Category Archives: Fundamentalism

On Barth’s Christologically Conditioned Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the ‘Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.

Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the ‘Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that “needed to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-à-vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its “Holy” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.

Barth writes,

We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalism—supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.

As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinking—the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]

Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and ‘Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.

Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his Göttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of God—so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.

On a James Whitean and Leighton Flowersian Naked Reading of the Bible

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Thumbnail created originally by Leighton Flowers (Caleb)

I was listening to James White live today on his Dividing Line vlogcast, and what he reinforces over and over is that he is what some are calling a ‘biblicist,’ or what I would identify as a solo Scriptura or nuda Scriptura proponent, as far as the way that he approaches Scripture. In this way, James White and his archnemeses, Leighton Flowers, ironically affirm the same bibliology and its attending hermeneutic. It is both modern, postEnlightenment, and Lockean (i.e., tabula rasa) in orientation. That is, it sees Scripture and its reception in a historicist frame of reference. This frame leaves the history of interpretation (i.e., creeds, confessions, catechisms etc.) in the dust, in regard to how White and Flowers receive Scripture. This ironically lends itself to a modernist-naturalist appropriation of and engagement with Holy Scripture, insofar that the Bible, in such a frame, seems to be a ‘white-slate’ wherein the interpreter has some type of objectivist angle into its exegesis.

The aforementioned is problematic for a variety of reasons. One prominent reason is that it ends up working from a petitio principii (circular reasoning). That is to say, it presumes: 1) My interpretation just is the objective reading of the Bible, 2) my interpretation of the Bible is a five-point Calvinist reading of the Bible, 3) therefore the objective reading of the Bible just is a five-point Calvinist reading (or just replace five-point Calvinist with Provisionist reading in Flowers’ case). What this approach fails to appreciate, for one, is that nobody approaches Scripture as a presuppositionless blank-slate; human agents are subjects, and as such we bring a variety of preunderstandings and unchecked a priori commitments to theological paradigms as we read Scripture. We could call this the “hermeneutical dilemma.” Neither James White nor his compadre, Leighton Flowers, acknowledge this. And thus, all that they are left to do in their respective debates and correspondences is to sling Scripture right past each other; never critically identifying or checking their theological a prioris at the frontend of their respective readings of Scripture.

But like I was noting, James White, today, as he was talking, in this case about Catholicism, made an absolute distinction between reading Scripture and the history of interpretation of Scripture; as if they inhabit two distinct silos. But they don’t inhabit two distinct silos, instead the history and the biblical exegesis are mutually implicating realities; insofar that human agents are subjectively reading and receiving the text of Holy Scripture. Until White and Flowers can admit this, and until all of their acolytes can come to grasp this, this whole “debate” between them, on five-point Calvinism versus Provisionism, will remain a futile endeavor. Unfortunately, they have many followers, respectively, who they are doing a disservice to. They are teaching young and biologically old, in some cases, Christian hearts and minds to read Scripture rationalistically rather than confessionally (and thus Christologically and Trinitarianly).

In closing, let me refer us to Matthew Levering’s sketch on the Whitean and Flowersian reading of Scripture (viz., what he writes indirectly critiques the Whitean-Flowersian combine of biblical interpretation); as far as its intellectual development and background go. Here Levering also offers an alternative approach that is participatorily grounded in a genuinely christologically and trinitarianly conditioned reading of Holy Scripture.

What happens, then, when Scripture is seen primarily as a linear-historical record of dates and places rather than as a providentially governed (revelatory) conversation with God in which the reader, within the doctrinal and sacramental matrix of the Church, is situated? John Webster points to the disjunction that appears between “history” and “theology” and remarks on the “complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible relams, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God.” Similary, Lamb contrasts the signs or concepts that can be grasped by modern exegetical methods with the moral and intellectual virtues that are required for a true participatory knowledge and love the realities expressed by the signs or concepts. Lacking the framework of participatory knowledge and love, biblical exegesis is reduced to what Lamb calls “a ‘comparative textology’ à la Spinoza.” Only participatory knowledge and love, which both ground and flow from the reading practices of the Church, can really attain the biblical realities. As Joseph Ratzinger thus observes, the meaning of Scripture is constituted when

the human word and God’s word work together in the singularity of historical events and the eternity of the everlasting Word which is contemporary in every age. The biblical word comes from a real past. It comes not only from the past, however, but at the same time from the eternity of God and it leads us into God’s eternity, but again along the way through time, to which the past, the present and the future belong.

This Christological theology of history, which depends on a metaphysics of participation inscribed in creation, provides the necessary frame for apprehending the true meaning of biblical texts.

In short, for the patristic-medieval tradition and for those attuned to it today, history (inclusive of the work of historiography) is an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems history—and the Bible situates us in history thus understood. (Levering, 23)

Iconoclasm and Karl Barth: On the Third Deadly Sin, Smoking

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To be or not to be iconoclastic, that is the question. Not really though. As a Free low-church evangelical I have no problem with using artistic renditions of Jesus, and many other biblical and Christian characters and events that have significance within the Christian story. Indeed, this more broadly brings up the issue of how Christians ought to use pictures and art within their own narratival schemas and presentations. For me, an issue has been on how or if I should use pictures of Karl Barth. If you have read me for any season of time it is clear to you by now that I am a huge benefactor of the theological themes, categories, and grammars developed by Karl Barth. But as we all know (or most of us do), Barth comes with his own barnacles; many would consider them to be totally disqualifying of him as a Christian theologian. The primary issue with Barth, of course, is his relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum; his live in ‘second wife.’ I have virally engaged with this matter back in 2017, which you can find an index for here. More mildly than that particular sin, Barth was also a smoker; not a chain smoker that I know of, but he smoked nonetheless. From the Fundamentalist-evangelical background I have grown up within smoking is one of the three deadly sins.[1] And so to share a picture of Barth, which I have said picture, showing him with a “cigarillo” in hand could be another stumbling block for folks’ reception of Barth all by itself.

Should I share pictures of Karl Barth without opprobrium; or should I share pictures of Barth simply because I respect his theology, even if I reject his sin? I typically share pictures of Barth when I am engaging directly, or even indirectly with his theology. This seems to be an appropriate usage of said pictures. Currently, there are some pastors, who also have reach on X, who are under fire for “slandering” other high-profile leaders among them; whether this is done anonymously (in Josh Buice’s case), or in person (in Bryan Chapelle’s case). Indeed, these folks are losing their ministries for their ostensible slander of others. Should their disqualifying sins keep people from engaging with their past teachings, or should they still be respected; insofar that said teachings are respectable and truly bear witness to the living Christ? Should they be referenced, and even pictured in days to come; even in the name of showing them respect, insofar that their prior witnesses commend that?

What remains the case, whether we are iconoclasts or not, is that we have all sinned (and continue to) and fall short of the glory of God. Should I share pictures of Karl Barth in an honoring way, or should it only be when I am critical of the man and his sin[s]? Is God’s witness and work in the lives of His people greater than the person themselves; even while including the person being worked on? Indeed, greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world. While we are simul justus et peccator (despite Jason Staples’ critique of said doctrine), it can be said that those who are Christ’s are Christ’s indeed, insofar that Christ is for us rather than against is. That even when we fall into, or even live in particular sins (consciously or unconsciously), His mercy and grace in the face of Jesus Christ triumphs over all of it. It allows us to look at the fly in the ointment, and still see the beauty and value of the ointment; to understand that ultimately the overwhelming of Christ’s “ointmented” body floods into the sinners’ life pushing out and dissolving said flies that might seek to putrefy the work of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

I understand this is a bit stream of consciousness, but hopefully something coherent has come through. Sharing pictures of Barth for me is just a brute fact in a certain way. He just is who he is by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. The lesson we might derive from this is that this same grace applies to us and our “flies” just the same. Soli Deo Gloria.

[1] Personally, I think smoking is a deadly habit with some nasty side-effects associated with it; both science and experience bear this out.

Church Culture isn’t the Gospel, isn’t God: On Deconstructing Deconstruction

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Church culture isn’t the Gospel. Even so, it is what we most tangibly experience as Christians in the world. That kind of experience, as with any experience, can be either good, bad, or indifferent. Unfortunately, many these days (and in days past) are deconstructing. They are claiming to have this ‘come of age’ moment wherein they’ve finally come to realize that their respective evangelicalism[s], the cultures therein, have misrepresented God to them. The early mistake most of these folks make is to conflate their experience in various church cultures with God Himself. This represents some form of functional pantheism for them, wherein God’s existence is coextensive with the church’s “body” existence. Insofar, that such folk are unable to disentangle their experience of church culture with the reality of the living God Himself, they will mistakenly chuck the whole thing; at least, the whole thing in the way they have come to understand it.

It’s hard to blame people for wanting to abandon North American evangelicalism (among other evangelicalisms across the world). In my own experience, and I’ve been “in it” since birth, the evangelical churches have gone to the seed of the anthropology they generally have appropriated from the very beginning. That is to note, evangelicalism, ironically, finds it genesis as a reactionary movement; at least as most of evangelicalism has taken shape into the present. It started with the so-called Fundamentalists. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries post-enlightenment rationalism, so on and so forth, began to penetrate the seminaries in North America; Princeton being the prime example. Once the higher biblical criticism, and its supporting rationalistic positivism began to seep into these seminaries, there were men who were intent on standing against it (think of someone like Machen). But the way they stood against the new theology, or ‘liberal theology,’ was largely to assume the burden put to them by the higher critics of Scripture. As a result, through this type of methodological appropriation, what came with it, was the type of supporting anthropology that funded the critics’ criticism; i.e., rationalism, romanticism, methodological skepticism etc. All this to say, in brief, through this reactionism the fundamentalist theologians allowed the critics to define the theological, and thus ecclesiological types of questions they were going to attempt to answer from the get-go. This type of theological mood was passed down to the fundamentalist and evangelical churches into the current moment. It is a ‘turn to the subject’ wherein the mode of the Christian is to first think of themselves, and then to God. It’s to think that we are singular islands in a voluntary treaty with other islands, and this cooperation we end up calling Church. But you see, if my sketch is correct, what is set up, when applied to a God-world relation, is a methodological starting point in an abstract individual self. It is through this starting point that such Christians approach God. The result ends up looking like the culture at large; i.e., we see a mass consumerism and self-enthrallment at the center of the biblical teaching (i.e., self-help, positive thinking, pragmatism etc.), as well as “worship” (music).

But the above type of enthrallment only superficially meets the basest of our human and fallen desires. It doesn’t offer a deep point of contact between the living and triune God, and what the truly human soul has been created for; indeed, to find its depth reality in the very ousia (being) of Godself. In other words, individualistic consumerist iterations of church culture only have a short burn available to them. For some that might entail decades, for others, a shorter period of time. Once people realize that they are only getting a watered-down version of what the world itself has on offer at full tap, the person seeking real depth turns to the fountainhead of the superficiality that the churches are only able to offer modified versions of. Of course, this “new” sense of liberty, that is from the shackles of “God” as “church culture, is experienced as a new burn is started, and the person is able to “live” off of this type of “early love” feeling for another season of life. Even so, they are left feeling vacuous and empty. They might be able to stoke their new exvangelical sensibilities, as noted, for seasons of time, but they still understand that underneath it all they haven’t found the depth dimension their souls have been longing for all along. Except, for many, they believe they’ve already “been there done that” with God; i.e., hearkening back to their experience with evangelical church culture as God. They are then thrown into a pit of despondency and despair fortified with the belief that they already tried the “God thing,” only to realize that “He” was really only a projection of the collective of people self-identified as the church.

My aforementioned sketch is bleak, but I don’t think is off point. The Church’s reality esse is not found in itself. The Church’s reality res is found in its inner-being in the inner-being of God’s triune life as it has come to participate in that life through the mediation of Christ’s life pro nobis for us through His union with our humanity, and through our union with His humanity as that is grounded in the bosom of the Father. The Church will always have a variety of iterations and cultural expressions, insofar that God’s life in Christ constantly afresh in-breaks into all types of human cultures all across the catholic globe. So, as that is the case, cultural expression, just as Jesus expressed His own human culture as the Jew from Nazareth, is not the problem. The problem is when human culture is thought in abstraction from its ultimate ground and reality in God’s life ‘for us.’ The problem for the churches is when the church’s culture becomes the starting and ending point in itself; as a harbinger to only reinforce the human incurved and sinful bent to begin with.

All of the above noted: it is understandable why many are walking away from God; insofar that they have conflated God with their purported experience of Him as given in their experiences actualized in the church cultures. I think it may well be the Holy Spirit attempting to wake people up to the spiritual failure of these many churches and their attending church cultures. But it is a fatal mistake to take your church culture, and your damaging experiences with it, and throw the whole thing away. God remains God, no matter the failures of the churches. The churches, as we all know, all too well, are of course populated by sinful people; chucking the whole thing doesn’t change that, nor does it change the fact that those who are abandoning God are themselves still, very much so, sinners. What we need to recognize is that the Church does not find its reality ‘within itself,’ but ‘outwith-outside itself’ in the risen Christ and the triune God. Once the Christian realizes this, i.e., that their relationship with God is not contingent upon their experiences within this or that church culture, they will have a better way to move forward. Maybe it will be to move onto another tradition, or just a specific church they find that is more genuinely grounded on the Word of God; or maybe it will be to stay in said church cultures and attempt to be a witness to the reality of the Church in the midst of all the superficialities they and others have been experiencing within the churches.

After saying all of the above, what also is true is that many people are simply using their dissatisfaction with the churches as an excuse to simply walk deeper into their own self-possessed desires and lusts, while hiding behind the real superficiality that is indeed present in the many church cultures today. That is to say, many aren’t finding the ‘level’ of superficiality they are experiencing in the churches as a sufficient means of self-centeredness to live the wanton lives they are really seeking; that is, as ordered by a disordered self-drivenness that their base selves long for.

There is a gambit here.

“Beggars All”: On Abandoning the Progressive and Legalist Mode of Salvation

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I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse towards perfectionism; not in light of the Gospel, that is. And yet it is rampant, especially as given non-stop expression on “Christian social media” (I’m mostly thinking of X/Twitter). There are always these extremes on a continuum. There are those who think to be anti-legalist is to be progressive and loose to everything. On the other hand, there are those who think to be holy (saved) is to be legalistic to the point that all of what they say about others never applies to them; as if they have perfectly arrived; as if they just are one of the elect and everyone else is reprobate, or at least highly suspect. But both centers stem from the same type of “meism.” As if the human agent is the determiner, on either side, of what is good, and beautiful, and free. This, I take to be, the perfectionist impulse; which really is just a performative mood wherein a person, one way or the other, simply must assert their own self-contrived standing before God and others. Either they assert their “freedom,” or they assert their ”legalism”; both being given ground by the homo incurvatus in se.

We aren’t saved based on being so-called “free” or so-called “constrained by our obedience.” We are justified before God because He who knew no sin assumed our unrighteousness that we might become the righteousness of God in Him; it is because of His poverty that we are made rich in the beautiful garments of righteousness which He has robed us with. All our righteousness is like filthy rags; that doesn’t end once we become Christians. We live, moment-by-moment, afresh anew, by His righteousness for us; by His re-creating for us and in us and with us. We remain simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’), as such, we live by His mercy and grace as He always lives to make intercession for us.

Are there standards of righteousness and holiness that we bear witness to as Christians? Yes, but this by the Holy Spirit in Christ in us, and not just against the broken world out there, but the broken world “in here,” in our own fallen and broken hearts. We ought to call out unrighteousness and evil, exposing the darkness with the light of God’s Word, but in so doing we really are only exposing our own wretched hearts, outwith Christ’s heart for us. This ought to at least humiliate us to the point that we remain obedient, even to the death of the cross. And the ground of this obedience is funded by God’s eternal life of humility for us, as He freely chose to become us in the humanity of Jesus Christ (Deus incarnandus). We certainly do have freedom in Christ, but it is a freedom circumscribed by being for God, and not for ourselves. It is a freedom to be holy as He is holy. It is a freedom to bear witness to the world that the Son has set us free, free indeed.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to be looking for some type of balance between being libertine or legalistic. I am suggesting that we abandon that whole paradigm altogether. God’s righteousness in Christ confronts us in the living color of His flesh and blood life for us in Jesus Christ; indeed, as He continuously breathes and hovers over us, from within, by the Holy Spirit. His work is ‘out of nothing’ (ex nihilo), which means that our daily lives are totally contingent upon His Word and Way, and not ours. There is nothing inherent to this world system that supplies us with the sustenance we require to live in the free life that God has brought us into by yoking Himself with us in His freedom for us in Christ. We have a new creation life that comes from outside of us, as an ‘alien life,’ as if manna falling from the heavens in the morning dew each and every day. This freedom, this righteousness we have been given through union with Christ, and thus participants in the triune life Godself, is not a possession of ours, as if a self-possession; we, instead, are a possession of this righteousness’s. This cannot be stressed enough: our lives, as Christians, as human beings, are fully and continuously, moment-by-moment, contingent on God’s Logos. We bring nothing to this arrangement except our dissolute selves, which the Creator, the Sustainer, indeed, the Father in His eternal relationship with the Son, has entered into, in the Son’s assumption of flesh, taking the depth of our fallenness, which He alone can see, into the bones and marrow of His humanity, allowing that to have its final and just result in the human life lived in obedience unto the Father, finally eventuating in death, even death on a cross. We couldn’t and cannot do that. It takes the homoousios Theanthropos (GodMan) to do that for us. And while that event, in itself, is once and for all, it is an event that has ‘perfect tense’ reality insofar that we gain our reality before God, continuously, as events-in-happening, moment-by-moment, through God’s reality for us in His Melchizedekian life as the Son of David, our High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit His eternal life.

Since our lives are contingent in the above way, we have no space for boasting except in the fact that our God is indeed the living and triune God who has not left us as orphans. This ought to change the way we approach the world, others, and ourselves. We, as Luther was wont to say (paraphrase), “are beggars all.”

A Psychology on the Theological Rationalist

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The following is a post I wrote ten years ago that has been buried on a tumblr account I once had. I thought I would repost it here (there are some grammatical errors present, but I’m too lazy to fix them).

Here is a short reflection on what I would like to call Theological Rationalism. 

In order to reflect upon what it means to be rationalistic; it is best to, at the outset, recognize that in my usage there is a difference between being a rationalist and being rational. The former smacks of an anthropology that is grounded in an intellectualism, meaning that a person or human being can be reduced down to their intellect or mind as their defining feature for what it means to be human (so an essentialism of the mind and its constituent properties)–what we might (and do) find in someone like Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology or even more pointedly in Rene Descartes’ epistemological (ontological) project of cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). This is the kind of anthropology that funds what it is to be a rationalist. I see this as distinct from being rational in that being ‘rational’ simply means that someone is reasonable (by whatever standards that might presuppose) in the way they think, communicate, and act; but being rational does not mean that someone’s ‘being’ can be reduced to their mind and its capacity to actively assign meaning to reality in an essential fashion.

With this distinction in mind, I would like to apply what it means to be a rationalist to theological practice and activity. For me in my experience as a Christian person, when rationalism is applied, as it is, in my North American Christian (and Protestant) context, is that we end up with a form of Christian Fundamentalism. I think the most stalwart and able representative of this kind of theological rationalism might be someone like Carl Henry. Although Henry was actually more informed and aware of his theological surroundings and history than who I really have in mind with this post.

In this post, I am thinking more of the kind of Christian I am most familiar with at a popular level. What happens for the North American Christian, often, is that all of their Christian identity can be reduced to one or two overarching totalizing meta-narrative or stories through which they compress and seek to interpret all else. In this way, they feel a sense of control, indeed even power over the circumstances of their life, and in particular, over their relation to God. The key to what I am getting at (without getting into some concrete examples) is to recognize that these kinds of theological rationalists have been trained and conditioned to think in this way; in other words, it is not that they are intentionally seeking to control their relation to God (although they are sometimes), it is that they have been sold a bill of goods that reduces God and his acts to their preconceived theological framework, which is based upon their own active intellect’s which believes that all of reality can be compressed therein. The emphasis then is placed upon their minds, and their capacity to provide propositional explanation for God, and all of the theological related to him.

The slavery enters into this situation at a very basic level; these theological rationalists believe that they are worshipping God, but who they are really worshipping is a construal of God and his acts which they have constructed and conjured up in a way wherein their understanding of God becomes the essential basis wherein God is assigned his being/person. The terrible reality of this is that this person is stuck in a vicious circle; because they might realize (at some point) that they are not living in a true refreshing kind of freedom, and so they desperately look to God for help. But this is the paradoxical problem, when they look to God, they have already denuded God of any Lordly and contradictory and transformative force in their lives, because they have captured God by the power of their own minds; they have made God contingent upon their capacity to explain God in the terms that their minds (and the history of ideas this associated with) have actively constructed, and all this in the name of God in Christ.

The only escape from this, from the absolutized subjectivity is to start fresh. It is, as Thomas Torrance might say, to engage in a dialectic and process of repentant thinking. It is to repudiate any kind of theological rationalism, and its anthropology, and to adopt a new attitude wherein the God who has revealed himself in Christ no longer is held captive by our own psyches and their desires to be comfortable and in control. It is to finally rest in the fact that God is God, and that he has contradicted all of our reason by way of the cross. Once we are able to renounce/repent of our wayward flesh made absolute; it is here where the theological rationalist finally will have the capacity to be theologically reasonable–and this, based upon a dynamic love of Christ that is not contingent upon me and my mind, but upon God and his relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

On “The Neo-Dark Ages of Modern Theology”: Getting Beyond the Smorgasbord of 21st Century Evangelical Theology without Ditching the Modern

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Theology isn’t a smorgasbord, but to view my evangelical world you’d never know it. High church confessionalists/traditionalists have greater clarity in this area than does the low-Free-church evangelical world. This is largely due to the fact that us evangelicals were formed out of the post-Enlightenment, deconfessionalized mode of ecclesial identity. In other words, evangelicals, by and large, are a people of the Book, yet abstracted from the Bible’s broader historical reception as that perdured into the medieval and Post Reformed orthodox period. It is difficult to write on this just because what it means to be an evangelical these days represents a massive continuum. Many so-called evangelicals were raised in the sort of deconfessionalized vanilla evangelicalism I am referring to above, and it is for precisely this reason that these types are attempting retrieve what they believe to be the theological foundations of evangelicalism; particularly as that is found in scholasticism Reformed.

But what I largely take evangelicalism to be is indeed a mode of modernity. That is, most of evangelicalism is a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the revivalism/conversionism therein. This is a religion shorn of its historical antecedents, and one that focuses on the turn-to-the-subject, on a warm-hearted pietism that focuses more on an individualistic understanding of Christian spirituality rather than on a spirituality formed by the communio sanctorum. With this ‘turn’ in place, evangelicals, modern in just this way, feel free to roam the planes and valleys in search of whatever expression of the Christian development suits their fancy; however said fancy may have developed for them. These evangelicals aren’t anchored to a tradition, or a confession, per se; at best, their confession is: ‘me-and-my-Jesus-me-and-my-Bible.’ Armed with this mantra, girdled by a staunch solo Scriptura, such evangelicals have little time for church history; especially when church history for them started the day they received Jesus into their hearts. When church history starts in a center in the self-possessed self, it is this self that gets to determine what sorts of theologies they will be formed by. And even if this type of evangelical looks to the past it will always be grounded in the touchstone of their lives, them.

As far as sketches go, I think the above, in an oversimplified way works. When attempting to fellowship with Christians who have been spiritually formed under such conditions (the ones just mentioned) it becomes quite difficult to achieve any sort of depth dimension, insofar as that dimension exists in the tradition[s] of the church. If such evangelicals have intentionally shucked the husk of the church’s confessions it becomes almost completely impossible to go any deeper than 1973, or whenever said evangelical said yes to Jesus. This produces, at an essential level, a fragmented communion, and as such when communions like this attempt to stand together, say against the wiles of the devil, what ends up happening is that the spiritual vacuum their lives are funded by quickly becomes exposed. In an attempt to shore up this vacuum the evangelical will collectively project their sense of individuality onto their leader; i.e. their erstwhile charismatically gifted pastor. As such, a personality cult is born, and the peoples’ unity becomes contingent upon the man, instead of the cosmic Christ, as He has leavened His church with His wisdom throughout the centuries in the communio sanctorum (communion of the saints).

Maybe this helps frame the way of evangelicalism in these our days. Maybe you feel famished, bereft of any depth reality in your daily Christian spirituality. The church is part of a cosmic reaching reality just as her esse is grounded in Jesus Christ and the Triune God. When Christians are cut off from this deep theological (and even historical) well, it becomes seemingly bleak when attempting to move and breath as a Christian in the 21st century. Is the antidote to this to do what the evangelical theologians of retrieval are attempting, to demonize modern theological developments, and jump back to the ostensible formations of “genuine evangelical” theology, as that is supposedly funded and founded in the Post Reformed orthodox developments (of the 16th and 17th centuries)? This doesn’t seem, to me, to be the best way forward. While I am a proponent of being critical of the negative turns made by the ‘new theology’ of the 18th and 19th c. I am not of the belief that modern theology, and even aspects of so-called turn-to-the-subject are purely evil. I believe it is possible to take what modern (and its antecedent mediating) theology has handed to us, and constructively reify that from within a genuinely Christ conditioned confessional frame regulated by what I take to be the regula fidei (rule of faith) of Christ’s life who continuously is in-breaking into His church even today.

Personally, while I reject the smorgasbord self-interested spirituality and doctrinal quilting of most of 21st c. Evangelical style, I think it is imprudent to simply ditch the whole modern period as if representative of a neo-dark ages that must be ignored. I think this is imprudent because in order to do so the “jumper” (of the ditch of modernity) must posit themself in such a way (which itself is a purely modern way to think) to imagine that they aren’t inherently modern themselves. But they are indeed a modern people, and when they attempt to ignore modern theology, in se, they only assume modernity’s anthropological mode of positing or starting with a self-asserted self in search of the ‘true-theology’ (the one developed, in their discursive reasonings, in the 16th and 17th c). In my view, it is best to simply acknowledge that we are a modern people, and to understand that God has been speaking to and in His church in and through all periods. This way we, as the people of God, are starting in a position where we are not the magisterium, but the ministerium of God’s Holy people the church. In other words, when we acknowledge that God has been present throughout, as if a yeast, the ambit of all church history, up to and into the present moment, we are recognizing that we are simply beggars-all, waiting upon God. As we are formed from this alien starting point, in the center of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ, as He ever afresh anew makes Himself known to us, it is from this eagle’s nest, seated at the Right Hand of the Father, high above all rulers and principalities, that the Christian can genuinely operate from the confessional reality of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ.

This is just the beginning of a proposal.

Biblicism: Fundamentalism and Solo Scripture §1

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As evangelicals we are known for our commitment to Holy Scripture and its authoritative Word. The further away from the Protestant Reformation evangelicals get, there is a drift among some towards solo Scriptura rather than the reformational sola Scriptura. In other words, the Scripture principle becomes so all encompassing that the belief arises that anything—like Church tradition—that might be seen as extra-scriptural is relegated to the realm of ‘philosophies of men’ rather than the revelation of God. There is a fine, almost unattainable balance to be found at this juncture; I have been writing about that more recently. There seems to be at least two extremes: 1) either people believe that they can read the Bible without appeal to any tradition at all, or 2) people believe that the tradition of the Church is so normative that to read the Bible without it is to be anti-catholic.

Karl Barth in CD I/2 The Doctrine of the Word of God identifies this sort of conundrum as it has obtained in the Protestant history of the Church, in particular. He identifies the problem that our option number one presents, and then offers a corrective by appealing to a softer version of our number two. I believe it is possible, and even necessary to recognize the fact that tradition is an inevitable aspect of biblical interpretation. I say this because the Bible, as is clear upon a moment’s reflection, is written occasionally; in other words, the Bible is written into various situations in an attempt to interject God’s own witness of Himself in and through the nitty gritty of life’s circumstances. But in these occasions there is an inner-theo-logic that the writings presuppose upon in order to make the claims they do in regard to God and all subsequent theological and christological reality. Even the idea that the Bible represents God’s words, that His living voice is heard afresh and anew therein, is a highly theological reality with all sorts of ontological and epistemic implications. It is this theo-logical reality that Barth uses to confront the notion that the Bible can be read all by itself without recognizing the role that theology plays in that reading. He writes at great length:

An interesting peripheral phenomenon of Neo-Protestantism is the peculiar behavior of the so-called Biblicism whose existence and character are strikingly presented in Gottfried Menken (1768-1831) of Bremen, a writer who has never received sufficient notice in dogmatic history. Even in his youth the characteristic complaint was made against Menken that it was “his obsession to try to construct his Christianity out of the “Bible alone….” That is the more or less explicit programme of this modern Biblicism. “My reading is very limited yet very extended; it begins with Moses and ends with John. The Bible and the Bible alone I read and study….” He is not concerned with “what is old or new, with defending or attacking, with assent to the doctrine of any ecclesiastical party, with orthodoxy or heterodoxy, but only with the pure and genuine teaching of the Bible….” And the Church? Menken prefers to avoid the word. For him and for all Biblicists it is a question of “Christianity,” “reality” the “truth,” the “kingdom of God.” The Church is “the eternally pure possessor and preserver of the divine.” Yet only too often its doctrine has “come under the influence of a passing philosophy or the superstitiously venerated theology of the fathers….” “In any case, where is the Church? Is it in the East or the West? Does it gather under the staff of the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople or under the threefold crown of the Pope at Rome? Finding no rest or portion in the world, did it long ago retire with the ancient Syrian Christians into the heart of Southern India or with the Waldenses into the valleys of Piedmont? In the fellowship of the Holy Ghost did it infallibly and irrevocably express itself at the Diet of Augsburg or at the Council of Trent or at the National Synod of Dort? Or finally is the true and perfect idea of Christian truth and doctrine to be found in the Idea fidei Fratrum? These few questions point to many things and embrace a large part of Christianity; but many different events, and systems and confessions and millions of Christians are outside their scope: Nestorians, Monophysites, Mennonites, Arminians, Jansenists, Mystics and Quakers; and many others, who all make claim to the name of the Christian Church and the treasure of Christian orthodoxy. These few questions are enough to show that, if we are not ignorant, or if after the customary manner and usage of sectarianism which becomes almost second nature, when we use the word Church we do not regard the confession of the Fathers and the sum total of those who agree with it as the only Christian fellowship in which true doctrine is to be found and to which alone, therefore, or primarily the name of Church belongs, it is not easy even to know what the Church believes and teaches. At an informative glance at so many different periods, countries, languages, systems, costumes and customs, at the confusion and tumult of so many different and contradictory and warring sects, at the medley of so many different confessions and catechisms, it seems difficult and almost impossible to find a standpoint where with insight and material truth we can say: I believe and teach what the Church believes and teaches….” “What is offered me as old is honoured by you as such only because it is found in a 16th century catechism from the Palatinate or Saxony, or because an 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury or a 5th century Bishop of Hippo thought in this way and formulated and determined the matter accordingly. But if you could add to these human authorities a greater one in the utterances of a 2nd century Bishop of Lyons, which you cannot, it would not make any material difference. For it does not matter to me to learn how Ursin or Luther or Anselm or Augustine or Irenaeus thought about the matter and formulated and determined it—they and their decisions are too new. I want that which old, original and solely authentic: Holy Scripture itself” (Schriften VII, 263 f.).[1]

We will let this first part of the long quote and commentary from Barth stand, and then revisit it through a second post where we will hear Barth’s critique and response to Menken’s ‘Biblicism.’ But I would venture to say that Menken’s sentiment resonates with many of us. If we are Free Church evangelicals, in fact, this is the stuff and grist of our daily existences as we move and breathe in the walls of our autonomous standing Bible churches. It is pretty apparent how this might be the logical conclusion to the reformational Scripture principle, but really only a misunderstanding of its practice at least.

We run into the problems this sort of Biblicism presents as we come across other Christians who are just as committed to the Bible’s authority as we are. We realize that there is a dilemma when we are using the same passages of Scripture to “prove” diametrically opposite points; all the while using the same grammatical-historical hermeneutical framework to arrive at our divergent exegetical, and thus, theological conclusions. This sort of ‘pervasive interpretive pluralism’ requires something deeper, as Thomas Torrance would call it, a ‘depth dimension’ wherein we might come to find the sort of ecumenical unity that arises as we dwell upon the Holy reality of Holy Scripture in Jesus Christ. But to think that we can simply stay at the surface of Scripture, as Menken slavishly wants to, doesn’t actually fit with the broad contextual reality of Scripture itself; that is when we see it within a dogmatic frame (as we should).

I will have further comment on this, particularly as we hear Barth’s antidote to Menken’s Biblicism. Don’t get me wrong: I lean Biblicist myself, but I think it’s naïve to think that Biblicism can mean a sort of tabula rasa of its own ‘structuralist’ or coherentist meaning. In other words, I think there is an ‘extra’ or external reality to Scripture’s meaning, that merely dwelling upon the ‘signs’ of Scripture will not lay bare. I think Scripture is embedded in a broader and thus context-forming theological ontology wherein it finds its reality, purpose, and ultimate meaning. Jesus believed Scripture had this >greater-than reality too (cf. Jn 5.39); we do well to follow our Lord.

Stay tuned for part two to this post.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2§20, 156.

What Kind of Church Culture Can Produce a Declaration like the Nashville Statement? Bearing Witness to Ourselves Rather than to Jesus Christ

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I have had a chance, as the day unfolded, to reflect further on the so called Nashville Statement; the statement that a hundred and fifty evangelical signatories signed their names to. It seems to be their attempt to draw a line in the sand in regard to what they see as a pressing problem for the church, and in particular, their evangelical church. The problem for them, of course, is the progression and in-roads of the LGBTQ, homosexual gay agenda, as they see it transforming not only the body politic of culture in general, but its pressing into the church itself.

But I have a problem with it. For me, the problem has more to do with these leaders’s conception of how the church ought to operate in regard to its witness to the Gospel in relation to the world at large. As I see it, they are presuming upon an us versus them dynamic that the Gospel itself does not presume; instead, the Gospel is an equalizing reality. The Gospel as the Word of God in Jesus Christ stands as judge not just over those guys and gals out there, but as judge of the church itself; as Peter notes: “17 For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?”[1] In other words, the Nashville Statement places itself in the place of God’s Word, as if its signatories are the judges; it actually and ironically displaces the Word of God with its own word over against others. If these signatories were to listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his admonition to the American churches, as he saw it back in the 30s, they may well not have penned such a statement. Bonhoeffer wrote:

American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of “criticism” by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s “criticism” touches every religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. . . . But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ, must for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.[2]

Do you see what Bonhoeffer is getting at, particularly when he references ‘natural theology?’ It is when churches displace her reality, founded in Jesus Christ alone, with a perception of herself as possessor of God’s absolute Word, and not just as possessor, but as dispenser, that she has presumed too much. She begins to elevate herself beyond the culture of which she is ensconced, and presumes that she has divined things, and thus has become able to pronounce things in absolute and damning ways, that in reality belongs to the Lord of the church alone; the living Word of God. Bonhoeffer’s point, is that when the church sees herself as coextensive with the Word of God itself, in an absolute way, that she actually loses her voice to bear witness to the living Word of God who not only stands in judgment of his church, but of the world at large.

Similarly, John Webster, as he comments on Barth’s critique of the liberal church in Germany is somewhat and ironically parallel with Bonhoeffer’s critique of the American church as he saw it. Here Webster, in line with Bonhoeffer points out how, in the thought of Barth, morality and ethics become too much aligned with the ‘moral and absolute self’ such that the Word of God loses its place for the Christian, and at the same time becomes coterminous with the Christian’s perception of the world at large and her pronouncements toward the world. Webster writes:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates. [3]

The Nashville Statement exudes this sense “of [the] absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness.” The Word of God has now been conflated with the Nashville Statement, as if a hundred and fifty signatories, backing fourteen theses on homosexuality are what God himself believes about the state of affairs in regard not just to homosexuality but other moral proclivities.

What concerns me most is the culture, in the evangelical church, that fosters the idea that such statements are healthy and good. In what way do such statements bear witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ; to the living Word of God? It ends up reducing the church to an organization of people who appear to be oriented around a cluster of ethical principles and mores instead of an organic reality who finds her sustenance in and from Christ. Whether or not homosexuality is contrariwise to the ethics of the Kingdom[4], the church herself should be more concerned with her own blights and inadequacies. The church should evidence humility before God wherein she is constantly crying out to him for his mercy and grace, such that this posture, before the world, bears witness to the reality of God in Christ. The church should avoid placing herself in positions where she appears to believe that she has become the absolute mouthpiece for God, in regard to perceived moral inequities, and instead submit to the personal reality of God herself. It is this repentant posture before God and the world wherein the power of God will be most on display. It is up to God in Christ to bring transformation into the lives of people; he alone justifies and sanctifies, the church does not!

Who do we think we are? Jesus is LORD, not the church!

 

[1] I Peter 4.17, NIV.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Protestantism without Reformation,” in No Rusty Swords, ed. Edwin H. Robertson (London: Fontana Library, 1970), 88-113 cited by George Hunsinger,Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 71-2.

[3] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.

[4] Which personally I believe it is.

*Artwork of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Mark Summers.

A Reflection on the Church and Science conference, and Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of Creation

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Today I attended the Church and Science conference sponsored by New Wine, New Wineskins which is a theology of culture ministry that Dr. Paul Metzger initiated at my alma mater, Multnomah Biblical Seminary. Multnomah has partnered with the American Association for the Advancement of Science who has provided Multnomah Seminary with a sizeable grant to work on producing theological curriculum that is attentive to the discipline of science in the 21st century. We had two plenary sessions, the first was Dr. Se Kim, of the AAAS; and then Dr. Rod Stilt of Seattle churchandsciencePacific University, he is a historian of science’s development as a discipline. There was also two workshop sessions. The first one I attended was offered by Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass, he is an Assistant Professor of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, and his presentation was entitled Is Jesus Greater than Anti-Evolutionism? The second workshop I attended was offered by Derrick Peterson and Dr. Michael Gurney, Derrick has his MDiv and ThM from Multnomah Biblical Seminary (and is a friend), and Mike Gurney has his PhD from Highland Theological College, University of Aberdeen (also a friend and former prof in undergrad) — their presentation was entitled “When Galileo Goes to Jail”: Rethinking What Galileo’s Controversy with the Church Means Today (Derrick presented the paper, and Mike moderated and facilitated the Q&A following).

I mention all of this because it leads to what we will consider in this post; in other words, the discussion from today at the conference has motivated me to write this post. I just happened to have read something from Bruce McCormack last week on Schleiermacher’s doctrine of creation, and in particular, about Schleiermacher’s qualified belief in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. I actually think that this topic would be an interesting one to explore at a conference like the one I attended today at Multnomah.

I am going to share from McCormack at length. The first piece from him is providing context for why Schleiermacher developed his doctrine of creation the way that he did. Here’s McCormack:

At the dawn of the modern period in theology, Schleiermacher was concerned that the day might come when the natural scientists would be in a position to provide a complete explanation not only of the movements of heavenly bodies but even of the origins of the physical universe. He writes,

I can only anticipate that we must learn to do without what many are still accustomed to regard as inseparably bound to the essence of Christianity. I am not referring to the six-day creation, but to the concept of creation itself, as it is usually understood, apart from any reference to the Mosaic chronology and despite all those rather precarious rationalizations that interpreters have devised. How long will the concept of creation hold out against the power of a world view constructed from undeniable scientific conclusions that no one can avoid?

By means of his heuristic and critical norm, he found a way to limit a theology of creation so as to obviate a conflict with the exact sciences but also to make a reasoned use of the creation story found in Gen. 1.[1]

Schleiermacher was anticipating what later came to be known as full blown naturalism and/or metaphysical materialism; where all of reality can ostensibly be reduced to physical reality and “natural” (i.e. observable) phenomenon. Schleiermacher was concerned with providing a kind of apologetic basis for Christian theology that elided the potential (in his day) findings of the natural sciences. As the direct quote from Schleiermacher illustrates he wasn’t concerned with the minutia of various biblical interpretive approaches, but instead he was concerned with the macro issue of origins itself. He was trying to provide a rigorous theological basis that would be impenetrable from the attacks of the natural sciences; as he perceived their development in his day in the 18th and 19th centuries.

McCormack distills for us in four points the way that Schleiermacher attempted to develop a genuinely Christian doctrine of creation that would out-pace Schleiermacher’s antagonists in the natural sciences. McCormack writes of Schleiermacher (at length):

This is not the place for a comprehensive exposition of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of creation. It will suffice here to allow Schleiermacher to describe his approach in his own words and to briefly sketch its results. “The doctrine of creation is to be elucidated preeminently with a view to the exclusion of every alien element, lest from the way in which the question of Origin is answered elsewhere anything steal into our province which stands in contradiction to the pure expression of the feeling of absolute dependence.” Since everything that exists must be absolutely dependent upon God, a Christian doctrine of creation must oppose “every representation of the origin of the world which excludes anything whatever from origination by God,” and it must oppose all conceptions of the origin of the world that would place “God under those conditions and antitheses which have arisen in and through the world.”From this state of affairs, Schleiermacher draws the following conclusions, all of which are supported by exegesis of Gen. 1: (1) God does not work with preexisting materials in creating. For if God found material ready to hand that he himself had not created, such material would be independent of him and the feeling of absolute dependence would have been destroyed. So the idea of a Divine Architect is ruled out of court. (2) If it is the case that the Christian doctrine of creation excludes anything that would place God “under those conditions and antitheses which have arisen in and through the world,” then God could not possibly be seen as having deliberated before acting. To be sure, creation is a “free” act of God, but divine “freedom” is wrongly construed where it is seen to entail “a prior deliberation followed by choice” or as meaning that “God might equally well have not created the world.” To define “freedom” in God in this way is to play it off against “necessity”—which is to bring God under an antithesis that is proper to the conditions of life in the world God creates. God’s freedom consists in his “otherness” and in his capacity to be who and what he is in all of his activities. It does not consist in a choice among options over which he must first brood before deciding upon the one he thinks “best” (as Leibniz had it). And in any case, as Spinoza put it (in a passage Schleiermacher would have approved), “because in God, essence and will are one, then the claim that God might possibly have willed a different world would be the same as saying that he could have been Another”—that is, a different God.(3) God cannot be conceived as having begun to create. Now this might seem to make creation “eternal,” but Schleiermacher resists this formulation of the relation. The reason is that if we say that creation is “eternal,” we seem to make it independent of God, which would destroy the feeling of absolute dependence. So Schleiermacher wants to uphold two values: (a) that God has never been without the world, and (b) that the world has always been absolutely dependent upon the divine activity for its existence. His conclusion is that God alone is “eternal” (in the sense of transcending time); the fact that the world does not transcend time but is structured by it is sufficient, in his view, to preserve a proper distinction between Creator and creature. But how then to speak of a creation that has no beginning without resorting to the term “eternal”? Alexander Schweizer would later use the word Sempiternität (from the Latin sempiternitas—meaning “everlasting” or “perpetual”) to describe the existence of a world that knows of no beginning. Such a world is “everlasting,” but God alone is “eternal.” I should add, perhaps, that this is not a linguistic trick but a real distinction, rooted in the differing kinds of being that God and the world are (God as a being transcending time and the world as a being structured by it). (4) Schleiermacher is willing to use the phrase creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) so long as its meaning is restricted to the understanding that God used no instrument or means in creating. That, he believes, is the force of the New Testament phrasing according to which God created “by His Word” alone. Such a phrase is to be taken in a critical sense, rather than as a positive explanation of how God works.[2]

Schleiermacher was obviously concerned with maintaining his principle of ‘feeling’ as the locus for his theological methodology; again motivated by his desire to move beyond the rationalism of his day and find a “safe place” as it were for theology to take place (unfortunately this ended up having deleterious consequences for subsequent theologizing, even if there is something also latently pregnant and valuable within this move of Schleiermacher). The point here though is that Schleiermacher desired to keep God distinct from his creation, and at the same time leave room for encounter or ‘feeling’ of God to happen in his creation/creatures.

I would like to say more, but this is running a bit long for a blog post. Suffice it to say, I think that Schleiermacher actually has the potential to provide some fruitful place in his doctrine of creation for some of the things considered today; particularly with reference to Dr. Josh Swamidass’ presentation. But also, Schleiermacher also helps to illustrate how conflict was happening, even for him, between the natural sciences of his day and his own theological development and methodology (which was something being considered at the conference today in general; i.e. the conflict or “warfare” between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ and how that might be mitigated and in fact used as a place where fruitful engagement might happen between scientists and say Christian theologians/pastors and lay people in the church).

P.S. There is much more to say, particularly with the place that Schleiermacher has in the development of the continued rift between science and religion. Does he help soften that rift, or contribute further to it? Questions like that. Not to mention the kind of theological space he might create for folks like Dr. Josh Swamidass who would like to focus on ‘experience’ and ‘encounter’ for evangelizing scientists in the public square and beyond (although I believe Barth provides a better more orthodox and constructive basis for a theology of encounter via his analogy of faith/relation).

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Mapping Modern Theology, 21.

[2] Ibid., 22 scribd.