Before the flourishing of Bultmann’s career, New Testament scholarship had been dominated by literary criticism, which attempted to uncover the secret of how the texts were compiled; by investigation of the Hellenistic background, especially the mystery religions surrounding the early church, as part of a sociological critique of the history of religion; and by excitement about the apocalyptic content of the teaching of Jesus as a first century Jew. Bultmann incorporated what he regarded as the results of these previous inquiries, but his own scholarly interests took him in other directions, for he was not moved by the old fascination with historical research, the life of the church in society, or the life of Jesus. “I often have the impression that my conservative New Testament colleagues feel very uncomfortable, for I see them perpetually engaged in salvage operations,” he wrote in 1927. “I calmly let the fire burn, for I see that what is consumed is only the fanciful portraits of Life-of-Jesus theology, and that means nothing other than ‘Christ after the flesh.’ But ‘Christ after the flesh’ is no concern of ours. How things looked in the heart of Jesus I do not know and do not wish to know.”
Bultmann’s concern about what it meant for a person or a community to proclaim Jesus as Lord led straight into a field ripe for scholarly exploitation. He had new questions, not about life but about its meaning. How did the early church, in the course of its eucharistic or missionary preaching, retell the story of Jesus and reshape or invent stories about his miracles and sayings, his birth and resurrection? How did the earliest preachers proclaim Christ as the Lord of life — not merely of exotic religion? And how did the transformation of life which these Christians experienced, and their knowledge of a salvation which was already theirs, so dominate their thinking and so infuse their preaching that other matters seemed trivial in comparison — the postponement of the Lord’s visible Second Coming, the actual content of the Lord’s original message, and even his historical personality?
theology
Having said all that, I still do not understand why so many of his fans overlook or excuse Edwards’ very significant errors. I can identify with Charles Finney who said of Edwards “The man I adore; his errors I deplore.” It seems to me that many of Edwards’ fans (especially among American evangelicals) are too quick to pass over the obvious logical flaws in his theology.
For example (and here you will have to trust me or look at my chapter on Edwards in The Story of Christian Theology and my many allusions to him and his theology in Against Calvinism): Edwards argued that God’s sovereignty requires that he create the entire universe and everything in it ex nihilo at every moment. That goes far beyond garden variety creation ex nihilo or continuous creation. It is speculative and dangerous. He also asserted that God is space itself. And he came very close to denying that God’s creation of the world was free in any libertarian sense as if God could have done otherwise. (He said that God always does what is most wise, something with which few Christians would argue, but somehow one must admit the possibility that God might not have created at all. Otherwise the world becomes necessary even for God which undermines grace.)
Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in—even our enemies. This is what we enact as we celebrate the Eucharist. In receiving Christ’s broken body, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering. Miroslav Volf ☀
The early church did not seek to formulate a theory of illness; instead, it healed the sick. It did not attempt to explain how the demonic could exist in a good world made by a good God; instead, they cast out demons. They had no hypotheses about how prayer works; they simply prayed. They were not, for all that, unreflective. They refuted, where necessary, theories of illness that prevented healing (e.g., the sin theory). They suggested that the source of at least some diseases was Satan (Luke 13:16). Their attitude was not antirational or antitheological, but merely concrete. They looked, not for adequate ways to conceptualize the Kingdom, but for ways to actualize it. Walter Wink ☀
We [Black theologians] want to know who Jesus was because we believe that that is the only way to assess who he is. […] Without some continuity between the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, the Christian gospel becomes nothing but the subjective reflections of the early Christian community. James Cone ☀
Christian theology is not a theology of universal history. It is a historical theology of struggle and hope. It therefore does not teach the secular millenarianism of the present, as does the naïve modern faith in progress, maintaining that in the future everything will get better and better. Nor does it teach that in the future everything will get worse and worse, like equally naïve modern apocalypticism. But it does warn that in the future of this world things are going to become more and more critical. Jurgen Moltmann ☀
For me, studying Jesus in his historical context has been the most profoundly disturbing, enriching, and Christianizing activity of my life. As a historian, I meet a Jesus the church has unwittingly hushed up–a more believable Jesus, a Jesus who challenges me more deeply than any preacher, a Jesus who evokes my love and worship by what he is and does, not by the sentiment or hype that some preachers fall back on. N.T. Wright ☀
Its not a matter of leaving earth and going to heaven. Its heaven and earth joined together. And hell is what happens when human beings say, the God in whose image they were made, we dont want to worship you. We dont want our human life to be shaped by you. We dont want, who we are as humans to be transformed by the love of Jesus dying and rising for us. We dont want any of that. We want to stay as we are and do our own thing. And if you do that, what youre saying is, you want to stop being image bearing human being within this good world that God has made. And you are colluding with your own progressive dehumanization. And that is such a shocking and horrible thing, that its not surprising that the biblical writers and others have used very vivid and terrifying language about it. But, people have picked that up and said, this is a literal description of reality. Somewhere down there, there is a lake of fire, and its got worms in it and its got serpents and demons and there coming to get you. But I think actually, the reality is more sober and sad than that, which is this progressive shrinking of human life. And that happens during this life, but it seems to be that if someone resolutely says to God, Im not going to worship you…its not just I’ll not come to church. Its a matter deep down somewhere, there is a rejection of the Good Creator God, then that it the choice humans make. N.T. Wright ☀
So a major twentieth century re-thinking of Christian faith is a realisation that the role of the church in the world is not to provide a secure path to heaven for a few who will escape the general doom of the world. It is to work, through acts of charity and reconciliation, for the liberation of every human being, and even, so far as it is possible, for the liberation of all created things, from all that frustrates the fulfilment of their God-created capacities. There is no guarantee that our efforts will realise such an ideal, but there is an absolute-divine command to try. The church exists not for its own sake or even for the sake of its members. It exists for the sake of the world and its liberation. Any dispassionate observer might say that a good place to begin the search for liberation might be with the church itself. Keith Ward ☀
Inerrancy was not a word I heard until seminary and then it was used only as a derogatory term for what fundamentalists believed about the Bible. (The seminary I attended was considered mainstream evangelical which is why I attended it.) I vividly recall one sermon by a leading pastor of our little evangelical denomination in which he gave an example of the gospels contradicting themselves. Nobody blinked. The contradiction didn’t touch on the gospel or salvation. If you didn’t know him, you might think he’d been studying redaction criticism! A decade or two later he would probaby have been fired for what he said–at least in most evangelical churches! Roger E. Olson ☀
Eventually, books and brands began identifying as “emerging church” or “emergent.” So it got a little messy. In my opinion, “the movement” became a bit narcissistic, and often became little more than theological masturbation: feels good but doesn’t give birth to much. It’s one thing to talk about theology. It’s another thing to talk about talking about theology. There is some sloppy theology out there. Some “emerging church” folks have repeated some of the mistakes of fundamentalism (only with more tattoos), and others have repeated the mistakes of liberalism (only with more wit). Meanwhile, there are many folks who seem to know exactly what “emerging church” is and think it is the anti-Christ. However, neither of these, I am convinced, represents the silent majority of young evangelicals of all colors of skin who love Jesus with all that they are and are not willing to use our faith as simply a ticket to heaven and ignore the hells of the world around us. There is a new evangelicalism that loves Jesus and wants to change the world. Shane Claiborne ☀
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. “My God,” you will say, “If I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?” Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament. Søren Kierkegaard ☀
As Barth argues in The Epistle to the Romans, the gospel has to be (and remain) a question mark sitting strangely next to whatever we dare to deem orthodox and sound in our own thinking. And when it comes to what we hope to understand of the judgments of God, we have to leave an awful lot to unwritten history lest we believe ourselves to own the copyright on them or find ourselves explaining them away. One recalls King’s expounding of a beloved community to come on earth even as he kept it in tension with the darker visions hinted at in his final sermon title, “Why America May Go to Hell.” An alleged devotion to the life of God can be undertaken, aspired toward, and even celebrated, but it should never be decreed a done deal or a mission accomplished. There’s always more to imagine, lean into, and be convicted by. David Dark ☀
Barack Obama has noted the influences on his thinking of prominent, twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. More than one recent president has cited Niebuhr’s influence, but Obama’s presidency has more strongly embraced core tenets of Niebuhr’s realism about the political importance of approximating rather than absolutizing our political ideals, and about the willingness to take required actions (even when inconsistent with our deeper purposes and preferences) in pursuit of those proximate objectives.
Niebuhr’s analysis provides reinforcement to the adage “politics is the art of compromise.” Most American presidents have been clear on this point — although there have been strong arguments for at least two recent exceptions. The presidencies of Jimmy Carter and of George W. Bush, who both cited Niebuhr as influential in their thinking, were much less given to a Niebuhrian approximation of good than Obama seems to be. Both Presidents Carter and Bush were sharply criticized for their uncompromising leadership styles. Ironically, President Obama has been equally criticized for his compromising style.
For Niebuhr, compromise was not something pursued for its intrinsic value (i.e., compromise for the sake of compromise), nor merely out of a desire to achieve or retain positions of leadership. Compromise was a means for achieving a common good. Similarly, Obama has understood that, in politics, you rarely get everything you want and, in order to set some of what you want, and to govern on behalf of all of the people, you may have to swallow some things you find unpleasant. This has been his approach in each of his major legislative initiatives and in the battles over the federal budget — with his end results being successfully formalized policies that in each instance have been decried on several fronts for their presumed deficiencies.
Here Obama is not being inconsistent with what he projected during his presidential campaign. He was elected in large part because he symbolized a change from politics-as-usual. He represented a bigness in his projection of ideals at the heart of the American political imagination — ideals related to being a nation fundamentally committed to rights, freedom, and opportunity for its citizens and for the world. Obama’s health-reform bill, his economic stimulus program, his budgetary battles over key educational and social-service assistance he believes are definitive of American government, and his diplomatic or military pressures in support of political reforms in Egypt, Libya, and Ivory Coast are more suggestive than not of the idealism supported by voters in 2008.
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
