvinist should move slower. If we are being self-critical interpreters, do these texts operate from an inner-theological thrust that necessarily leads the exegete to the classical Calvinist conclusion about Josh Harris? Is it possible that the collectively formed confessions and creeds appealed to by such interpreters are so mired in the subjectivities of their drafters that the text of Scripture ends up being sublated by the culturally inspired intellectual mores of their day?

These are deep matters. But the basic point should be to highlight the fact that we all bring theological constructs to the exegesis of Holy Scripture. The question remains: which constructs are most organically proximate to the Gospel reality? Which constructs are most open to recognizing that God still speaks; that He didn’t stop doing that in 16th and 17th century Western Europe? These are important questions. There are important questions to ask of Bultmann’s thinking as well. That will have to wait for another day.

[1] Anonymous Facebook Source.

[2] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 716-17.

 

An Anatomy of Unbelief in the Physical/Literal Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Engaging With the “Logic” of Bultmann’s [and Congdon’s] Rejection of the Cosmogony of Holy Scripture

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Here I want to address the anatomy of Rudolf Bultmann’s unbelief in the historicity and physical/literal/bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. So, I will share a lengthy quote from David Congdon on Bultmann’s thought, in this regard, and then provide my commentary latterly.

The political dimension of Bultmann’s hermeneutical program is only one aspect, albeit a crucial and often-overlooked one. Given its importance to Bultmann, we also need to address the question of natural science. The cultural world-pictures the kerygma traverses in its ongoing movement through history include, among other things, cosmological assumptions. In other words, a Weltbild involves presuppositions about not only the kind of God who acts in the world but also the kind of world in which God acts. Bultmann signals this at the very beginning of his Entmythologisierungsvortrag, where he presents as a key mark of the mythical Weltbild the idea that the world consists of “three stories,” with earth in the middle, heaven above, and the underworld below. It is at this same level of cultural Weltbild or “social imaginary” that Bultmann places the modern scientific method, within which we live. In contrast to the mythical Weltbild, “in this modern world-picture the link between cause and effect is fundamental.” Bultmann’s cultural context presupposes “a closed interdependent nexus [Wirkungs-zusammenhang] in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. Miracles, in the sense of publicly visible and objectifiable occurrences, belong to a foreign cultural context that no longer obtains in modernity. Deconstantinizing therefore entails the radical differentiation of the kerygma from the cosmological assumptions of the ancient world and the translation of the kerygma into new contexts operating under new cosmological-scientific norms.

As scandalous as it may sound, Bultmann’s rejection of all supernaturalism, including the literal interpretation of the resurrection as a physical occurrence, is actually in service of the missionary truth of the gospel. Gerhard Ebeling spells out the logic of Bultmann’s move in his own dogmatic inquiry into this issue. The traditional notion of resurrection makes use of “apocalyptic modes of thinking” and “apocalyptic conceptual elements” that belong to an “apocalyptic world-picture,” and “we cannot assume that the apocalyptic thought-forms are a world-picture we could readily make our own.” The notion of the resurrection of the dead “belongs to a world that has become strange [fremd] to us,” indeed, to “a world-picture that has become obsolete.” We need not get into the details of the debate over apocalyptic. The point here is simply that to make the traditional notion of resurrection a sine qua non of genuine Christian faith is to conflate the kerygma with an alien cultural thought-form and thus to replace “a liberating experience of faith” with “an oppressive law of faith.” Faith in Christ cannot be bound to antiquated or alien cosmologies, even if the translations of the kerygma into those alien contexts are entirely valid and remain a valuable witness for contemporary communities of faith. It is both possible and necessary for the church to carry out translations of the kerygma into a modern context in which the scientific norms of the day render impossible the ancient apocalyptic Weltbild, at least in its literal, mythological form, just as our context today renders impossible ancient cosmology, biology, and the like. We no longer accept antiquated accounts of the planetary system or human reproduction, for example, nor should we.[1]

What to say?

17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not with clever speech, lest the cross of Christ be emptied. 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the intelligence of the intelligent I will confound.”20 Where is the wise person? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. 22 For indeed, Jews ask for sign miracles and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a cause for stumbling, but to the Gentiles foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. –I Corinthians 1.17-25

12 Now if Christ is preached as raised up from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ has not been raised either. 14 But if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. 15 And also we are found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if after all, then, the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised either. 17 But if Christ has not been raised, your faith is empty; you are still in your sins. 18 And as a further result, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If we have put our hope in Christ in this life only, we are of all people most pitiable. –I Corinthians 15.12-19

There is no compelling reason to follow Bultmann’s line of reasoning. He is responding to his own German contextual problematics, and attempting to work within ad hoc conditions that the reality of Holy Scripture and the Holy Life of the Triune God know nothing about; except in condemnation at the cross of Christ.

Yet, Bultmann (and Congdon following) unfortunately presume that to ‘go back’ to an alien Weltbild or ‘world-picture’ is a move of intellectual sacrifice (sacrificium intellectus) that any modern person simply won’t commit themselves to. It is this sort of evolutionary progressive and linear understanding of historical intellectual development that Bultmann, Congdon et al have unnecessarily committed themselves to, and that has led them to think the 20th and 21st century thinkers simply can no longer abide by the strange and “antiquated” world of the ancients. But what is rather strange to me is the notion that just because there was a certain phenomenological understanding of the cosmos in “biblical times” that we must necessarily, according to Bultmann’s logic, throw the belief in the resurrection out with that cosmogony in toto. I am unclear why this is necessary. What if the cosmology and the “apocalyptical” view of the world in say Second Temple Judaism, and even more anciently, is more advanced than the modern understanding of the world? What if the modern understanding of the world is antiquated by the heavenly realities of God’s more advanced ways of working such that the “fullness of time” (cf. Gal 4) which He choose to advent within represents a more accurate way of understanding His ways than modern ways do?

Bultmann’s understanding of things is overly-simplistic and even naïve as it is captured by a sort of positivistic rationalism that is enslaved to the optics of the modern day. All one must do to undercut the whole of Bultmann’s project is reject his premise that the modern categories of thought are the canonically correct ones, and instead presume that the ones that Holy Scripture presumes upon are the correct ones. Further, it is just as easily possible for the kerygmatic reality of the Gospel to even fit into the modern categories, insofar as those are reified by the more primal apocalyptic realities that are revealed in and through the history and epistemic delimiting reality of the literal-physical resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. In other words, even as modern people, it is possible to ‘filter’ modern intellectual developments in and through a Christ-conditioned lens that does not submit the reality of the biblical cosmology to the ambit of the modern immanentization of all things. Karl Barth, in contrast to Bultmann, represents a modern who does not fall prey to the sort of naïve approach that Bultmann ends up giving into. Barth works from what he calls a second naïveté, in regard to ‘critical scholarship.’ Yet, within this he does not give away the [Holy] Ghost when it comes to the miraculous workings of God; indeed he revels in them to a point that even bothers certain scholastics.

As a matter of historical and theological-intellectual understanding, reading about Bultmann’s theology (all 800pp of it!) is an interesting reading project. But it boggles the mind, when someone reads about his theology, why that someone would also feel compelled to simply sign onto Bultmann’s premises; at least if you are a biblically formed Christian. There is no compelling reason to accept the premise that the modern is the most advanced form of understanding how things are in the world. This represents a petitio principii that makes the critical thinker wonder why anyone would want to privilege this intellectual paradigm over the biblically given one; the latter paradigm is one that presents the bodily resurrection of Christ as the sine qua non of all that is real and powerful and hopeful in the world, of what makes Christianity stand or fall.

 

 

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 661-63.