Category Archives: Progressive Christianity

Matthew Henry’s Perspective on Thirdwayism: Contra Secularism’s In-Breaking into the Churches

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The evangelical churches in North America, in particular, and in the West, in general, have largely been secularized. To say something has been secularized has broad affect. But primarily, I am wanting to emphasize how pagan Enlightenment categories have been uncritically swallowed by the churches. Whether that be to affirm climate change (as “creation care” or ecotheology), softness on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer-Intersex (i.e., “gay Christians”) issues, critical theory and critical race theory, Liberation theology, and a whole host of other antisupranaturalistic Enlightenment categories and ideologies, the evangelical churches, by and large, have allowed themselves to be defined by. And if the culture, as the Apostle Paul and the Holy Spirit identify for us, is in fact an ‘evil age,’ then what in God’s Holy Name hath this darkness to do with the Light? As Christians, as ambassadors, as emissaries of Jesus Christ we have been called to bear witness to Jesus Christ, and by this witness, by His reality, His resurrection power indwelling us, indeed as we participate in His life by the Spirit, by His Light we are to expose the darkness; which would entail, that we, on the other hand, repudiate the secularism, the paganism, the Enlightenmentism that so many of the evangelical churches are in fact imbibing (even in the name of Jesus Christ as “bridge-building” aka thirdwayism).

Conversely, the aforementioned has a history. The formative parts of that history are present within the 17th and 18th centuries (so, the Enlightenment). This was a time when the empiricism and rationalism of someone like John Locke, the rationalistic dualism of Immanuel Kant, the Deism of the like et al. was in full blossom. The Deists, of course, simply believed that there was a transcendent god, up there yonder, who got everything started, who created the heavens and earth, gave it a good spin, and has since left it to itself; and to us. Embedded in Deism was a charred rationalism, that when applied to the confessional Dogmas of the historic church, with particular focus on the doctrine of the triune God, left God almost dead in the gutter; left a God, as noted, who was most assuredly not three-in-one / one-in-three. As such, being a confessional Christian—someone who affirmed the orthodox ecumenical church creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, with reference to the triunity of God and the deity of Christ—had come to wane. In the face of the intelligentsia of that day and hour, to be a confessional Christian was looked at like being the village idiot or something. Even so, and by the mercy of God, such persons persisted.

In the midst of this, those “persistents,” the people who withstood succumbing to the Deists and rationalists among them, within the “churches,” remained faithful to the reality of the triune God. Indeed, here is how contemporary church historian, Nick Needham, writes about one of these ‘faithful,’ with direct reference to Matthew Henry himself:

For the Dissenters, Presbyterian Matthew Henry (1662–1714, author of the famous Bible commentary, spoke in a similar vein as the 18th Century began:

The low condition of the church of God ought to be greatly lamented; the Protestant interest small, very small; a decay of piety; attempts for reformation ineffectual. Help, Lord! There are but few who are truly religious; who believe the report of the Gospel, and who are willing to take the pains, and run the hazards of religion. Many make a fair show in the flesh, but few only walk closely with God. Where is he that engageth his heart, or that stirs up himself to take hold of his Maker?[1]

The way Henry was referring to his time and day in the churches sounds eerily similar to our day and time. More than ever, so-called evangelical Christians, particularly “the leaders,” have allowed the erosive powers of the current world culture[s] to seep into the churches; and they have done this all in the name of Jesus Christ. There are many who use the name of Jesus Christ, refer to the Bible, use all the right Christianese, and yet they have in point of fact denied the power of God, the Gospel, in favor of cloistering with the various secular ideologies run amok among us in this world system. These ‘forces,’ within the churches, particularly as we see that given expression in a magazine like Christianity Today, or in the writings and activities of the late, Tim Keller’s thirdwayism (acquiescing to the progressive ideologies of the 21st century), in the name of bridge-building, or in the “winsomeness” of someone like Russell Moore or J. D. Greear, have taken the many peoples of the churches into the slough of despondency, right along with them. This shan’t remain the case!

Like in Henry’s day, it is easy, and at a point, even appropriate to bewail the current church situation. But we cannot stay in that status. The ‘faithful’ must recognize our current moment, as that has been foisted upon us, even by us, and first and foremost repent. Once this step has been taken it is incumbent on each and everyone of us, indeed as individual members of the church, to keep in step with the Holy Spirit, take up our crosses daily, and follow Jesus Christ. As we live out our unique callings by our Master, as we shine brightly with the Brightness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as we expose the darkness with the Light of Christ, we might be able, yet, to inject the churches, the church, with the vitality of our risen and ascended Lord. That can only come as we participate in the life of Christ, in union with Him, and by His resurrection and ascension energy, in shared koinonia (fellowship), one with the other, by which the power of God, the Gospel, can come to have full effect on the liveliness of the churches, and as the light to the world that Jesus is Savior and Lord.

[1] Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: Volume 5: The Age of Enlightenment and Awakening (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2023), 99.

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.”

The Theological and Ideational History Behind the Deconstructed Culture Writ Large

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In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. –Judges 21:25

The human heart has never changed. Ironically, in our secular times humanity, in the main, has come to believe that we have “progressed” beyond our primitive forebears. Secular humanity of the 21st century generally maintains that it has moved beyond the religious platitudes and superstitions of the pre-critical past, and moved onto greener and more enlightened pastures. But the secular age, in fact, is really just a mythology that needs to be demythologized by the lights of sound and theological consideration. This is what TF Torrance provides for us, as he sketches the inherent dualism that reigns over the spirit of the modern age. Dualism in the sense that the human spirit, in the secular, has been abstracted from its ground in its antecedent life, as that has been gifted to it through the Word of God. As TFT notes, the secular human has taken what once was an attribute of the living God, and immanentized it, or collapsed that attribute into the recesses of their own enslaved consciouses. As TF underscores, secular humanity has taken what was the genuine possession of the Creator, and attributed it to themselves. That is the capacity to determine the right way for oneself; the self curved into the depths of its own subjectivity, as if it alone knows and self-determines the good and the beautiful; or the distinction between the holy and profane.

Torrance writes the following:

The story of that development need not detain us further, but we may glance at two significant stages in it. The first of these is the immense impact of Cartesian dualism upon Protestant Christianity—that was an influence from the side of Roman Catholic philosophy, but it had its strongest impact in Protestantism where there had been asserted such a clear distinction between Grace and nature, the Creator and the creature. Once that distinction became distorted into a dualism, it tended to breed Deism, and Deism provoked the old antithesis of spirit and matter, and rampant spiritualism broke loose only to find itself faced with the menace of a positivistic and mechanistic interpretation of nature. It was in the midst of this that there took place the great ‘Copernican revolution’ initiated by Kant, which presents us with the other significant stage in the development of Protestantism which we must note. This is the stage in which the categorical imperative is identified with the self-legislating ego, the divine Spirit is identified with rational self-consciousness, or the inwardness of the human spirit, and out of which it lives, is the ‘Word’ which it hears in the depths of its own subjectivity.

The ’God’ of this Neo-Protestantism is the God who is correlated with the religious subject and its spiritual potentialities, the God who meets and satisfies the needs and answers the questions of ‘modern man’ (that creature that takes himself so frightfully seriously and imposes himself upon everything). Truth about Him is discerned within the religious subject himself, so that the business of theology is to examine the structure of the religious consciousness, particularly—so the stress developed as the nineteenth century wore on—in its historical and universal manifestations. It was within this context that Christianity was subjected to such exhaustive historico-psychological examination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which mean that Christianity was regarded essentially as a process, while the Reformation was regarded simply as a development in that process, when the essence of religion in the human spirit began to break free from its childhood bondage under external authority and the sovereignty of the inward religious experience was asserted, and its right constantly to create for itself new forms through which to express itself in ‘modern culture’.

In this light it was inevitable that Christianity even in its origins should have been interpreted as the product of the human spirit, and so from Strauss to Bultmann the thesis has been maintained that the Gospel does not go back so much to Jesus Himself as to the creative spirituality of the early Church, and therefore if we are to be true to Jesus who in His way provoked that creation we ought to create new forms of Christianity for our own day. This whole conception has been helped on immensely by the application of the concept of evolution to the development of the religious spirit and by the new ‘modern’ notion of history, stemming from Dilthey, as that which man himself creates and for which he is responsible. Thus the historical truth of the Christian faith is only that which man can envisage for himself, what he can make real for himself, and for which he can make himself responsible through his own decisions. Christian truth is that which has become and continues to become true in and through the history which man himself creates by his existential decisions. That is the only reality which he can acknowledge—that is to say, whatever submits to the creativity of his active reason.[1]

In general, when Christians deconstruct in the 21st century, and reconstruct as Exvangelicals or progressive Christians, the aforementioned, as developed by TFT, in regard to the history of ideas, and their application to the human experience in the secular culture today, are the mechanics it obtains within. It’s really just the age-old story of the Genesis 3 narrative, and the fall of humanity into a dissolved status before God. It is the partaking of the forbidden fruit, over and again, whereby humanity believes the lie that the first Adam bit into; i.e., that we can be like God, knowing both good and evil. When the culture writ large, shorn of its ground in the living and triune God as its, attempts to exist in and from themselves, it is the intellectual hardware Torrance has identified for us, whereby a self-actualized person in the 21st century instantiates itself.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 82–3.

The Particularity and Concreteness of Christ: Against Cultural “Christianities”

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A genuine Christianity is not pluriform, it does not have multitudinous realities at its core. It is not a cluster of beliefs that likeminded people rally around. A genuine Christianity—its inner reality—is in fact a person; it is God for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. When people exit or walk away from this or that perceived form or expression of the “Christian existence,” they aren’t walking away from Christianity’s inner reality, per se, if in fact they believe that to be exhaustively represented in the form of that, as they have come to experience that, in this or that Christian tradition. In other words, if someone believes, when they walk away from Christianity, that they have done so by walking away from their immediate experience of that, they are sorely in error; and in error, in such a way that it potentially could have, or will have eternal consequences.

There are certainly damaging and erroneous forms or expressions of a self-proclaimed Christianity, but much of those are simply socio-cultural constructs masquerading as THE form of Christianity; at least in the way that it is presented to and received by its adherents. If someone has a personal relationship with the living God in Christ, walking away from Christianity becomes a much different thing than walking away from an experience of a so-called Christianity.

Make sure, if and when you walk away from something, you know what in fact you are walking away from. And just as important, make sure you understand what you are walking into as an alternative.

Self-worship as the Modern Form of Humanity: Both Cultural Christianity and Secular Paganism

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Self-made drama is corollary with worshipping a self-projected god; this is more antiquely known as idolatry. I just wrote that as a Tweet, yesterday. I had something like Romans 1:18ff in mind, but also Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous critique of religion in mind as well; which is the following in nuce: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”1 Thomas F. Torrance describes the inner-mechanics of this, as he details ‘the problem with modern theology,’ thusly:

The problem with modern theology, however, is that the second feature has to out of hand, for when the element of personal relation to God is not controlled by critical testing on the analogy of faith it degenerates into a gross personalism in which we obtrude ourselves into the place of God, making our relations with God the sole content of theological knowledge. That is the problem that faces us everywhere today in the so-called ‘new theology’ in which statements about God are reduced to anthropological statements. Whenever we try to transcend a subject-object relation or replace it by a ‘pure’ subject-subject relation, we are unable to distinguish God from ourselves, and lapse into irrationality, and then into the bitter futility of God-is-deadness.2

You will have to infer what TFT is referring to as the ‘second feature’ (I don’t feel like treating that now). But what should, at least, be clear is when Torrance refers to ‘subject-subject relation,’ this is the modern mode of immanentizing all reality to the absolutism of ‘self’; ie “turn-to-the-subject.” Modernity likes to think it has ‘come of age,’ that it has finally transcended the magics and mythologies of the superstitious past; its proof-of-transcendence is ostensibly revealed in our “scientific advancements,” primarily experienced concretely in technologies. Its nostra theologia (‘our theology’) is then only capable of worshipping the self as that is individualistically and collectivistically projected into the various and empirically visible achievements of the indomitable human spirit. “Our feelings” give pathos to the life and verve of the verity of tech we interact with day in and out; it has become the ‘subject-subject relation,’ the sacramental balm that modern humanity immerses itself into in self-actualistic orgasm.

The genuinely Christian response to this is to repent! Bow the knee to the risen Christ, humble yourself, through the humility of God in Christ for you, and know that He is God, and that we are not! It is only in this repentant affection that a person can truly think reality as it is, and thus operate as the type of theological realist that Christ is for us. We will come to recognize that there is an object over against us who turns out to be the subject for us; the humanizing reality that allows us to stand before the living God in His iustitia aliena (‘alien righteousness’), and come to understand what it genuinely means to be human from the ec-static life of God for us—a life constantly given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ as that is gifted to us by the Holy Spirit.

 

1 Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion. 

2 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), x-xi.

 

 

Christian Atheists, Woke Christianity, and the 19th Century as its Antecedent

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Having historical perspective can actually change your life, but only as a subset of having eternal perspective; insofar that genuine human history is Christ’s history for us. As such I like to study church history and historical theology, among other histories, in order to gain this sort of perspective; particularly when it comes to ideas. I have been reading through James Ungureanu’s most excellent book (published PhD dissertation) Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict in order to help me get the sort of historical footing I think is so pivotal towards understanding my place in the stream of ideas and movements thereof. Ungureanu is a historian of science, but with a theological twist. In his book he offers a seismic perspective on how the so-called ‘conflict thesis’ (or warfare thesis) developed between science and religion. What he demonstrates is just how much of this ostensible warfare is really an anachronistic imposition upon the past; i.e. that this so-called conflict, and the people it is typically assigned to, as its progenitors (Draper and White), is fake news. Be that as it may, in order to establish his thesis, James must do the deep-dive archeological work of uncovering the artifacts of history that others have moved quickly past (without making the proper connections etc.).

I want to simply pause and share a morsel of this artifactual work that implicates our current cultural moment, in regard to the socio-politico-religio sitz im laben we inhabit as Christians in the Protestant West. For some reason, most likely because of historical illiteracy among the masses, the Young, Restless, and Progressive seem to think they are engaging in something fresh and new; in regard to the liberal nature of the sort of activist and ‘woke’ Christianity they are attempting to live out in the churches and in the streets of America and across the Western globe. This all has ideational and historical antecedent that I’d propose most are ignorant of. It has already played out before. The young (and the historically ignorant) are simply playing out what has already been played out in the history; and to its adherent’s eternal destruction. Ungureanu writes of what was known as ‘new theology’ (or religion without theology), and its historical landscape this way:

The previous chapters give some indication of the vast changes Christianity experienced during the nineteenth century. Advances in natural and historical sciences, intentional or not, seemed to many a direct assault on traditional Christian belief. Debates about the character of Christian faith raged both inside and outside the church during the century, and out of these debates emerged new ways of thinking about the nature of faith, the historical Jesus, the character and authority of Scripture, the truth of revelation, and the future of religion.

While the nineteenth century was undoubtedly an intensely Christian era, it was also a time of much doubt and disillusionment. As scholar of religion Linda Woodhead has put it, the nineteenth century witnessed the “reinvention” of Christianity. Those who rejected traditional Christian belief, but who claimed to remain theists, often adhered to some form of liberal theology. This new or “reinvented” Christianity was part and parcel of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. For the religious liberal, there was an “acute sense of the need for a reformation of Christianity,” an attempt to accommodate Christianity to the modern era. Recognizing that advances in the sciences and historical-critical scholarship had supposedly contradicted established religious ideas, many attempted to ameliorate the emerging malaise by readjusting or reconstructing the meaning of religion. As we have seen, nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism generally responded to higher criticism and scientific naturalism by transforming rather than abandoning the faith. By the last decades of the century, the New Theology or “new religion” movement had found numerous supporters on both sides of the Atlantic.

What this “new” or “freer” religion looked like, however, was deeply contested, as we saw in the previous chapter regarding the “Quadrangular Duel” between Herbert Spencer, Fredric Harrison, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Wilfrid Philip Ward. However the “new religion” was conceived, many men and women in the nineteenth century believed that the reconciliation of science and religion depended on it. One important strategy used by liberal Protestants and religionists at the end of the century was turning “theology” into a pejorative. By contrasting the ideal of a free, progressive scientific inquiry against the authoritative, reactionary methods of theology, religious liberals imagined dogma, not faith, as the true obstacle of modern thought. Conflict occurred, they believed, not between scientific truth and religious truth, but between scientific truth and religious truth, but between contesting theological traditions. If religion would only rid itself of dogmatism and ecclesiastical authority, science and religion would be in harmony. The distinction between, and separation of, religion and theology was thus incredibly important—indeed, everything hinged on it. Many liberal Protestants believed the separation of religion from theology was the best approach to bridging the schism between modern thought and ancient faith, and thus for bringing about reconciliation between science and religion. The separation of religion from theology of course antedates the late nineteenth century. As we discussed earlier, a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers used this distinction in their effort to construct a “rational” or “natural” religion. But the distinction was tainted by a strong anticlerical polemic that largely remained in effect into the next century, when mainstream Protestants were beginning to adopt more modernist ideas. By the late nineteenth century, however, this anti-Catholic polemic has transformed into a Protestant self-critique, and subsequently into the “Protestantism minus Christianity” narrative we have seen in the work of Edward L. Youmans and the scientific naturalists.[1]

Earlier I may have laid too much emphasis on the young, but millennial and younger seem to have taken a certain reception of the mainstream progressive liberalism Ungureanu refers us to. But as noted, all of the ‘new’ developments have been around for many centuries, in their most modern instance, though, as we find it in the 19th century. If you have had any exposure to mainline Protestantism the ‘feeling’ that Ungureanu narrates for us in its historical iteration is a known quantity; in other words, these things are not foreign to you.

One problem with thinking this way is that progressives and the ‘new religion’ seems to think they can escape dogma and ecclesiastical authority. But as should be apparent this sort of movement away from such realities doesn’t actually remove them it only creates a vacuum wherein new dogma and ‘ecclesiastical authority’ emerges; even if it only masquerades as their negations. The issue of dogma and authority isn’t a matter of if there is going to be such components, but whether or not the dogma and authority are good. When we look at how this new religion has been fleshed out in the broader culture today it is clear that in fact a hyper-dogmatic and hyper-authoritarianism has replaced the old dogma and ecclesiastical authority. Wokeness, which is the new religion of today (that finds correspondence with the feeling of the 19th century iteration), has all sorts of dogmas, and authority figures that intend on keeping people in line with their works-righteous and liberating view of salvation.[2] This is what happens when we do a religion minus Christianity; or more pointedly, minus the orthodox and risen Christ who is homoousios.

[1] James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 216-17.

[2] Think, Liberation Theology and its neo-Marxist and Critical Theory nexus.

The Lungs of Jesus Christ: Postcritical Theological Interpretation of Scripture contra the “Historical” Way

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There are people who want to focus on what the Bible actually says, in the way that it says it; and there are people who want to focus on barthglasseswhat they think the Bible says according to their canons of extraneous criticism developed under the pressures provided by their peers. Karl Barth was a Dogmatic theologian and biblical exegete who wanted to focus on the former, on what the Bible actually says, according to its ordained conventions and reality found in Jesus Christ.

I have noticed, maybe you have too, a movement taking hold within a demographic of younger (as far as biological age) and even baby boomer Christians who in the past would have identified as evangelical Christians, but who are now more in step with what has loosely been called ‘Progressive’ Christianity. But it isn’t just this demographic, it is also the tribe I grew up in; dispensationalists are just as participatory in this process of reading the Bible through prefabricated rules developed from a historist approach toward the Bible. We could blame all of this on an uncritical (or maybe even a critical) appropriation of Enlightenment engagement of Scripture, which indeed, focuses on the formation of the canon of Scripture, and its text latent contours through criteria that are external to Scripture itself. One consequence of this is that those who follow this trajectory end up having ongoing discussions about the Bible, but never really engage with the material theological content of the Bible. The Bible gets reduced to a text that is useful for reconstructing the history of religions, but not useful for encountering the living God reported upon within its pages (and its special history relative to its reality found in Jesus Christ).

George Hunsinger, a Karl Barth scholar, professor par excellence at Princeton Theological Seminary has written about how Barth worked as a postcritical interpreter of Scripture; recognizing that the critical scholarship I was speaking about above has its place, but it really isn’t all that enlightening toward actually engaging with the text of Scripture – whose context is ultimately the Triune life of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Here is Hunsinger:

As understood by Barth, the function of biblical criticism was mostly preliminary (NS, 233). It pertained to history in them modern sense of the term. It allowed various elements of the texts to be distinguished, whether they be historical, or legendary, or conflations of past and present occurrences. Critical distinctions like these had to be made. But after they were made, wrote Barth, “they can be moved again into the background, and the whole [text] can be read, with this tested, critical naïveté, as the totality it professes to be” (IV/2, 479 rev.).

Historical and non-historical elements flow together at this point (cf. III/1, 80-81). Verifying the miracles historically ceases to be of great importance. What matters is the sort of events being reported: events that are incomparable and mysterious. “The ill-advised hunt for a historical truth supra scripturam [prior to Scripture] is called off,” wrote Barth, “in favor of an open investigation of the veritas scripturae ipsuis [the truth of Scripture itself]” (I/2, 494 rev.). What emerges as the sole object of exegesis, from a theological standpoint, is the texts themselves. No other option makes sense if the following is true: “Revelation stands, no, it happens, in the Scriptures,” wrote Barth, “and not behind them. It happens. There is no way around this in the biblical texts – in their actual words and sentences – given what the prophets and the apostles, as witnesses to revelation, wanted to say and have said.”

Theological exegesis is determined by this picture of the attested events (NS, 234). It tries to respect what it finds in the texts. It operates with a hermeneutic that allows them to correct our ordinary picture of what is and is not possible.

Scriptural exegesis rests on the assumption that the message which Scripture has to give us, even in its apparently most debatable and least assimilable parts, is in all circumstances truer and more important than the best and most necessary things that we ourselves have said or can say. In that Scripture is the divinely ordained and authorized witness to revelation, it entails a claim to be interpreted along these lines; and if this claim be not duly heeded, it remains at bottom inexplicable. (I/2, 719 rev.)[1]

A baby boomer scholar who is very popular among the progressive Christians, Peter Enns, just recently wrote this on his Facebook wall: “If I hear one more Enlightened One claim that source criticism of the Pentateuch is dead and buried and has been replaced by literary analysis, I am going to file a lawsuit for academic slander.” Enns is someone who is doing a good job revivifying something that I think Barth believes should be in the background, and not at the forefront of how exegesis of the text of Scripture ought to proceed. I am with Barth.

Hey, if you want to spend your time engaging in the never ending process of source, form, and redaction criticism, when doing Bible study, done under a naturalist-historist mode of operation that is up to you! But if you want to actually encounter the living Word of God in Scripture, then I suggest you accept Barth’s invitation to feast at the banqueting table of Holy Scripture and its compelling and breathing reality found from the lungs of Jesus Christ. Let Scripture impose its special and strange, and even foolish reality upon you, instead of you imposing your reality upon it.

[1] George Hunsinger, “Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation: Rudolf Smend on Karl Barth,” in Thy Word Is Truth: Barth On Scripture (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012) ed. George Hunsinger, 42.

Peter Enns and ‘Natural’ Bible Reading

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Peter Enns just wrote a blog post in response to Andrew Wilson’s Christianity Today’s review of Enns’ new and rather controversial book (for many) The jeromebibleBible Tells Me So. In Enns’ article he identifies twelve rhetorical strategies “evangelicals” like Andrew Wilson use when responding to critiques of the Bible, like Enns’, where the Bible’s historical and textual contradictions are emphasized; emphasized through a certain historist-text-critical lens. Here Enns describes the “why” of these rhetorical strategies–deployed by evangelicals as they are–and in his description what Enns believes about Scripture (in contrast to his “evangelical” interlocutors) becomes apparent:

These strategies—which are not necessarily deployed consciously—are aimed at protecting evangelical theological boundaries but do so at the expense of those evangelicals, who, through the course of reading and studying scripture, come upon legitimate questions for which they are seeking thoughtful answers. Issues like the tribal violence of God, true (not apparent) contradictions, and historical problems are quite real and cannot long be kept at bay through these strategies.[1]

For the rest of this post, we will survey (sort of) some of the history that has led Enns to become an “anti-inerrantist,” which is ironic, to say the least.

Some Of The History

People haven’t always thought of the Bible through the lenses that people like Enns and inerrantists (usually associated with evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity [being forwarded by today, most ardently, by neo-Reformed types like John Piper, Westminster Theological Seminary, et al]) do. Prior to the turn to enlightenment modernity, and the higher criticism of the bible that developed as a result (among other things), people used to think of the bible as the place where the God of history in Jesus Christ encounters and meets us; inviting us into his life which is history. Far from discounting the historical veracity of Scripture what was emphasized more was a participation of God’s people in the history of God’s life disclosed in Scripture which found its telos or ‘end’ (purpose) in his beloved Son, Jesus. Matthew Levering identifies this conception of biblical history (the one I just said that finds its ‘end’ in Jesus Christ) as a ‘participatory’ view of history; he labels the theory of history that Enns and the inerrantists follow (solely, as far as developing a doctrine of Scripture) as linear history. According to Levering (and others, many others) linear history by the eighteenth century had become the dominate way of thinking about the reality of Scripture and the way that people ought to approach it. Notice Levering (as he provides a brief survey and diagnosis on this very line of thought):

By the seventeenth century, the participatory understanding of historical reality was on its last legs among intellectuals, although the overall unity of the onward-marching linear-historical moments was still presumed.

Hans Frei finds a similar logistic conceptualism in Enlightenment biblical hermeneutics, although unlike Lamb he does not, so far as I know, draw the connection to late-medieval thought. Discussing the “supernaturalist” position on the Bible offered–within the context of the emergence of historical criticism–by the eighteenth-century Lutheran theologian Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten, Frei notes that for Baumgarten the accuracy of biblical history “ ‘be brough to the highest degree of probability or the greatest possible moral certainty in accordance with all the logical rules of a historical proof.’” By the eighteenth century, logical rules of historiography took priority over the Bible’s narrative as the ground on which Christians could understand themselves. These rules envisioned God’s action as radically “external” to human action, and thus extrinsic to historical accounts of Scripture’s genesis and meaning. In patristic and medieval hermeneutics, by contrast, not logical rules of historiography, but faith in a providential God grounded the assumption that the books of the Bible displayed the divine pattern of salvation. This faith nourishes and is nourished by the Church’s biblical reading, understood as a set of embodied and liturgical practices constituting the Church’s conversatio Dei.[2]

Just to reinforce Levering’s sketch of things, let me also refer to John Webster who writes similarly to Levering:

To simplify matters rather drastically: a dominant trajectory in the modern development of study of the Bible has been a progressive concentration on what Spinoza called interpretation of Scripture ex ipsius historia, out of its own history. Precisely when this progression begins to gather pace, and what its antecedents may be, are matters of rather wide dispute. What is clear, at least in outline, is that commanding authority gradually came to be accorded to the view that the natural properties of the biblical text and of the skills of interpreters are elements in an immanent economy of communication. The biblical text is a set of human signs borne along on, and in turn shaping, social religious and literary processes; the enumeration of its natural properties comes increasingly to be not only a necessary but a sufficient description of the Bible and its reception. This definition of the text in terms of its (natural) history goes along with suspension of or disavowal of the finality both of the Bible and of the reader in loving apprehension of God, and of the Bible’s ministerial function as divine envoy to creatures in need of saving instruction.[3]

Conclusion

Peter Enns and the “Inerrantists” come from this same trajectory, the linear historical one that both Levering and Webster highlight for us. Whether you are Enns or the inerrantist, Scripture is reducible to linear-historical reconstruction and the way that sentences are syntactically structured, etc. Enns and the inerrantists might want to get to a point where Scripture can become a ‘spiritual’ thing (Enns says as much at the end of that blog post of his I linked to above; and the piety of the inerrantists bears testimony to this exceedingly so … there is a heart warmed feeling and love for God, by both Enns and the inerrantists), but the bedrock of their doctrine of Scripture won’t ever really allow them to; there are too many hurdles to jump prior to ever getting there (to living in a participatory depth in regard to the Bible and what it is in relation to its order as given by God). And so Enns and the inerrantists end up developing theories of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics) that have taken shape by their acquiescence to the bible “as history,” natural history before it is supernatural history; and this ends up having a deleterious effect upon everything else.

It is because of this (and I am focusing on Enns in this post) that I see Enns as dangerous and not edifying to the larger evangelical body of Christ (the younger or millennial generation, so called, in particular).

I hope younger Christians, in particular, will turn to a more robust and participatory understanding of biblical history. Understanding that Scripture is part of God’s invitation to converse with him, the Triune God.

 

[1] Peter Enns, Source.

[2] Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2008), 21-2.

[3] John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason(London/New York: T&T Clark, A Continuum Imprint, 2012), 6.

‘Schooled in the faith of Christ’: Thomas Torrance Responds to Rachel Held Evans’ “Questioning” Approach

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As you all know I had an interesting engagement with Rachel Held Evans this last week here at the blog; particularly because I chose to write too quickly, jesusteacherand thus not respectfully of RHE. In the aftermath of that I have continued to think about ways to engage with RHE, and her post on Abraham and Isaac (which was really a post on hermeneutical theory). What was more central though to Rachel’s post was actually her questioning of how God is represented as the one who commanded the Israelites to go into the Canaanite nations and slaughter them (Rachel uses the more provocative language of ethnic cleansing, with all of the modern political and ethical connotations attached to that that language conjures for all of us). I want to take another shot at engaging with Rachel, and the content of her post. In particular I want to focus, this time on how she has claimed that she is simply engaging in honest questioning of the text of scripture and its ethical implications. Many others, in Rachel’s defense, also asserted that this is all that Rachel is doing. The post that got me in trouble with many of her readers (whether those readers be fans or not of Rachel’s writings in general) revolved around the fact that I was questioning Rachel’s questioning. Of course the way I came at Rachel, like I have already noted, was disrespectful and not right on my part. But I still think in spite of my foolishness in that first post, there was still a nub of criticism therein that was legitimate. In that sense then, let me focus on one aspect of Rachel’s general and overall mode; i.e. on the way that she approaches just about every issue: She tends to claim that all that she is doing is being a skeptic, a ‘questioner.’ It is this mode that I will engage throughout the rest of this post.

Learning To Be ‘Christian’ Questioners

Is it right to be a skeptic, a questioner, a ‘naked-questioner’ as a Christian; or do we as Christians have a higher calling a more ennobling task set before us? I would argue that we have a higher task set before us, one that we do not get to determine, but one that is imposed upon us. Those of us, Rachel included!, who name Jesus as Lord are not allowed to ask random, or arbitrary questions of God in Jesus Christ; we have been called to submit to the questions and answers imposed upon us by God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. And so this brings me back to Rachel’s mode[1], she claims to be an honest questioner and skeptic, and that she is bringing her experience, science, modern ethics, etc. to God, and asking him to meet her expectations based upon those various loci. Note Rachel as she ‘questions’ God’s apparent ruthlessness (in the story of Joshua toward the Canaanites) based upon the aforementioned loci:

This is a hard God to root for.  It’s a hard God to defend against all my doubts and all the challenges posed by science, reason, experience, and intuition.   I once heard someone say he became an atheist for theological reasons, and that makes sense to me. Once you are convinced that the deity you were taught to worship does evil things, it’s easier to question the deity’s very existence than it is to set aside your moral objections and worship anyway.[2]

But this is not what we have been called to as Christians, as I just noted; with the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ there comes a method, a set of questions that God has determined as the norming questions that he would have us ask of him, conditioned as they are by the center of his life given for us in his Son. Thomas F. Torrance (as he reflects on Karl Barth’s method of theologizing) might counsel us (including Rachel and her readers) this way:

. . . Barth found his theology thrust back more and more upon its proper object, and so he set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption.[3]

For Barth, for Torrance there is not an arbitrary way to question God or the way he acts, there is a concrete way that is given to us. It is a way that is not in our hands, not reposing upon our intellectual misgivings; it is a way that is imposed upon us, and thus not in our control – and so it scandalizes us. Torrance comments further on this way as he thinks about the benefits of catechesis and the scientific method (which means seeing Jesus alone as the regulator and giver of the questions that God has given us to bring to him as a freewill offering):

… The really scientific questions are questions which the object, that we are studying, through its very nature puts to us, so that we in our turn put only those questions which will allow the object to declare itself to us or to yield to us its secrets. The more we know about a thing the more we know the kind of questions to ask which will serve its revealing and be the means of communicating knowledge of it. This scientific principle has to be applied to Christian instruction, and it is here that we see the fundamental importance of the catechetical method. The young learner does not know enough as yet to ask the right questions. We have to encourage him to ask questions, but also to learn that only the appropriate questions will be a means of knowledge. This is nowhere more true than in regard to Christian communication. Christianity does not set out to answer man’s questions. If it did it would only give him what he already desires to know and has secretly determined how he will know it. Christianity is above all the question the Truth puts to man at every point in his life, so that it teaches him to ask the right, the true questions about himself, and to form on his lips the questions which the Truth by its own nature puts to him to ask of the Truth itself that it may disclose or reveal itself to him….[4]

Conclusion

I would suggest, moving away from Rachel H Evans, but staying close, that Rachel’s popularity (other than the fact that she is a smart, intelligent, genuine person) has a lot to do with the way people, Christian people in general have been trained to approach God. Christians, especially in North America, have been trained to approach God on their own heart-felt terms, and the questions that arise out of that frame of reference. Rachel Held Evans’ approach, I would suggest, embodies that in a way that gives voice and words to the questions that so many post-evangelicals have. They are questions, I would further suggest, that are hang-overs from their evangelicalism; apologetic questions that arise from an apologetic faith. This remains, among other things, a great irony of the Rachel Held Evans movement (and I am simply referencing her prominence among many many like-minded sojourners), if I can call it that; a desire, in some sense to be “post” evangelical, and yet still operating from the very premises of evangelicalism (as far as the kind of rationalist and apologetic questions that have plagued it for so long).

As an alternative, Rachel Held Evans & companions, all Christians could follow Thomas Torrance’s advice and be ‘schooled in the faith of Christ’ and allow his life to impose upon us his questions (and then answers). This way there will be a ‘rule of faith’ regulating our approach to God that will keep us from asserting a lordship of our own, and allow us to assume a posture wherein we recognize that Jesus is Lord, and that we can only then operate in and from the domain of his Word, instead of in and from the domain of our own words.

 

[1] Why am I focusing on Rachel so much? Because she is high profile, and has massive impact upon a gigantic swath of the Christian church. Her influence is massive! And so she deserves special attention, especially if she is ‘teaching’ people how to think biblically and theologically; and she is!

[2] Rachel Held Evans, SOURCE. 

[3] Torrance, Theological Science, 7.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, The School Of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock Publishers, 1996), xxvi.