A Word on Biblical Inerrancy

The linkage of inerrancy to the ultimate textual biblical autographs, which are currently lost to history, is a significant claim in certain schools evangelical biblical theology.  A common view is presented in this short article https://carm.org/inerrancy-and-inspiration-bible.

The writer argues that "inerrancy means that all that is written in the inspired documents is without error."  More to the point, it is not the text as we have it that is inerrant, but the originally written texts of the books that ultimately were canonized into the Old and New Testaments rather than the copies of those books.

The argument is complex, which I will not draw out here, except to make the case that the assumption that the autographs are without error is an article of faith that is based on a set of presuppositions rather than an empirical reality.  My purpose at this time is not to challenge that article of faith, but to point it out that the claim is an axiomatic belief that, in itself, cannot prove the validity of its claim.  The underlying hermeneutical issue is that of determining what drives this claim.

The argument is complex, which I will not draw out here, except to make the case that the assumption that the autographs are without error is an article of faith that is based on a set of presuppositions rather than an empirical reality.  My purpose at this time is not to challenge that article of faith, but to point it out that the claim is an axiomatic belief that, in itself, cannot prove the validity of its claim.  The underlying hermeneutical issue is that of determining what drives this claim.

From the other end of the historical continuum, the writers of the particular books of the Bible were not aware that their writings would be formed into a coherent canon, which would be interpreted, ultimately, at least by a certain segment of the evangelical community as the inerrant word of God.  To accept inerrancy as derived ultimately from the autographs is to assume that those who ultimately established the canon in its NT form were themselves divinely inspired in selecting precisely those texts that initially “moved through the writers to communicate to us [precisely] the words which God wanted us to hear.”  I do not argue that the bishops did not draw on specific theological criteria in making the selection, but only to make the point that any assumption that they were particularly inspired by the Spirit of God to select precisely those texts in the creation of an inerrantly inspired canon is also an act of faith rather than a position; one based on a certain set of hermeneutical and theological presuppositions.

As an article of faith, I accept the literary convention that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God, which I perpetually find edifying.  I make this claim not only on the basis of personal reception but through the evidence of the mighty cloud of witnesses through an almost 2000 year tradition. I accept the presupposition that the collective canon includes the inscripturated word of God revealed to the individual writers through the Holy Spirit.  I also view the canon as the primary witness to the revelation of God that has the capacity to communicate its message through the ages as reflective in the mighty cloud of readers and interpreters throughout the past 2000 years. 

In short, I accept (in part by literary convention) that the biblical canon, like no other text, is a primary source of Christian revelation from which I, along with millions of other readers have experienced much edification. I am not persuaded on the need for a doctrine of inerrancy—at least one that connects an errorless text to an unavailable set of autograph—that seeks to provide a level of certainty that is not available through the revelation of the mystery of God in Christ reconciling the world. 

Further Discussion on the Role of Theology in Clarifying Points of Encounter between Liberal Theology and Biblically Based Evangelicalism

 George (original)  In my view the issue is how seriously is the Christian faith to be taken in the contemporary world by mature adults.

Mark: That is indeed a serious concern. But theological clarity is not really a good general predictor of effectual faith. See for example The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Don’t Christians Live What They Preach? by Ron Sider.  

George (new): Mark, your point is well taken and Ron Sider’s article is cogent.  It is also in agreement with the Gordon-Cornwell theologians, Richard Lints 

 and David Wells who make the point that one of the reasons that popular evangelical culture is so prey to contemporary cultural fads, especially the self realization ethic, is because the evangelical movement as a whole lacks a well thought-out and cogent biblically-based theology grounded essentially in reformist principles. While I take issue with some of the implications of both Lints and Wells (I cannot accept the level of certainty that their claims of an exclusive Christianity are based on) I applaud them for laying out a solid framework for a contemporary evangelical theology.  By doing so, they establish a structure through which meaningful dialogue with the more liberal theological branches of contemporary Protestantism can take place. On that, see especially Gabriel Fackre’s Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective (Eerdmans, 1993)

As I had brought out in my last response to Dave, I am making the case that one of the critical dialogue partners of denominations like the UCC is (or needs to be!) with articulate evangelicals like Lints, Wells, and Fackre, authors, I may add, whose books I have never seen in the Hartford Seminary bookstore.  There might have been a course or two that has provided a solid study of contemporary evangelical thought at HS, but other than a recent summer course taught by Tony Compollo, I’m not aware of much of an emphasis at HS on the intricacies and depth of evangelical theology.  By contrast, I know that Lints, in particular, while remaining firmly rooted in the precepts of evangelical theology (see his The Fabric of Faith, 1993), brings into his seminars texts from both the postliberal and liberal Christian perspectives).

With you, I agree that theology is not everything, and for many people perhaps not important at all.  Effective preaching, inspiring music, informed Bible study, the formation of a meaningful community, the opportunity for service, etc., all these are crucial for the formation and sustaining of a mature adult-grounded faith.  As stated previously, theology is a late work, but an essential one if there is any value in connecting faith to reason and the critical issues and questions people bring to their faith journeys.  Even as the former has the primary status, the quest still involves faith seeking knowledge, as the mode of encounter, for many, in conjunction with the perplexities and temptations of the secular city.  Moreover, the matter depends on how one defines theology, which I don’t view as an exclusively academic pursuit, but coming out of the questions and thoughts of any and all in their seeking and their doubting about what this life of faith means in the context of a life pursuit.

Lints, Wells, and Fackre have something of substance to say about an evangelical-based Christian faith as grounded in the contemporary setting.  One may or may not agree with all, or even much of their commentary.  Well and good.  At least they clearly articulate what it is they believe and the supportive reasoning at the level of accessible theological discourse.  If denominations like the UCC are to have serious discourse with the evangelical sector, their theologians are going to have to be at least as comparably articulate.  While any viewpoint expressed by a theologian is not to be taken as the gospel, interpretations can be authoritative in the sense of the cogency of their arguments and the comprehensiveness of their vision.  One can take issue with what any theologian (or anyone else says), but I believe denominations like the UCC are well served to take with much seriousness the challenge of writing cogent theological discourse, which speaks to those in the pews with as much passion as does the call to social justice, or more appropriately, “social witness” (Fackre, 1998, Restoring the Center).  Mature adult Christian identity hangs in the balance. Theology is not everything, but the quest to link faith to the life of the mind and the perplexing questions with which people are grappling, is one of the core challenges that denominations like the UCC need to face.

Culture Gaps in Protestant Liberalism

I read William Hutchison’s (1976) book, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism while in grad school some two decades ago.  I had been working on mid-19th century revivalism as part of a PhD program in history at the University of Connecticut.  I had also finished up a paper on Charles Finney and Horace Bushnell in which I found more convergences than divergences within a common context of Christian republicanism.  This convergence had its roots in a mutual grounding in non-separating congregationalism of the Puritan era  in the vision of New England as New Jerusalem. With Boston symbolized as the City on a Hill Christ would be revealed in a fresh way in the fulfillment of the Puritan Revolution in the new world.  It was my reading of Bushnell that brought me to Hutchison’s book, a solid overview on the emergence of Protestant liberalism in the United States from the Civil War through the First World War.

This history is crucially important in terms of the purposes of the Confessing Christ network in that it laid the foundation for 20th century Congregational religious identity, much more so, I would argue than any formal heritage grounded in the tradition of the Reformation.  Having its roots in Bushnell, this emergence is also the result of the influence of the “progressive” theology coming out of Yale with Noah Porter and other liberal lights of the late 19^th century.  My memory is foggy, but I have some recollection of a progressive school of theology coming out of Andover in the same time period (D. Williams, Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology, 1970).

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            By the early 20th century there was a wide constellation of influences on the mainline denominations that drew extensively on the “modernist impulse” which laid the foundation for a broad stream of religious identity throughout the century in which the world, broadly defined, set the context for the faith.  What is critical, in my view is an evangelical determination of what was/is valid within the modernist impulse and what was/is questionable. Obviously there would be no uniformity of opinion here, but a grappling with the issue in itself could, in the right spirit open up some very fruitful dialogue.

My opinion is that there is considerable culture lag in mainline liberalism (generally speaking) based on issues raised a century ago.  Any substantial reconstruction of UCC collective identity is going to require the most profound discernment of the relevance of those issues for the contemporary setting, including a close examination of what was lost as well as gained by embracing the trajectory of the modernist impulse.

A deep appreciation for the transcendence of God would, I think, be a key factor in a way that disambiguates it from any vestiges of fundamentalism (and the modernist/fundamentalist wars of the early 20th century). A key for the evangelical community is the need to come to grips with the social gospel disambiguated from any vestiges of a telos of progress or any equation of the Kingdom of God with the brotherhood of man.  Both of these are old issues. Nonetheless, I suggest, they are still active as an unconscious force in the collective psyche among at least many who are grappling with this conflict, whether from the liberal or evangelical camp.

I do agree on the importance of grounding UCC identity within the Reformed tradition.  However, I believe that that effort can only remain problematic until these more recent conflicts within Protestant liberalism are more decisively worked through.  There might be some considerable value in placing keen attention on grappling with these early 20th century conflicts and their concomitant culture lags.  The result could be a more likely prospect of realizing an ecumenical identity with strong evangelical-reformed roots than currently operative, and at least some lessening of the culture wars within the denomination toward a more fruitful theological dialogue.  Such a development, in turn, could have rich implications for ecclesiology, missions, social outreach, and personal piety.  I hope to address these issues more fully at a later time in book form.   (Blogger's Note) In fact I have done so, as some of you know, in In Quest of a Vital Protestant Center:  An Ecumenical Evangelical Perspective.  http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Vital-Protestant-Center-Evangelical/dp/162564048X

Jonathan Edwards on the Beauty and Wrath of God: A Brief Overview (Update)

Jonathan Edwards on the Beauty and Wrath of God: A Brief Overview (Update)

J. I. Packer refers to Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as “colonial America’s greatest theologian and philosopher;” one might argue that Edwards was the greatest theologian whoever graced the many pages of American religious history.  Packer further notes that “as a bible-lover, a Calvinist, a teacher of heart-religion, a gospel preacher of unction and power, and above all, a man who loved Christ, hated sin, and feared God, Edwards was a pure Puritan; indeed, one of the greatest and purest of all the Puritans.”  Packer rightly notes that this Puritan was “born out of due time.”  As with Lincoln, so with Edwards: in Lincoln’s case, in revitalizing the democratic legacy of 1776, in Edwards’ case, in reawakening the Puritan religious vision for a new generation that came to a crescendo in the breakout of the First Great Awakening, which continued to characterize his ministry and writings until his death in the late 1850s.

The Puritan impulse emerged as a reform initiative within the Church of England.  It transmuted into an independent religious movement in the embrace of the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation:  the sovereignty of God, justification of faith, and the centrality of the personal interpretation of the Bible through the power and light of the Holy Spirit.  Puritans also believed “that man existed for the glory of God, that their first concern in life was to do God's will and so to receive future happiness. They believed that Jesus Christ was the center of public and personal affairs, and was to be exalted above all other names” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans.  Edwards stressed all of these themes.

The English Puritan movement of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries brought great vitality to the Christian faith through the writings of Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, John Owen and other luminaries; writers whose work on faith, theology, and the power of the written and spoken biblical word deserve close study among contemporary evangelicals. The Puritan movement was brought to New England in the early 17^th century with Boston serving as the epicenter—“the city on a hill”—with high hopes that through its “errand into the wilderness,” New England would become transformed into the New Israel where the Protestant Reformation would reach its pristine goal that would ultimately lead world conversion. This vision of ultimate global conversion was central in Edwards’ world view.

 New England Puritanism reached its high water mark in the first two generations, particularly the first, say by 1660, but gradually declined through the first decades of the 18^th century in a transition that one historian captured in his book titled From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765.  It is in this milieu that Jonathan Edwards burst on the scene in North Hampton, MA, as the key theologian of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, a conversion-based revitalization movement that brought radical faith once again to the center of cultural and religious focus throughout New England and the northern colonies.  It is in this setting that Edwards preached his classic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” where he stressed the fear of God in the classic sense.  In this sermon he offered the following dire warning to those who have backslid or never accepted the faith once for all delivered to the saints:

It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is!  All that we can possibly say about it, gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it; it is inexpressible and inconceivable: For “who knows the power of God's anger?”

As important as is this sermon in the Edwards canon, it captures only one essential aspect of his religious vision, the righteousness of God expressed through his heightened wrath and the need strive toward a life of radical holiness, without which one is in the most acute danger of being utterly lost in terms of enjoying a right relationship to the living God.

There is also an aesthetic sense underlying Edward’s religious vision in its focus on God’s beauty that is captured in another of his sermons, “A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Parted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine.”  As Edwards presents the vision:

There is a divine and superlative glory in these things [the revelation of the living presence of God to the individual conscience]; an excellency that is of a vastly higher kind, and more sublime nature than in other things; a glory greatly distinguishing them from all that is earthly and temporal. He that is spiritually enlightened truly apprehends and sees it, or has a sense of it. He does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God's holiness. There is not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense how amiable God is upon that account, or a sense of the beauty of this divine attribute.

There is a great deal packed in here which goes to the essence of Edwards’ religious vision, in which his love, exhibiting itself as true beauty, infuses the world at its most fundamental essence, a beauty that is marred, even disfigured, but not destroyed by sin, in which it is not possible for “those whose minds are full of spiritual pollution, and under the power of filthy lusts [to] have any relish or sense of divine beauty or excellency; or that their minds should be susceptive of that light that is in its own nature so pure and heavenly.”

It is the tension between these dynamics (the unsurpassable beauty of God and the gross destruction of sin) that underlies all of his major texts, notably Treatise on Religious Affections, Freedom and the Will, The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, The End for Which God Created the World, and The Nature of True Virtue.

Packer’s summary statement is worth noting: “Edwards has been described as God-centered, God-focused, God intoxicated, and God-entranced, and so indeed he was. There is no overstatement here. Every day, from morning till night, he sought to live in conscious communion with God, whether walking, riding, studying on his own, or relaxing in the bosom of his large and, it seems, happy and often extended family. He was not a mystic in the sense of seeking Goddrenched states of soul that leave rationality behind; on the contrary, it was precisely through deep and clear thoughts that God warmed and thrilled his heart.” 

For Edwards, the beauty and awesome fear of God were mutually entwined in a way that lent an intensity of passion to the revelation of God in Christ in the very midst of reconciling the world.  When taken as a whole, his theological reflections and devotional commitments were grounded in his aspirational vision to realize the kingdom of God in this life as an ever present and most fundamental reality, notwithstanding the ever present gap between the reach and the attainment in this life.

With us, Edwards lived with the seemingly ineradicable tension between the power of beatific vision of God’s indwelling presence and the indubitable reality of the ever present disfiguring power of sin to corrupt the individual’s relationship to the living God, which, despite sin, is foreordained to come to pass in God’s good time through the blood of the Lamb.  Unlike most of us, Edwards was a trail blazer of the highest order in seeking the far edge reality of embracing the most realizing eschatological vision of what life with God will be like when God will become all in all, that is, when all things will be subjected to him (1 Cor 15:28).

Whither Theology in the Secular Academy

I couldn’t find the discussion post to the topic of what would have needed to be in place in 20th century public schooling for the automatic eradication of God from public discourse to have not happened.  The message was, I believe, to the effect that scientists should acknowledge the limits of what can be illuminated by science and not pretend to have anything of substance to say about metaphysics (ontology).  I agree with you on that, just as I believe that in their better moments, most scientists would, too.  However, your point is well taken that in the scientific guild as a whole there is at the least, an implicit zeitgeist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist) operative based on the assumption that the universe, at some very profound level of knowledge is subject to the potentiality of rational understanding on naturalistic grounds alone.  This would be the perspective of the scientific philosopher Karl Popper (I almost wrote Barth) who also propounds the indeterminate nature of our understanding of nature and the universe itself even in his seeking of World 3 Objective Knowledge (See his intriguing book, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach).

To add something from my field, there is also a similar zeitgeist in the historical profession in which anything beyond the natural is automatically eradicated from the field of study.  Thus, in 20th century historiography, at least at the public university, we can study art, politics, society, diplomacy, and culture on their own terms (as they are defined by the guild), but not theology as a historical discipline on its own terms, or even as a sub-discipline of intellectual history.  Thus, notwithstanding the profound grappling of the relationship between faith and culture as exhibited by the neo-orthodox theologians en masse, the neorthodox interpretation of faith on its own terms gets virtually no coverage at all in the 20th century European intellectual history curriculum. The partial exception may be Reinhold Niebuhr in his focus on “realism” and contribution to cold war ideology, but not his theology as representative of one way in which a Protestant intellectual grappled with the meaning of God and culture in the 20th century, especially in his opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man. 

That subject has been basically taboo based on the enlightenment, rationalist assumptions that have undergirded the history profession over the past century and more.  The extent to which the postmodern influence will change things remains to be seen.  Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have been willing to view religion on its own terms into some of their work. However, I’m not sure the extent it extends beyond some version of humanistic naturalism.  My best hunch is that they would reject monotheism as a serious possibility in its own right as beyond the pale of serious human discourse.  If 20th century intellectuals knew as much about Barth and Bultman as they do of Heideggar and Wittgenstein, they would have come to have known that there are contemporary viable ways of thinking about God, whether or not one accepts the validity of any such thinking.  The fact that Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans is not a book that is studied in 20th century intellectual graduate courses is a scandal of vast proportions that played its not unsubstantial role in eradicating God from the curriculum of the secular university.

Thus, God as a profound discourse of human probing, and certainly any claim of God as radical other, has been eradicated from the field of intellectual history based on the presumptuous conceit of enlightenment thinking.  This legacy, which nonetheless endures, is powerfully challenged by postmodern scholarship, which nonetheless reifies the secular in the refusal among its major proponents, with some notable exceptions, to view theology as a legitimate discipline based on its own intrinsic standards.  In short, Karl Barth et al are excised from the intellectual history of the secular university where anything beyond naturalism is viewed as absurd on its face (or merely private).  In my counterfactual reconstruction I would correct this oversight.

Pushing on the Logic of Liberal Protestantism

I read somewhere in Borg that if he were raised in another culture he probably would have accepted the religion in which he would have been raised.  On the surface it sounded superficial except that if he accepts inclusivism as axiomatic he cannot help but to say something like that.  I assume the Dalai Lama had a silent smile for professor McFague when she had said something similar.

Even still, I want to push Borg, Spong, and McFague to probe more deeply on why they view Jesus with ultimate concern.  Even if for them the matter is existential and cultural rather than, say, ontological, in which God is revealed in human flesh through the Trinity,  there are still motivating reasons and I would like to see these theologians more publicly grapple with those reasons.

I intuit a weak narrative theology operative in their Christ “from below,” but their narrative threads are a good deal more liberal and metaphorical all the way down than the postliberal narrative theology of Frei, Lindbeck, and Husinger.  What I’m interested in is a sharper articulation of the ultimate value system of their respective theologies, and when pushed very hard, exactly how they grapple with the exclusive/inclusive tension of a believing faith in Christ.  If one takes the Trinity with radical seriousness that invariably pushes toward a high Christology and an exclusivist interpretation of the significance of Christ as the way and the life without equivocation and remainder.  If the Trinity is a metaphor for something else—a more inclusive religious experience in which, in the final analysis, the different religions exhibit diverse dimensions of a global understanding of God, then what one could say at best is that Christ is a way, a truth, and a life with much equivocation and remainder.  My assumption is that Borg, Spong, and McFague are closer to this second camp. If that is the case, if Christ is a way, a truth, and a life, only, in which other possibilities of equal merit pertain, then my objective remains on pushing these liberal stalwarts very hard on identifying the source and rationale on why they link Jesus to their ultimate concern (assuming they do).

In my view, if the Trinity is anything less than what has been claimed in the orthodox Christian tradition over many centuries, then Christianity as a way, may have a certain aesthetic appeal that one might find inspiring at a given time and place, but nothing more compelling or enduring to it to profoundly stabilize a radical commitment to its core assumptions.  At different times and places other stories will carry a more substantial weight and Christianity as a distinctive religious will gradually flow into the ebb tide of some type of syncretism, a temptation that the early church successfully countered in no small measure in the doctrinal stabilization of the Trinity.

Probing the Underlying Assumptions of Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong

As many of us know, Bishop Spong and Marcus Borg are major liberal Christian theologians who have raised critically important issues particularly for mainline Protestantism.  Both Spong and Borg are empathetic to Rudolph Bultman’s project of demythologizing in order to remythologize, a position to which I am far from unsympathetic.  Still, I would push these theologians very hard in grappling with the key question, even in its remythologized mode, why Jesus?  The deeper question, then, is to what extent is even the remythologized Jesus still relevant to our contemporary setting and on what grounds?  To press this further, why do these theologians identify Christ (however interpreted) as their ultimate concern?

            What I would like to get at, in part, is whether the answer for these theologians is ultimately existential and personal, or whether there is another ground that transcends such relativism.  If there is another ground, I would like them to be as exacting as possible in explaining what that basis is, including a very precise discussion of the inclusive/exclusive issue on whether Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” without equivocation or remainder. For if inclusivism is radically held to, then, by definition, any foundational ground for adhering to the faith becomes questionable.  Based on this assumption, I might say, for example, that I ground what Tillich calls “ultimate concern” in some secular philosophy, in which may be nothing intrinsic in its logic, or in principle, to argue that I am wrong.

            Now if you were going to say I’m wrong and that somehow the stirring faith of the living Christ is a more satisfactory form of human identification than anything else, then, by definition, that needs to be based on some criteria.  What I want to know, in particular, is precisely how these esteemed liberal theologians come down on this issue and on what grounds. These criteria, in turn, would serve as a basis for evaluating other perspectives (both more liberal and conservative).

            Historically, the Christ myth has been a very potent symbol for many people for a long period of time.  In terms of the Christ myth, my view is that the heights and the depths of its efficacy in mediating the human condition for good are unfathomable, and therefore perpetually emergent in the process of continuous human existence itself.  In this respect, its infinite depths are fathomless, which is also true of any “living” secular philosophy.  If this is the case, its remythologizing potential, in itself, is not sufficient grounds to base any objective-like claim of exclusive truth, however subtle. Other grounds need to be made.  Do Spong and Borg in any sense assume an exclusivist position?  If so, the basis for it needs to be clearly articulated.

            If not, then one drops back to the inclusive position and interprets the living Christ as one viable pathway to the holy (to use religious language).  That may be fine, but that by definition can there be nothing other than a personal, existential decision based on no ground other than personal choice?  And even here, I want to press matters.  If this is the pathway that Spong and Borg assume there are still reasons operative on what they have based this on.  By definition, in emphasizing Christ (however “liberally” interpreted), they are making certain value judgments that are based, at some level, on reasons. Although it may be implicit in their written theologies, I would like these two liberal stalwarts, or their defenders to publicly reflect on their reasoning for placing their ultimate concern on Jesus, including a very honest confrontation with the exclusive/inclusive issue.  There is much at stake on the viability of Christianity in grappling with this complex issue in a probing, discerning manner.

Twentieth-Century Trends and UCC Theological Identity: Challenges and Opportunities

My understanding of the focus of the Confessing Christ (CC) network is the concentration on “serious and joyous theology” aimed at identifying what is valuable as well as what is problematic in the theological focus of the UCC leadership  http://confessingchrist.net/.  While there are a divergence of theological voices on the CC steering committee as well as the broader network as exemplified on this list the appellation  of “liberal” to describe the prevailing theological viewpoint of the CC leadership, as someone had mentioned, seems wide of the mark to me.  In fact, from everything I’ve seen, the prevailing voices in this network exhibit a highly nuanced, profoundly biblical perspective that is, indeed calling the UCC back to its Reformation heritage.  Within the broader network, as exemplified by this list, there are a range of voices from theological conservative to modestly liberal, but a far cry from the center of gravity among the progressive viewpoint of the denominational leadership.

Moreover, as I understand it, the ecclesial focal point of the CC network is reconciliation rather than hostile confrontation with the prevailing progressive denominational thread, and also, I think, an appreciation among many in this network that there is something to learn, as well, from the progressive sector, even theologically, notwithstanding a need to nudge the denominational leadership back to its heritage in the Reformation.

As I had previously mentioned, these dilemmas are rooted in the progressive/fundamentalist tensions within Protestantism that go back to and prior to the onset of the 20th century.  In the mid-19th century there was a broad convergence at least within the North within the major denominations, a working consensus, of sorts of what has been referred to as the “benevolent empire” stemming out of the energies of the Second Great Awakening.  The theological conflict between the perfectionist leaning Charles Finney and the Princetonian Calvinist Charles Hodge did point to some brewing problems, yet by and large a broad center did hold through the Civil War.

• Then Darwin
• Then critical historiography
• Then increasing cleavage between Yale and Princeton
• Then fundamentalism and inerrancy
• Then the social gospel
• Then the kingdom of God interpreted as the brotherhood of man
• Then premillennial vs postmillennial eschatology
• Then the Scopes trial

The emergence of liberal Protestantism was grounded in these epochal changes in religious thinking of the 1875-1925 era.  The same applies to fundamentalism, a distinctively modern phenomenon. In working out a biblically-based centrist position, part of the challenge is to determine how the conflicts of these various issues are re-interpreted in the current period.

I, for one, can accept the broad premises of evolutionary biology and critical historiography as intellectually normative, subject to ongoing scholarship without the need to attribute theological significance to them.  That is, evolutionary science tells me something about the origins of species while critical historiography sheds some light on the formation and structuring of civilizations that I would accept as empirically verifiable even if they contradicted certain historical-like statements embedded in the Bible.  This gets tricky because I agree with Gabriel Fackre and others that there are historical components to the Biblical story, though I also argue that there are historical-like narratives also embedded which may not have been accurate at all as factually based.  An easy example is whether there was a literal Adam and Eve.  The short answer is I doubt it, and many taking strong biblical theological positions would agree with such skepticism.  Where the issue gets dicey is when we get to the NT and think about such matters as Virgin Births and the literal resurrection of the dead.  If such events did happen that would be fine with me. My common and critical sense understanding necessitates profound skepticism on these matters—not outright rejection, but profound skepticism, in which it is up to those making such claims to put up the evidence.

I won’t go on with these examples, as the point is really that in order to work through the tensions between fundamentalism and Christian modernism, the wheat from the chaff in critical analysis needs to be separated.  In terms of history and science, both may provide empirically-based reasons to reject or at least challenge the literal veracity of certain biblical events, even the important ones.  At the same time neither history nor science, as currently practiced, tells us much, if anything about God, or about the authenticity of the Christian revelation.

In reading Gabe and others I am gaining a better appreciation for the entire scope of the Christian story from creation to final eschatology and the depth of this story in comparison to those of our own far less comprehensive ones of self creation.  I have also believed for a long time, and still do, that the Christian revelation is about much more than the travails of the historical Jesus, even if we did have thorough and accurate information about this person.  In himself this personage was quite an insignificant player in the scheme of ancient history and could very well have been lost to historical memory.  However what the NT teaches is that the revelation of Jesus as the Incarnate Christ was the result of God working through the historical Jesus in part through the apostolic succession, the emergence of the church, the creative inspiration of Paul and the formation of the NT canon some several centuries after the life of Jesus.  There’s much else, too that one could undoubtedly point to as signs of God working through Christ in bringing the Incarnational revelation to humankind.  To me, this revelation itself is the mystery; some 2,000 years later in its capacity to speak and profoundly so to the perpetual condition of humankind.  On faith (for we do see dimly, but we see by faith) it speaks like no other revelation in the realm of human history.

It is not evangelicalism, but the incarnational faith of Trinitarian orthodoxy, which I believe is the standard upon which Christians need to put their stake in the ground.  That’s a broad tent, but it does have its standards.  It is the tent, I believe, which provides the solid basis for the CC community to engage the UCC leadership in rigorous, but respectful dialogue.  Such dialogue includes scope for the various lights beyond the evangelical community which speak a word or two of truth about critical dimensions of the mediation of the Word within the context of our times.  Thus, the CC community does it self well to learn what it can from Tillich, the Niebuhr brothers, Gilkey, Ogden, Hall, Moltman, Ruether, McFaque, Brueggemann, and other serious theologians of various neo-orthodox and liberal persuasions—not to accept everything that comes from their creative pens, but to probe with discernment what they have to say and to take what is essential from them in the ongoing work of establishing the level of theological thinking that is required for our times. 

Thus, when such work becomes mediated through our own biblio-centered evangelical premises the quality of all our theological thinking can only be thereby enriched.  One discerns this level of richness in the theological studies of Gabriel Fackre and from a very different tradition than that of Avery Dulles.  It is present, too, but in a more skeptical vein in the work of Donald Bloesch.

As I think through the vision of the CC network, I discern a distinctively different voice than that expressed by the liberal leadership and supportive progressive clergy of the UCC.  No doubt, there are substantial issues under consideration in the thinking and working through a viable theology of and for the UCC.  That needs to be done, however, with much discernment and in the process, coming to terms with the theological richness that comprises the more progressive and liberal perspectives, and calling that leadership, to reconnect in a more profound way than perhaps currently experienced with the fundamental truths of the biblical revelation.

Imaginative Construals and Canon Criticism in the Era of Postmodernity

(From someone who I was having a listserv dialogue with some years ago)

First, thank you very much for your astute and heartfelt words on WB.  In both of your messages, your WB quotes get at the essence of his core message at least in his powerful essays.  I haven’t studied his more formal writing in any depth, so perhaps he is a bit more systematic there in his book on Genesis and Theology of the Old Testament.  I assume there’s a fair amount of “leakage” there, too, though perhaps not as much as when he is writing “imaginative” (quote meant positively) essays in his confrontation with the hegemony of postmodernity.  I enjoyed his collection, Interpretation and Obedience: From Faithful Reading to Faithful Living a great deal and found in particular, “The Legitimacy of a Sectarian Hermeneutic” based on 2 Kings 18-19 nothing short of stunning, where WB speaks about being at and behind the wall in addressing the claims of the empire.  I also found his essay “The Third World of Evangelical Imagination” very rich in “daring speech” (my quotes, mimicking WB) about God in the very epicenter of secular modernity/postmodernity.

I’ve mentioned here what I take to be the core of WB’s project in the piecing of postmodernity one verse, one miracle, one revelation at a time, and the quotes that you provided in both of your messages provide a substantive demonstration of such piercing.

In terms of the canon, you point to its “unfathomable diversity.” No doubt there is a great deal of range, but I would still rather say, unfathomable depth.  One can discern such in Romans alone in Paul’s complex exegesis on the relationship between grace and the law.  Then there are the particularly poignant chapters, 9-11 where he’s struggling with his religious progeny, through an incredibly diverse use of the OT scripture in his various arguments by analogy (as exhibited throughout Romans).  The evocation of such speech undoubtedly had a powerful impact on the early church as if God himself were speaking through Paul’s words—speech which still resonates today for those who have ears.  The subtlety of 9-alone bears comment in his own grappling with the meaning of the new covenant in light of the permanency of the original one: “Concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sake (accent on the last three words), but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers” (accent on the last 6 words) (Rom 11:28). 

And as previously written in Romans, “If their fall is richness for the world and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness"” (11:1-12).  “For if their being cast away is the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?” (vs 15).  Then, after three rigorous chapters of this intense wrestling he can only but accept what to human beings can only seem profoundly paradoxical: “Oh, the depth and the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (11:33). As someone on the list put it, “I find the Gospel very exciting and out of control, at least of our control...”  Thus, Paul, himself seems to be downright Brueggemaniann in his “imaginative construals” of the OT text in his preaching of fresh words in and about the Gospel of Christ. 

The reconstruction of the Deuteronomic text through the mouths of the prophets in light of the Babylonian exile is another profound grappling with the narrative, which WB tells so well.  In short, fresh interpretation streams throughout the biblical narrative that at least to some readers brings home the core point that, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).  Accent here on “All Scripture” and “is profitable,” which speaks to potentiality, but nonetheless, all scripture, a point that WB does not deny, but then I get troubled when he privileges certain texts over others, which at least puts in jeopardy the notion of all scripture.

WB is the master of drawing out the imaginative depth of the individual text and in that he offers much potentially both to hungry liberals and conservatives seeking a fresh word of truth in a land that may be very dry.  In his wrestling with the text WB is a consummate preacher and expositor.  I take no issue with that, which I view moreover, as his primary gift to the modern/postmodern church.  What I do find troubling is an almost dogmatic-like aversion to the “grand narrative” of the canon as a whole, from Alpha and Omega to various points between.  While I agree with you that the biblical text can be domesticated, it not need be so and does not have to be to the extent that preachers, teachers, and other communicators of the Word honor both the text and the context in which the Word and people are situated.  Of course, this is what WB seeks to do, but I think we do have to look closely at his core project of “funding” postmodernity, which he views as kairotically integral to the times in which we (in the west) live.

I, for one, do not dismiss the potency of this moment; this off-centered (geographically defined) Christianity in which marginality rather than Christ the center defines the primary space of where so many people who are willing to hear the Word, live.  That has defined my own space for a very long time, one that I know quite well, which has its own allures and appeals, and who am I to say that it is not authentic space.  This Christ at the margins is a very real space where many who sit in our pews, and perhaps more than a few pastors, as well, live.  What WB does is to give them voice and in that he is making a substantial contribution to mainline identity and in the process he re-introduces the legitimacy of the Bible.  This is no small achievement.  His “angular” interpretation speaks to this mode.

I want to keep this angularity and the imaginative construals that fresh interpretations evoke.  I want to do this, however in a way that honors the canon in its entirety; the grand narrative as well as the many little stories that comprise this constructed text.  This, I believe, WB has not adequately grappled with, and, in fact, exercises a profound hermeneutics of suspicion against any such project, as indicative in his ongoing canon criticism of biblicist Brevard Childs.  The question that I pose back to you is what do we do with the grand narrative?  Is this simply part of a mythopoetic legend that speaks an idiom of an ancient world, but has no applicability today?  Be clear, I, too, want to separate the wheat from the chaff of critical historiography and modern scientific understanding, and the allures of obscurantism have no appeal to me either. 

That said, we still have to deal not only with the matter of interpretation, but the standards upon which interpretation is based; the standards upon which our faith is grounded; particularly the relationship between the text and the world.  What I find in the serious evangelicals like Bloesch, Fackre, Erickson and others is a profound grappling with the challenges of modernity/postmodernity, while at the same time, when push comes to shove, viewing the Bible as interpreting the world rather than the world setting the context in and through which the Bible is interpreted.  Obviously, the relationship is more complex in that there is considerable interplay between these two— complexity always leaking out against our best construals.  This I grant.  Nonetheless, we do have to decide at some level below having complete or perfect knowledge and our decisions are invariably based on where our ultimate vocabularies and commitments reside.  At his best moments, WB is nothing short of prophetic in his electrifying imaginative construals, which, in the very act of his speaking (writing) it is as if God is piercing postmodernity that is grasped at the moment of reading.  That is obviously very powerful and to lose that is to lose much.

Even still, and this is where I want to raise a very big issue, to what extent does he see funding postmodernity as he describes it in Texts Under Negotiation as THE kairotic moment of our times?  For if that is our times, then WB's marginalized but very powerfully spoken Christian faith may be nothing short of the will of God for our times.  However, if he is holding onto this vision tighter than perhaps God intends, then perhaps there is some idolatry lurking in his insistence that marginality is in fact the key characteristic state of our times, or that even if it is, sustained inward cultural migration is simply not a feasible place for “serious” Christians to confront and address the world (Hauerwas).

Again, I'm very glad that you have raised these important issues.  I don’t think anyone here is saying there are simple answers.  Sill, there is direction and choices have to be made on the basis of where one locates ones ultimate commitments and vocabulary.  For me, the Bible, all of it, is a very solid place to go; a place I go with my eyes wide open and with a fair amount of knowledge of its many contextualizations, but where I go as a predominant resource as the Spirit leadeth.

The Viability of God Talk in the Secular City

Given the current emphasis on the term (or title) Lord, Avery Dulles’ reflections in The Assurance of Things Hoped For may be of relevance:

Faith is a religious act.  It involves an adoring submission of one’s whole self to God as supreme lord of all things.  In faith I abandon the self-centeredness of my normal vision and consent to look at reality from God's perspective.  I transfer my concern from narrow self-interest to the God on whom I depend and who is to be unconditionally esteemed, trusted, and loved for his own sake.  The intrinsic motive of faith, the ‘authority’ of God, is God himself in his wisdom, truthfulness, holiness power, and fidelity. These divine attributes, though conceptually distinct, are all identical in God (p. 275).

In the important work of coming to term with modernity many of the more liberal Protestant denominations and theologians sacrificed at least to some degree the clarity and power of this fundamental faith act.  In reading through Dulles I get the impression that on the whole, Vatican I & II did a better job than Protestantism of grappling with the intellectual premises of modernity as well as that of inter-religious dialogue, while maintaining the radical particularity that in Christ the fullness of God’s revelation to humankind has been given once and for all even as there are always new insights to be gleaned from this core revelation.

To be sure this religious act is a matter of faith all the way down which cannot be proven by human reason, logic, or evidence.  Nonetheless, these can, and need to be helpful, for without signs it would be very difficult to see, even in a glass darkly.  Even still such faith viewed exclusively through secular channels might readily be viewed as absurd, or more charitably as obscurantist. 

In seeking to come to terms with modernity, liberal Protestantism at its worst accepted too readily the underlying assumptions of secular intellectualism, particularly a diminishing of the radicality of God as transcendent Other over and above anything that can be conceived in the natural world or in the realms of our inner and social experiences.  Thus, one might say that the notion of God was repressed from 20th century intellectual history and philosophy as a manifestation of a broader “death of God” phenomenon, particularly in Europe and less so in the US, notwithstanding persistent strains of fundamentalism as well as evangelical resurgences throughout the century.

At its best the effort to come to terms with modernity is indispensable, if there is going to be a credible apologetic aspect to the faith at all, not only in response to overt unbelief (and therefore to the culture at large), but in response to the multiplicity of identities among many who are overtly Christian (like many of us?) in their (our) various constructions of reality which are anything but purely Christian.  Perhaps I might suggest that at least in Protestant circles that apologetic work has barely begun to take place outside the realms, say, of Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Langdon Gilkey.  One might also place Walter Brueggemann in this apologetic category in his “funding” of postmodernity in the compelling breakthrough of the kairotc moment through the imaginative stimulus of the Holy Spirit.  Such apologoteic theology is indispensable if such fundamental religious acts of claiming Christ as Lord and Savior are going to mediate in ways that are compelling.

As many here have pointed out, there is a broad range of problems linked to the liberal (post or otherwise) or neo-orthodox solution.  Might we see as a next step a thick reformed-grounded evangelic apologetic that does not merely collapse into dogmatics, but confronts the intellectual premises of modernity and postmodernity on their own terms while maintaining a distinctively Christian perspective?  Donald Bloesch and Gabriel Fackreand George Hunsinger, UCC centrist stalwarts, have done substantial work in this arena. I suppose one could argue that Barth’s turn to dogmatics was also a subtle form of apologetics by indirection, but a fuller apologetic effort may be needed, such as that as exhibited by Jurgen Moltmann if the religious act of faith is going to be viewed as credible by more than a remnant.  

I don’t disagree that the more fundamental work may still be the need to sharpen a subtle dogmatic project right in the heartland of the UCC denomination and its supporting seminaries.  In fact, I think it’s essential. Let that work go forth! On Bloesch, on Fackre, on Brueggemann, too!  Still given the pervasive cultural and religious pluralism of our times along with a profound agnosticism in the heartland of the “thinking” middle class and contemporary intellectuals, perhaps there is a need to move beyond Karl Barth’s dogmatics (while drinking richly from his wells) and incorporate richer apologetic work in the very creation of a more subtle articulation of faith.  On that score, perhaps Dulles may have a point or two in Ch 11 in The Assurance of Things Hoped For, titled “Properties of Faith.”  In that chapter, Dulles points to five key properties:  “supernaturality, freedom, certitude and doubt, and obscurity.”  For Dulles, faith is primary, but it is faith in search of knowledge amidst the dynamic tension of certitude and doubt within the context of the ultimate obscurity of the mystery of God, given the fathomless range of His Kingdom and the inherently limited and flawed nature of our own understanding and will.  The gap between what we seek and what we possess is itself fathomless, though we press toward the mark in the midst of our groaning and travail, and in the process are occasionally given the light of the beautific vision of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of human history. 

Wither Walter Brueggemann's Hermeneutic?

The biblical text, in its fullness, which remains beyond our capacity to exhaustively grasp, is the ultimate vocabulary upon which Walter Brueggemann stakes his identity.  At the same time, given the profound impact of secularism, anti-foundational postmodernity, and our post-Christian society and culture (fundamentalist/evangelical revival notwithstanding), from the point of view of perception and reception, imaginative construal may be one of the most dynamic hermeneutics available to many contemporary people in coming to grips with the revelation embedded in the Biblical text.  This may be particularly the case amongst those who have fundamentally challenged the precepts of the Christian faith and who have embraced one aspect or another of the secular city as their primary vocabulary.  There are many reasons why those who have had some level of decent Christian formation in their background who have left the primary vocabulary of faith, or who, even if, in faith they continue to adhere to its primary truth, have not heard an Authentic Word in a very long time.  Simply put, for many the assumptions of the secular city seem to be existentially primary and anything which fundamentally violates those precepts takes on the appearance of the unreal.  I haven’t done a formal study, but I bet there are many people in our UCC congregations, if not pastors as well, who at some powerful (and perhaps unconscious) level embrace the secular as their primary (at least at the level of a very potent penultimacy) vocabulary.

In my reading of WB, it seems that he is appealing in his many collections of short essays to these people as his primary audience, while secondarily, encouraging the evangelical sector to overhear the conversation.  For the former in particular, the eruption of the Spirit of God one verse, one miracle, or one revelation at a time within the epicenter of the secular city may be precisely the Word needed in order to break the logjam, however temporarily, of the secular assumptions that ground their primary vocabulary.  It is not as an absolute truth, but as a manifestation of the contemporary kairos that WB is skeptical of grand narratives as reflected in his ongoing dispute with Brevard Childs, even as, at some profound level, as Gabriel Fackre suggests, he adheres to the entire Story.  Gabe quotes the following WB text:

The Bible is inherently the live word of God, revealing the character and will of God and empowering us for an alternative life in the world. While I believe in the indeterminacy of the text to some large extent, I know that finally the Bible is forceful and consistent in its main theological claim. It expresses the conviction that the God who created the world in love redeems the world in suffering and will consummate the world in joyous well-being. That flow of conviction about God’s self-disclosure in the Bible is surely the main claim of the apostolic faith, a claim upon which the church fundamentally agrees. 

As Gabe states, “this of course is not the fullest summation of WB’s hermeneutic, but I think that there appears to be more in common and for conversation than has been suggested.”

            When WB refers to the dynamic of the imagination—the importance of imaginative construal—I hypothesize that he is referring to nothing less than the Holy Spirit in illuminating the disclosed Word to receptive listeners.  What he is implying, I think, given the current kairos, is that the third voice of the Trinity requires a certain primacy in order to break through the logjams of identities highly influenced by secular existentialism.  It is always the Word of which the imagination illuminates on WB’s interpretation, and on this there is no equivocation. What is at issue is the extent to which strongly formed Christian identities, particularly in mainline congregations will play a central or more marginal role in the total identity formation of believers.  While WB would like to see more, I think what he is saying, given the temper of the times is that there is little choice, particularly among the mainline, than to come to terms with this marginality.  Given this assumption it is through the imaginative dynamic encounter that the text may break in once again one verse at a time in the important work of “funding” postmodernity.  WB does hope that through an accumulation of these individual encounters something more coherent and stable will emerge at this time in the history of the west even as he remains highly suspicious of comprehensive theologies breaking in within the foreseeable future.

That said, it’s also limiting to leave things there, which at his best, WB does not, even in Texts Under Negotiation. For while WB speaks to an important some, there are important others even within the mainline for whom this message remains unconvincing and certainly unsatisfactory.  There is a thirsting too (however repressed, at least in certain UCC congregations) for what Gabe Fackre refers to as the “full-orbed” Word and the need to grapple with entire Story with the sophistication and nuance that he does in The Christian Story and The Doctrine of Revelation.  The critical message of Fackre’s work is that any substantial encounter with the Spirit itself requires a through understanding of and illumination by the Word, including a solid appreciation of the entire Story.

I don’t think WB would deny this, although he might wonder how that would occur in the given postmodern reality.  Certainly comprehensive Bible study needs to become a major congregational focus which is far from given in the current reality of mainline Protestantism.  In the process many of the imaginative encounters of which WB illuminates in his powerful narratives need to be experienced if there is going to be any revitalization movement within the UCC.  Broadly speaking, what is needed is not so much a dialogue, but at the least a very ongoing tripartite encounter between Walter Brueggemann, Donald Bloesch, and Gabriel Fackre (which includes the various schools of thought which their work together embodies) in order to substantially grapple with the many issues that are on the UCC table in the current era.

May it be so!

Encounteriing Walter Brueggermann

Bruegemann's strength, in my view, in addition to his profound understanding of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is his knowledge of post-reformation theology and his powerful exegesis, as exemplified in his various collections of essays.  Also extremely provocative is his tapping into the imagination as the most potent means of linking the biblical text to the ethos of the contemporary setting.  In this respect he may be viewed as the apostle to the postmodern secularists.  In this capacity he would play a formidable role in the UCC God is still speaking campaign http://www.stillspeaking.com/intro1.htm. For those on the margins of faith and doubt, WB, on personal testimony, offers an extremely powerful way of re-entering the strange new world within the Bible that for many, more dogmatic approaches would not have been convincing.  The seeming irrelevance of the Bible is a phenomenon that shapes the thinking of more than a few who attend mainline (or perhaps even evangelical) congregations, who at some level are still seeking a Word where one has not been found for a long time.  The deep influence of secularization, even in the midst of our congregations, is a factor that cannot be lightly dismissed, in which the pastoral call very well may be, in WB’s terms, that “funding” of the Word of God, one verse, one miracle, one revelation at a time, in which to attempt more could very well turn into sterile bibliolatry.  I hope it is clear that I am speaking at the level of reception and I am speaking for some and not for all. 

In any event WB played a very similar role with me that Jurgen Moltmann did some years earlier in opening up the hermeneutical possibility that God could speak a vital Word through his text.  I spent a good part of two years pouring over everything I could get my hands on by WB. In the process of following the trajectory of his interpretations, I also read substantial portions of the OT.

I also experienced some limitations, such as WB’s privileging of some texts over the others, which I interpret as at least partially contradicting the spirit of 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”  While WB might have viewed it as ironic, my re-encountering the Bible through his theology pushed me toward an evangelical faith retrieval of some enduring stability, which I needed to reclaim if the Christian faith were going to prevail in my life in a compellingly vital way.  This retrieval— illuminated, as far as I could discern by the Holy Spirit—has depended, in no small measure, on the capacity to embrace the Bible full without privileging certain texts over others, as the very source of my ultimate vocabulary. 

The second, and related limitation I find in WB, is, notwithstanding the “existential” power of his “funding” of postmodernity one text, one miracle, one revelation at a time, is that I simply could not fathom how, at least, I could construct a stable religious life from that basis, or how a congregation could establish an ecclesiology which could mediate the religious needs and passions of a congregation from week to week.

I could imagine, in theory, a postmodern/post-Christian congregation, which gathered week-to-week from their travails within the secular city.  This ideal congregation would encounter the Word once again through the imaginative dynamic of the charismatic preacher who would reach those in the pews through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, where the Word would come alive, once again one verse, one miracle one revelation at a time.  I do believe this is a place where many people, and perhaps congregations in such denominations like the United Church of Christ are, and in this respect, the voice coming out of the theology of WB may very well be the authentic Word of God that such a congregation may need to hear.  Interpreted from this vantage pint WB is an authentic UCC voice that needs to be thoroughly heard and respected within the Confessing Christ network, at least as a viable Kairotic option of where a certain sector of the faith community may be in our secular era of modernity/ postmodernity  http://confessingchrist.net/.

Yet, if taken as the gospel itself, or as THE authoritative theology of our times, WB’s vision could also be viewed as extremely repressive and oppressive to boot.  The possibility for a thoroughly biblically-based evangelical encounter through the likes of Bloesch, Vanhoozer, Barth, Henry, Fackre, Lints, and others is also a critical need which has been profoundly repressed within the mainline denominations going back to the struggles with fundamentalism at the beginning of the 20th century.  In order to get at the root of these issues, the historical dynamics that lent them their intensity would need to be imaginatively re-encountered and reconstructed.  That is work for another message. 

Someone had suggested a dominant role for Bloesch at an upcoming Craigvlle conference.  Whether at Craigville or elsewhere, I would recommend a thorough and respectful encounter between WB and Bloesch where some of these critical issues could be aired out. For this is one of the crucial encounters I believe that needs to take place between the CC community and the UCC Cleveland leadership and progressive ministry throughout the denomination.  Let us assume that both brothers deserve a respectful place at the UCC table, and then establish the places where they could mutually sit and where we could respectfully engage them.

Whither Brueggemann’s Hermeneutic?

The biblical text, in its fullness, which remains beyond our capacity to exhaustively grasp, is the ultimate vocabulary upon which Walter Brueggemann stakes his identity.  At the same time, given the profound impact of secularism, anti-foundational postmodernity, and our post-Christian society and culture (fundamentalist/evangelical revival notwithstanding), from the point of view of perception and reception, imaginative construal may be one of the most dynamic hermeneutics available to many contemporary people in coming to grips with the revelation embedded in the Biblical text.  This may be particularly the case amongst those who have fundamentally challenged the precepts of the Christian faith and who have embraced one aspect or another of the secular city as their primary vocabulary.  There are many reasons why those who have had some level of decent Christian formation in their background who have left the primary vocabulary of faith, or who, even if, in faith they continue to adhere to its primary truth, have not heard an Authentic Word in a very long time.  Simply put, for many the assumptions of the secular city seem to be existentially primary and anything which fundamentally violates those precepts takes on the appearance of the unreal.  I haven’t done a formal study, but I bet there are many people in our UCC congregations, if not pastors as well, who at some powerful (and perhaps unconscious) level embrace the secular as their primary (at least at the level of a very potent penultimacy) vocabulary.

In my reading of WB, it seems that he is appealing in his many collections of short essays to these people as his primary audience, while secondarily, encouraging the evangelical sector to overhear the conversation.  For the former in particular, the eruption of the Spirit of God one verse, one miracle, or one revelation at a time within the epicenter of the secular city may be precisely the Word needed in order to break the logjam, however temporarily, of the secular assumptions that ground their primary vocabulary.  It is not as an absolute truth, but as a manifestation of the contemporary kairos that WB is skeptical of grand narratives as reflected in his ongoing dispute with Brevard Childs, even as, at some profound level, as Gabriel Fackre suggests, he adheres to the entire Story.  Gabe quotes the following WB text:

The Bible is inherently the live word of God, revealing the character and will of God and empowering us for an alternative life in the world. While I believe in the indeterminacy of the text to some large extent, I know that finally the Bible is forceful and consistent in its main theological claim. It expresses the conviction that the God who created the world in love redeems the world in suffering and will consummate the world in joyous well-being. That flow of conviction about God’s self-disclosure in the Bible is surely the main claim of the apostolic faith, a claim upon which the church fundamentally agrees. 

As Gabe states, “this of course is not the fullest summation of WB’s hermeneutic, but I think that there appears to be more in common and for conversation than has been suggested.”

            When WB refers to the dynamic of the imagination—the importance of imaginative construal—I hypothesize that he is referring to nothing less than the Holy Spirit in illuminating the disclosed Word to receptive listeners.  What he is implying, I think, given the current kairos, is that the third voice of the Trinity requires a certain primacy in order to break through the logjams of identities highly influenced by secular existentialism.  It is always the Word of which the imagination illuminates on WB’s interpretation, and on this there is no equivocation. What is at issue is the extent to which strongly formed Christian identities, particularly in mainline congregations will play a central or more marginal role in the total identity formation of believers.  While WB would like to see more, I think what he is saying, given the temper of the times is that there is little choice, particularly among the mainline, than to come to terms with this marginality.  Given this assumption it is through the imaginative dynamic encounter that the text may break in once again one verse at a time in the important work of “funding” postmodernity.  WB does hope that through an accumulation of these individual encounters something more coherent and stable will emerge at this time in the history of the west even as he remains highly suspicious of comprehensive theologies breaking in within the foreseeable future.

That said, it’s also limiting to leave things there, which at his best, WB does not, even in Texts Under Negotiation. For while WB speaks to an important some, there are important others even within the mainline for whom this message remains unconvincing and certainly unsatisfactory.  There is a thirsting too (however repressed, at least in certain UCC congregations) for what Gabe Fackre refers to as the “full-orbed” Word and the need to grapple with entire Story with the sophistication and nuance that he does in The Christian Story and The Doctrine of Revelation.  The critical message of Fackre’s work is that any substantial encounter with the Spirit itself requires a through understanding of and illumination by the Word, including a solid appreciation of the entire Story.

I don’t think WB would deny this, although he might wonder how that would occur in the given postmodern reality.  Certainly comprehensive Bible study needs to become a major congregational focus which is far from given in the current reality of mainline Protestantism.  In the process many of the imaginative encounters of which WB illuminates in his powerful narratives need to be experienced if there is going to be any revitalization movement within the UCC.  Broadly speaking, what is needed is not so much a dialogue, but at the least a very ongoing tripartite encounter between Walter Brueggemann, Donald Bloesch, and Gabriel Fackre (which includes the various schools of thought which their work together embodies) in order to substantially grapple with the many issues that are on the UCC table in the current era.

May it be so!

The Crucial Importance of Intentional Theology

"The spirit bloweth where it will.  Against that there is no argument.  One can also experience (I experience it within myself) the stench of religious language to the extent that it is not directly linked to the power of the living spirit of God."  I think you (my interlocutor) have done a nice job in putting for us in a few words, something of the spirit of the UCC vision.

Still, unless one is going to depend on an experimental epistemology as the center of value, and I’m not sure this is UCC teaching, without providing some stabilizing structures to ground a christo-centric calling.  For evangelical theology it is in sola scriptura as the final authority.  As put by the astute Gordon-Cornwall theologian, Richard Lints:

We will understand ourselves only if we first understand Scripture.  Once we understand the framework of Scripture, we may then interpret our place in the historical unfolding of the redemptive activity of God.  The Scriptures ought to interpret the modern era rather than vice versa.  This is a lesson from which modern evangelicals might greatly benefit (The Fabric of Theology, p. 190)

This perhaps is even the position of Brueggemann when powerfully pushed from the perspective of his narrative theology, although he is also immersed in contemporary critical biblical scholarship and is largely empathetic to it.  For WB it still remains difficult to determine whether culture (postmodenism) or the strange new world of the Bible is the determining source of legitimacy.  While WB would wince at the “essentialism” of Lints’ evangelical theology, he does say elsewhere that the Scriptures are normative, although, for WB, the revelation through the spirit comes only one verse at a time in its “funding” of secular postmodernity, a voice that is extremely difficult to articulate, never mind legitimize in the current era.  What WB identifies is a moment of time, and those moments can be very crucial.  Still, except for a theology based on the grounding point of the “spirit bloweth where it will,” one wonders how one can come close to stabilizing a religious identity, and more perplexingly, perhaps, how that plays out for the life of a congregation.  I’m not rejecting such “funding” as one of the crucial ways in which the Kairos is speaking to modernity/postmodernity.  What I want to do is examine the implications of such an existential theology, however much it is grounded on a certain reading of narrative theology.

What happens when we can’t hear the spirit, or when we hear “the spirit,” what makes the voice of Christ determinative?  What grounds the choice for that voice as opposed to another—Ghandi, Buddha, Krishna, the Jewish God without the mediation of the Christ, the voice of secular reasoning?  Does it matter?  Perhaps not so at the level of the pure indwelling of the spirit, a place, however, that even Pentecostals cannot perpetually live, never mind staid New England Congregationalists.  Does experience (the pure phenomenology of it as a living truth), then become the ultimate arbiter, for not only the spirit, but for experience itself, which bloweth where it will?  On this topic, I heartily recommend Modes of Revelation by Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles.  As he puts it, “Scripture and tradition are not used atomistically to provide logical premises for deducing arguments, but organically and imaginatively to provide symbols and clues so that the mind of the believer can be ever more fully attuned to the truth of the revelation” (p. 283).

For Dulles and Lints, the construction of theology is a late work, essential to the development of faith in the fleshing out of the “full meaning” (which can only be aspired to) of the Christian revelation through the flow of historical time.  Both Lints and Dulles draw on different founding premises.  However, they both press hard on the necessity for theology as a discipline of faith and the need for grounding faith in something more stabilizing than the ineffability of subjective experience.  The key is not to minimalize the discipline of theology, but to view such formal probings as critical tools (more formally, heuristics) in the thinking and working through the matter of faith.

Then what are we to make of the Incarnation?  One can reject easily enough (raise the most acute of suspicions about) any simplistic claim that the historical person Jesus of Nazareth ever said, “I am the truth, the way, and the life.”  What one cannot do is deny that it is a core statement of the Christ Jesus of the New Testament, in which the claim is nothing other than this Christ is God in human flesh, and that this Christ (through grace) is accessible to those who seek after him with all their heart, mind, strength and soul.  This is a form of biblical literalism that narrative theology cannot lightly move beyond short of denying what is fundamental to its premises.

One may interpret this incarnational New Testament claim in a variety of ways (and much subtlety as well as the greatest simplicity is warranted as the spirit bloweth).  Even still, I cannot fathom how even the most “generous orthodoxy” can equivocate on this central claim without sacrificing something essential of such orthodoxy.  (One may move beyond orthodoxy, but that is another matter). That is, one may quibble about this and that interpretation, but I cannot fathom how any orthodox belief can do other than accept the Incarnation as a foundational source of Christian truth.  On that, can there be equivocation?  That is a question and not a statement, and it is not a rhetorical one.  Of course, unless that belief is spiritually based, dogma, as mere words is worse than dung.  But let us assume that we have some sense of what we are speaking here and that every once in a while we actually experience the indwelling of the holy spirit, which I view as nothing more and nothing less than Christ consciousness speaking within and to our consciousness, however partially and fragmentarily so.  It is neither spirit nor word alone, but spirit and word together which is essential, even as at any given time within any given individual or community of believers, one may prevail over the other.

This is where dogma, or more formally, theology, as well as apologetics comes into play, to say nothing of a grappling of the relationship of faith within the context of culture, articulated most programmatically, perhaps in H.R. Niehbur’s (as timely as ever) Christ and Culture.  More to the point, one cannot even begin to deal with theology and apologetics in any thorough way unless these critical topics of faith are grounded in what the philosopher John Dewey refers to as the “cultural matrix.”  For, if nothing else, the Judeo-Christian tradition is about a faith in God moving through historical time at specific times and places. However fictional such history may be, the Bible is a historical-like narrative that seeks to account for the drama of human history through the prism of God’s redemptive work in time.  However apologetically and hermeneutically construed, these dynamics of faith need to be factored in within our own contemporary accounts, particularly for any theology that purports to be orthodox.

Such work might be viewed as a sterile academic exercise if the theological dimension of faith did not matter.  That it does is based on at least three assumptions:

(a)   The practical impossibility of living in the continuous sphere of the spiritual realm as even as one does not want to do anything that stifles such an indwelling of the spirit of Christ.

(b)   The compelling questions and problems that people in the pews and those who might attend the pews have that do not beget easy answers is often the source that drives the quest for a meaningful theology and apologetics, which are far from merely “academic,” matters.  While such questions may or may not be posed in formal theological terms, as defined by theologians, just by their very nature they are theological in intent in the manner of faith seeking understanding, and understanding, at times, challenging core faith assumptions.

(c)   The need for the UCC to grapple more dynamically with the creative tension between Christ and culture because it is in and through this nexus where we reside.  Given our residence as post-Constantinian Christians in the secular city of postmodernity, it is impossible, in my view to grapple meaningfully with faith over any extended period of time without a coming to terms with where we are situated within the Christian drama.  And how where “we”, for whomever and however that is defined, relate to “they” whether, they are traditional evangelical Christians or those who reject any claim of religion at all and embrace purely secular values.  Can these relations and these nexus of situations be mediated purely in the spirit, or does it take the full work of our collective heart, mind, strength, and soul to grapple with these matters even in the acknowledgement of our diverse gifts?  Obviously, I sense that something is incomplete without this intentional grappling.  To press this further, the lack of willingness as a denomination to engage in more intentionally theologically probing analysis of the human condition within the context of faith, at this time and place, may be in part, an unconscious desire to escape from the more radical implications of what it may mean to believe.  I offer this as a hypothesis only, but worthy of consideration.

The Logos speaks in its own idiom.  Since we do not live perpetually in that state of blissful at-one-ness with God, formal thought about what drives us when the spirit is more evidently active is also crucial—hence theology and apologetics even for the experience-driven, spirit seeking UCC.  When theological work is well done it forces the writer and reader to come more acutely to terms with ultimate issues.  This is why it is indispensable work—work that all of us as lay theologians, in one form or another, need to take on both for ourselves as individuals and collectively as the body of Christ.