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.
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.
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