Brueggemann's Missing Encounter with Evangelical Theolology (More cut material)

Brueggemann’s Missing Encounter with Evangelical Theology Brueggeman’s is intimately attuned to his primary audiences which are the pastors and educated laity of the mainline Protestant denominations and the theological institutes and scholars that give them their predominant shape. His primary reference points are the various theologies that underlie postliberal and liberal scholarship with seldom substantive reference (other than his far from passing commentary on the biblical theologian Brevard Childs) to centrist and conservative theologians by name and substance of their arguments. Thus, one will find no reference to Bloesch and Fackre, Brueggemann’s theological counterparts in the UCC, or to the more conservative theologians and biblical scholars at Gordon Cornwall such as David Wells, Richard Lints, and Walter Kaiser. References to other evangelical scholars such as Mark Noll, Os Guiness, and the historian George Marsden, who also grapple in a subtle manner with the relationship between faith and culture in the contemporary setting, are noticeably lacking from Brueggemann’s work. The point here is not that Brueggemann or anyone else can be all inclusive in reach; nonetheless, there is, to use the term of religious educator Maria Harris, a “null curriculum” within his discourse tending toward caricature of what he depicts as the excessive emphasis on certainty within the household of traditional evangelical theology and practice.

I do not argue that Brueggemann is off base in his depiction of at least some versions of popular evangelicalism. I do maintain that he does not grapple in his core publications with the most cogent contemporary evangelical minds whose work does take on many of the issues he raises often with different implications and emphases than the ones he draws. A more traditional evangelical scholarship also gives much credence to the importance Brueggemann places on imagination, although only when tied more unequivocally to core biblical truth claims of God’s ontological reality, which he does not deny, but brackets for the sake of his homiletic purposes. As put by Carson, the emphasis Bruggemann places on his imaginative construal of biblical narratives “would be helpful” if “they were always tied to the same worldview and were always judged by some other standard than the imagination itself.” For Carson that standard is nothing other than the foundational truth claim of the ontological reality of God as revealed both in the narratives and the many propositional claims pervasive throughout Scripture.

Carson, perhaps too easily links Brueggemann’s interpretation to “a kind of theologically flavored liberationism” in which a type of radical politics has, at the least, a powerful tendency to subsume or even usurp the theological. Childs argues similarly in his assessment that Brueggemann’s dialectical correlation between Scripture and the given cultural moment diminishes the authority of the text in placing primary validity on consciousness stimulated by the imagination. The result, he fears, despite Brueggemann’s “striving to be a confessing theologian of the Christian church,” is that of being classified “as a most eloquent defender of the Enlightenment, which his proposal respecting the biblical canon actually represents.”

The point here is not so much the perspicacity of Carson’s and Child’s critique, as it is reflective of a common evangelical concern on the need to push Brueggemann toward a more deliberate grappling with ontology without diminishing the dynamics of his dialectical methodology. Closely related is the effort to press Brueggemann on the grounding point of his ultimate commitments on whether it matters whether one places one’s ultimate (as opposed to only) authority on Scripture, ecclesial and theological tradition, or the cultural setting. There is no question that Brueggemamnn is an unequivocal lover of Scripture, which he takes with utter seriousness. He works through biblical texts with great exegetical and expositional discernment in their capacity to break through postmodern imagination, but not in any totalistic or foundational manner which results in any permanent-like victory for the claims of faith over the world. Brueggemann’s postmodern concern is that such foundational questions no longer hold central stage as reflected in their more modernist sensibilities, as evident, for example in Fackre’s poignant theological acuity or Bloesch’s orthodox comprehensiveness.

Rather, what is significant with Brueggemann is the potency of the homiletic moment in the experience of God’s revelation in the midst of many pervasive construals to the contrary which have major sway in the lives of the laity and ministers of the mainline church. Thus, for Brueggemann the dialectical challenge is to find and expound upon the authentic Word of God in the immediacy of its revelation in the critical space of our times between, as he puts it, “tyrannical orthodoxy and absolute morality on the one hand, and therapeutic indulgence and satiation on the other;” the narcissistic culture as depicted most programmatically by Lasch. On this latter homiletic point, Carson and Childs are more empathetic, even as they remain troubled by what they take as Brueggemann’s biases toward theological liberalism. Still, they find much to value in his work even as they press him toward a more canonical interpretation of Scripture in their definition of what this means.

Brueggemann is far from neglectful in pointing toward canonical tendencies in the biblical text that remains open to diverse construals which include, but moves beyond the various orthodoxies of a great deal of traditional Protestant interpretation. As he puts it, “[c]anonical interpretation never gives an absolute grid for interpretation.” What we have “is only timeless literature and timeful readings.” Canonical faithfulness does not reside within the text. Rather, it is texts and interpretations “together [that] comprise canonical interpretation.” Given the spontaneity, multi-voiced, and dialectical dimension of the God who is revealed in and through the biblical Word in the midst of the dynamic of historical change, canon construal emerges “as a conversation” (italics in original) in the rough and tumble between conflicting metannaratives.

A major strength of Brueggemann’s hermeneutic is that it speaks against any too easy formulations that tend to freeze faith into categorical frameworks which in the final analysis are human constructs. At the same time, the issue of ultimate centers of value—authority, to put it in the strongest of terms— is unavoidable. This includes postmodern reading in the effort to deconstruct various human pretensions that establish gods out of our own illusions even as it is God who ultimately disposes as Brueggemann acknowledges.

When pressed very hard, Brueggemann also places ultimate loyalty on “the foundation of apostolic faith to which we all give attestation.” This is a crucial admission that is sometimes overlooked in critical evangelical assessments that too easily miss what he is getting at in his emphasis on imaginative interpretation. Still, even in the acknowledgement of “unity in all things essential,” Brueggemann cuts along some very different lines than those of Childs, Carson, Wells, Packer, and Bloesch, and Fackre. Such differences are particularly evident on the role of the Grand Narrative in contemporary theological discourse and the related topic of the ontology of God which he defers in response to what he perceives as the more pressing challenges facing of our kairotic moment.

  For Brueggemann, our time is “a time of scattering.” In this marginalized place where mainline Protestantism finds itself today, “such comprehensive models” of theology as proclaimed in traditional evangelical and Reformed circles “are not likely to emerge quickly” or at all. Operating from a Christology that in many respects is from below while acknowledging the historical legacy and the apostolic proclamation of a high Christology, Brueggemann emphasizes the importance of serious theological conversation partners mutually working out their salvation in fear and trembling “without exposition that includes and accounts for everything.” Thus, without rejecting the ultimate significance of a grand design as indicative of a more traditional canonical biblical theology, its deferral may be essential “given our cultural moment of scattering and our intellectual moment of hermeneutical self-knowledge.”

Cut text from my book on Contemporary Protestant Biblical Theology

The capacity to expand the Barthian project as an ongoing theological work is an issue of the most critical magnitude given the foundational status of the Bible as the classical Protestant magisterium. The persisting reality of the cultural divide between fundamentalism and modernism permeates all sectors of U.S. Protestantism to its core, which compounds the challenge of embracing Scripture as the primary narrative of faith in its complex relationship to church tradition and the broader cultural matrix. An imaginative coming to terms with the implications of this chasm in which critical theological issues are probed represents a crucial baseline for any viable Protestant renewal even within the context of its culturally marginalized diaspora setting. As argued throughout this book, any such reform within Protestantism will not come easy and will be ultimately limited in any event, although to what extent, one of course, cannot say. The point is there is a viable basis for some fruitful enhancement of centrist ground as exemplified for example in the critical dialogue between evangelical and postliberal theology and in the reclamation of the neo-orthodox legacy, all of which have the capacity to speak to searchingly attuned sensibilities underlying the confessing Christ movements within the mainline denominations and to critically articulated evangelical perspectives.

Holiness

A question wasposed by Herb Davis o the Confessing Christ listserv on how the holiness folks identify Holy or Holiness.

My intial response was as follows:

I don't speak for any movement, but keep in mind that in God Almighty Donald Bloesch identifies holiness and love as the two primary attributes of God. If I had to venture a definition I would call it a movement toward a continuous consecration to the indwelling voice of God in our actions, attitudes, relationships with others, as guided by our fallible illumination of the Holy Spirit in conformity with the revealed word of God. Consecration is sometimes linked to the term "sanctification." which is sometimes contrasted to the term "justification." I see the relationship between these two dynamics of faith in a much more fluid relationship. While there is a finished element to justification (Romans 3:21-31; 5), which itself requires an action on our part--faith, there is also the outworking of this through adoption and repentance, to draw on classical biblical doctrine, in which it is possible to grieve the holy spirit. Thus in the broadest sense there are past, present, and future connotations to salvation to which any understanding of election needs to be so grasped. Sanctification would be the progressive working out of our New Adam calling in which Christ is being formed within us While in the present a good deal of the Old Man remains, the trajectory of our faith--our calling is still toward the formation of New Adam. Holiness, then, would be the aspiration with radical intent of striving to having Christ formed within us (Philippians 2:12-13) as the incarnational image of God grafted into our reality. While there is much in our own lives and in the world that militates against this, our calling is still toward this aspiration which in the fullest sense of the term would be New Jerusalem. The extent to which this is realizable in our current vale of tears is an ongoing debate between the Calvinist and Wesleyan strands within contemporary Protestantism.

What is your view?

George

Herb responded with the following:
Dear George, As always your responses are thoughtful and clear. I think this sentence reflects your position, “Holiness, then, would be the aspiration with radical intent of striving to having Christ formed within us (Philippians 2:12-13) as the incarnational image of God grafted into our reality.” As you must know by now I have a great deal of trouble with striving on my part. I think I would emphasis v. 13, more than 12. I have a fear that I could convince myself that my striving has paid off and the image of God in Christ is grafted into my reality and assume authority and power and righteousness that belongs only to the Holy One, and none are Holy and Good but God. I agree that love and holiness are of God.

You asked me what I think and you can take a shot at me. I believe our holiness is our relationship to the Holy. As adopted sons and daughters of God in Christ we are holy. Although we are not worthy that God should come under our roof, when he does we are holy. Our holiness is not the result of our striving, “grapsing to be like God” Phil 2:6 but of “God who is at work in us” phil 2:13. In Holy Communion there is a mystical union between the believer and God in Christ, for Calvin we are lifted up into the holy of holies, where only holiness is present. So holiness for me is being in Christ Jesus, second person of the Trinity. I became holy when I was baptized and the holiness grows as I receive the body and blood of Christ,hear his word preached, share in the life of the elect. It is all gift no grasping.

Maybe there is two ways of being holy, one striving, another let it happen, believing that it is happening.

So I never strive to be holy, I do try to listen to God’s word in the Law and the Prophets and Word made flesh. To obey that word, the one Word.

Always enjoy your presence. You push me from I place I seldom go. Thanks. Herb

I offered the following:

Thanks Herb

You caught the essence of what I meant by holiness in terms of our relation to it. Of course I agree with you that God is most holy, infinitely more so than we have the capacity to appreciate which means that he has a sense of humor, too, undoubtedly more so than do we. In terms of the quoted sentence, “Holiness, then, would be the aspiration with radical intent of striving to having Christ formed within us (Philippians 2:12-13) as the incarnational image of God grafted into our reality,” I would simply add that such aspiration is futile without the prompting of the Spirit of God. With that clear recognition and with both vs 12 & 13 of Philippians 2 in mind, let us consider James, "show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works." (2:18). I don't believe James was saying that one is saved by works and neither is Paul in Philippians. Rather, and I think this is the critical point, "faith" is a verb and a very active one at that, including that of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. That is, such faith believing is a decisive act of the will, whether or not accompanied by corresponding emotions.

Agreed that one simply cannot choose to believe; there is the blowing of the breath of the Spirit there without which we would only but be working out of our own energy sources. Thus we cannot make ourselves righteous before God, however steadfast we may enjoin any such effort On this, Watchman Nee in The Normal Christian Life is very clear. Yet, within the faith calling, the human striving is an essential aspect in the full coming into salvation in any comprehensive sense in which creation itself "groans" (active verb) in "quest of eager longing for the revealing sons of God." Then again, Paul warns us not to grieve the Holy Spirit, which obviously means we have the capacity to do so. Then we have al those active verbs of doing something or refraining from doing something in Romans 12, Colossians 3, Galatians 5, Ephesians 6 We are also told in various places to "put on." Put on tender mercies, put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Then there's so much in the gospel parables that has to do with what we do and what our attitude orientation is. Clearly some of this; a great deal in fact, has to do with the condition of our innate disposition "where your treasure is there your heart will be." But there is also a great deal that calls us to turn toward something, to change, to beware, etc. No doubt much of this has to do with repentance, which in my understanding neither Paul nor 1 John radically separates from salvation even as justification and repentance have different theological definitions.

I think part of the problem may be that of linking justification alone and salvation too closely together, particularly when salvation needs to be grasped comprehensively (Romans 8:18-30) as pertaining to the entire creation and past, present and future in which some degree of openness (not necessarily "openness theology") needs to be taken into account.

Finally, I think the difference between the Calvinist and Wesleyan strain within Protestantism is at least partially related to particular gifts and callings, which might help to explain some of the differences between you and I on this topic. However, I think we're both thinking comprehensively even as you and I may emphasize he different strains within Protestant theology.

George

I expect this is a discussion that could go on for a long time. I'm wondering what others are thinking?

1940-1965: In Search of a Religious Consesus in Protestant America

The following piece was stimulated by a discusion on the Confessing Christ listserv on the beakdown of a consesus political and religios vision grounded in the "civil religon" of the 1950s The followning decades wewre marked by sharp polariies between the radical left and radical right in wich the latter has been in the clear ascendency since the 1980s.

GD
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Neo-orthodox realism and the biblical theology movement detailing the “mighty acts” of God, both of which were pervasive in the period between 1940 and 1960, sought to bridge the gap through an embrace of the Reformed tradition that in principle could incorporate the major precepts of critical liberal scholarship.

Much exciting work in theology and biblical studies emerged in this mid-century period in Europe and the United States that re-legitimized the biblical notion of God’s transcendence and the broad-based unity of the Bible in a manner, which, in principle, if not always in practice could be reconciled with higher biblical criticism. The neo-orthodox and biblical theology movements, which gained substantial adherence at the seminary and denominational levels, played a major role in diminishing the dominance of theological liberalism and its impact in the broader religious culture of the nation during this two-decade period. Notwithstanding this mediating resurgence, the forces unleashed in the early 20th century which fueled the modernist/ fundamentalist divide, were still operative and needed but little force to break out into open conflagration in the post WWII period.

The great divide was held in bay to some degree in this “consensus” period of U.S. history as depicted in such key texts as Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition and Age of Reform, and Louis Hartz’s often referenced, The Liberal Tradition in America. Yet, the enduring fissures between the biblicalism of even the neo-orthodox variety and modernism re-exploded in the latter decades of the 20th century as this consensus period broke down in the “culture wars” unleashed by world-wide protest over the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The result was that the most fundamental issues on the nature of Christian faith within the context of the modern world became encased in a highly contentious polemic, notwithstanding mediating work to the contrary.

A critical factor in the breakdown of any budding neo-orthodox synthesis was the emergence of a diffusive civil religion within the mainline churches in the early post-World War II period. This muted “civil” theology stood in stark juxtaposition to a rigorous biblicalism in the increasing merger of certain strands of fundamentalism and evangelicalism at the theological level, as reflected in the formation of Fuller Seminary in 1947 and the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s. In this maelstrom the theological insights of the neo-orthodox theologians became viewed with increasing irrelevance within the Protestant mainline while Karl Barth’s interpretation of biblical narratives as “sagas” and Reinhold Niehbuhr’s reconstruction of biblical orthodoxy as “myth” were rejected by a broad swath of scholarly evangelicals, which brooked no compromise with biblical inerrancy.

Prospects of any broad-based conversion within Protestant theology; that is any consequent healing of the modernist-fundamental divide was further eroded by directions taken on both sides of the great divide from the 1960s to the present. Evangelicalism in its many variants grew exponentially through charismatic and Pentecostal revivals, the explosive growth of the “megachurch,” and the political flourishing of the religious right with the onset of the Reagan presidency. There were many fissures, disputes, and disagreements within the evangelical sector of American Protestantism, including a progressive minority component as reflected in the work of Jim Wallis and the formation of the weekly magazine, Sojourners. Despite the differences and exceptions, common enough positions on abortion, gay rights, the role of women in society and in the church, and the toxic impact of the 60s on the traditional American values, helped to establish an evangelical distinctiveness sharply differentiated from mainline Protestantism.

A somewhat literal and inerrant reading of the Bible undergirded a conservative social polity based on a vision articulated by the Christian Coalition of bringing America back to God. The religious right has been a major source of conservative political power in the United States for the past 30 years. Additional discussion of evangelical theology and religious culture, including my own relationship to it is interspersed throughout this book beginning with the last two sections of this chapter.

For the remainder of this historical survey I focus on a few of the ways in which mainline and liberal theology was infused by a wide stream of fresh thinking broadly influenced by Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. In this key text, which became a byword of an era, the ethos of modern urbanity became the context in which Christianity, if it were to have force in the modern world, would have to find its voice. More radical were the writings of the “death of God” theologians who argued that the traditional notion of a supernatural, transcendent God was no longer a viable concept at least for the residents of the secular city.

Any rebirth of Christianity could only emerge through an embrace of the faith’s core symbol, the cross, in the death of traditional religious categories through which the spirit (or at least the “essence”) of Christ could re-emerge, but only within the context of secular experience. Traditional notions of “God talk” were dismissed as irrelevant and obscurantist to their core. Fundamentalists and evangelicals who rejected the entire thrust of the secularization argument roundly repudiated this position.

The death of God movement did not have a large following even within the mainline denominations. It did, however, represent the culmination of a half-century of existential theology extending from Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and certain tendencies within Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although the latter remained an uncompromising theist through the course of his short and heroic life. As a major proponent of “process theology” Langdon Gilkey integrated both existentialism and neo-orthodoxy in his search for the articulation of God’s immanence within the very fabric of “secular” history. The searching and living out of this ineffable presence was viewed as the fundamental basis for any reconstruction of theological, biblical and religious language in which any vestige of spatial notions of God in heaven and man on earth impeded rather than facilitated the emergence of the spirit’s indwelling in the modern period.

Notwithstanding its secularist appeal, the rarefied terminology of death of God and process theologians was too esoteric for direct appropriation in the mainline denominations. Through seminary training these influences indelibly played into the religious formation of at least certain clergy who would generally find it exceedingly difficult to translate such insights into inspiring pulpit sermons that could speak in any convincing idiom of a new theology of practice in the secular city. Given the theological abstruseness of such work, to say nothing of the radical nature of their implications for traditional understanding of the Christian faith, the gap between the seminary and the pew more often than not led to clerical avoidance rather than to rigorous embrace. Consequently, the hard work of theological exposition needed for any appropriation of its core insights at the congregational level was largely left waning for the religiously inclined laity hovering around the boundaries of the secular city.

One result was that mainline congregants typically lacked substantial reasons at the level of clear articulation for hard won religious beliefs even though rigorous thinking in the professional life of the middle class required a direct analysis of facts and operative constructs at the level of where it counted in practical application. Thus a dichotomous view of the relationship between the church and the world was all too characteristic of mainline experience in which neither the implications of existential nor traditional-based theologies held full sway. For adult male members of the mid-1960s of mainline denominations in particular, a widening experiential gap between the reality-based perception of the world of work and a Sunday church experience could not be papered over by building projects and stewardship campaigns.

These various modes of existentialist theology spoke to broad currents in the post-1960 mainline religious culture. While certain key phrases about the need for “relevance” were appropriated into congregational life, little systematic work was accomplished in integrating these schools of theology within the context of the institutional life of the church. A more dynamic relationship between the seminary and the pew emerged in the 1970s in an appropriation of the “identity politics” of black and feminist theologies. This was a double-edged sword. Those who embraced these more recent streams of religious thought were better able to translate theology into practical action than the advocates of the death of God and process theology. Yet, this came only at the price of very sharp conflict between the advocates of the new political theologies and others of more modest inclination who remained less convinced, as well as among the more outright skeptical and overtly critical even within the mainline denominations.

Thus, as the 1970s began, the broad-based consensus of the early cold war era gave way to a polarizing tendency in U.S. culture between conservative and progressive forces, fueled by radically conflicting stances on the Vietnamese War. These countervailing world views had sharply-defined gender, race, class, and theological components, which melded into conflicting ideological constructions, symbolized most fully in competing perspectives on interpretations of the “countercultural” decade of the 1960s. While the following discussion focuses on the two central issues of race and gender, the broad themes that have given shape to theological liberalism from the late 19th century are subsumed and radicalized in these two critical areas.

Bonhoeffer's Wordly Christianity Pt I

In a recent CS-SPANN 2 program Christian historian Martin Marty included a discussion of how Bonhoeffer's theology was interpreted by both the "death of God" theologians of the 1960s and the 1970s and a certain segment of the current evangelical theological sector. This provoked me to post my writings on Bonhoeffer desiugned for a chapter on the significance of the neo-orthodox mvement for contemporary trinitarian orthodox Protestant theology. While there is clearly a worldly component to DB's thelogy, I draw primarily on his text Ethics to highlight something of wha the meant by worldly which for him remained deeply integrated within a theocentric vision, sometimes characterized by his phrase "Christ the center.

GD
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There is a substantial difference in emphasis between Barth and Bonhoeffer underlying a common perspective. Both highlighted the centrality of Christ as revealed in the Word and the necessity of a living faith in its embodiment in the church and the world. In this respect they were both dogmatic dialecticians seeking to make sense of the reality of God’s revelation in Christ within the context of the first several decades of the 20th century as played out by the “crisis” theology that hovered over Europe and the United States. The fundamental difference was Barth’s concentration on the centrality of dogma as revealed by and through the Word and Bonhoeffer’s accentuation on the significance of the revelation for right action and thought in the midst of the contingency of living history.

It was on this account that the “secular” theologians of the 1960s drew on Bonhoeffer’s “religionless” Christianity to articulate what they considered as a more viable vision of Christianity when the traditional “three-story” theistic God could no longer hold sway in the light of liberal post World war II thought, culture, and geo-politics. As in Bonhoeffer’s original expression, so it was even more so in the 1960s that the search for a new language beyond religion was a kairotic desire for an authentic revelation in an era where traditional pieties and orthodoxies became viewed, at least in certain quarters, in the most scandalous sense as idolatrous, when not downright incredulous. That the view of such a God described by the secular and death of God theologians was a caricature, which nonetheless contained important elements of truth, is a point of interest worthy of much pondering.

That Bonhoeffer wrote at the boundary lines of faith in the midst of the most searing of perplexities cannot be doubted, particularly in light of his Letters and Papers from Prison. Yet it was this same Bonhoeffer in this same text who spoke of the God who resided at the center more so than at the boundary, “not in weakness” of faith, “but in strength;” the strength of authentic proclamation in the midst of life. Rather than the God “beyond our cognitive facilities,” Bonhoeffer emphasized the “God…beyond in the midst of our life.” The “secular” Bonhoeffer is an important figure in the imagination of 20th century theology particularly as an alter ego to that of Barth in a quest for a post-war theology beyond neo-orthodoxy. The Bonhoeffer that I draw out here is based primarily on The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics. This, too, is a worldly, but also more churchly Bonhoeffer, grounding the basis for a living faith of the indwelling Christ in the midst of any and every given historical setting. This Bonhoeffer is not set in antithesis against the neo-orthodox Barth, but one in sync with this legacy, while bringing out important themes that remained more tangential in his mentor’s work. As Bonhoeffer put it in his critique of the secular/religious polarities that provoked and stimulated Reinhold Niebuhr and Tillich:

There are not two spheres, standing side by side, competing with each other and attacking each others frontiers. If that were so, this frontier dispute would always be the decisive problem of history. But the whole reality of the world is already drawn into Christ and bound together in Him, and the movement of history consists solely in divergence and convergence in relation to this centre.

Bonhoeffer as well as Barth sought to move beyond any sterile orthodoxy to the extent that doctrine acted as an impediment to the free flowing wind of the Holy Spirit. At the same time he remained fully committed to the centrality of the Bible as the primary vehicle of revelation, including the scriptural emphasis on the majesty of the God of Judeo-Christian theism in his capacity to speak within any context and idiom that he so desired. The extremities of Bonhoeffer’s own situation in the bowels of a Nazi prison camp pushed him at times to the boundaries of a “religionless” Christianity. Yet, in taking his work as a whole, including his prison ministry, he remained focused on the centrality of the Bible, the church, and faith in the God who is here, as both immanent within time and place and transcendent of the deep contextuality of the very human history of the early 20th century through which he wrote and lived.

It is this more Barthian Bonhoeffer who gave shape to a worldly sensitive Christianity as reflected in his key text, Ethics that has a great deal for the contemporary church to draw upon in any hermeneutical retrieval of the ethos of the Reformation in an early 21st century context.

In his Christ the center “worldly” Christianity Bonhoeffer notes that “the essence of the gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems.” Rather, it is in radical obedience to Christ himself in each and every situation. In following the Jamesian pathway (Jas 2:20-26), for Bonhoeffer, the most radical and essential step is “not a confession of faith in Jesus.” What radical commitment to faith necessitates is nothing less than unswerving and immediate obedience to the very call to surrender all as the inescapable price for the privilege of following Christ for the entire course of one’s life. Anything less on his account is a holding back; some adherence to the idolatry of the self or culture that can only contradict the will of God in some fundamental way. Such obedience is not the Lutheran concern against works. Rather, it is the very essence of faith; costly faith even in the midst of our fallen state where nothing we can do can right our relationship with the living God in which we are nonetheless called into radical obedience in faith (Rom 3:31; 6:15-19).

It is this same ethos of radical commitment to Christ and to Christ only through which Bonhoeffer grounds the most elemental obligation of the church in relation to the world. As he states it:

The Church’s word to the world can be no other than God’s word to the world. The word is Jesus Christ. This word is Jesus Christ and salvation in His name. It is in Jesus Christ that God’s relation to the world is defined. We know of no relation of God to the world other than through Jesus Christ. For the Church too, therefore, there is no relation to the world other than through Jesus Christ. In other words, the proper relation of the Church to the world cannot be deduced from natural law or rational law or from universal rights, but only from the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is an evident Barthian influence of the most radical sort. At the same time Bonhoeffer does not deny, as neither would Barth, that the church has something to say to the world on the problems faced by humankind, including something akin on its own terms, yet always through the perspective of Christ revealed as the Incarnation of the living God.

On this assumption the church has a great deal to say about the broad range of human ethics in the most penultimate sense since the spirit of Christ is revealed within the midst and through the signs of our material existence. Thus, with Barth, even as the reality transcends the symbols which enclose the signs of God’s revealing, Bonhoeffer agreed also that God could only be known analogically in and through the signs that his Spirit opens up to human perception. Such signs flow forth within the context of any given time and place throughout all of the spheres of the “secular” realm in various hidden and revealing forms. In terms of the problems of humankind, the quest for the ultimate Word embedded within the penultimate will lead to specific courses of action in given situations in accord with the prompting of the Holy Spirit. This is the case on Bonhoeffer’ even as the gap between divine revelation and human perception within any given context invariably persists.

However plausible or even compelling such a course of action may be in the revealing of the spirit of God within a given context (as discernable through an inherently flawed sensibility), such revelation in time does not translate into a universal application in a manner that transcends time. The kairos of Christ’s spirit breaks into history wherever and whenever it will in whatever forms it so chooses in which the Christian vocation is defined as close to possible adherence to the small still prompting of its authentic voice. This is true pietism in the most Bonhoefferian sense. It is the essence of Bonhoeffer’s worldly Christianity which remained constant throughout his short career, notwithstanding different points of emphases as embodied in his key texts. The dialectical dynamic in his theology is between world and church, rather than the secular or religious per se as the pivot points of accent for the manifestation of Christ’s spirit; the underlying constant in the midst of each and every historical experience.

To provide an example of such contextualization, even such a central problem as the abolition of slavery in the United States in the 19th century could not absorb the authority of ultimacy in Christian ethics, however penultimately significant of an issue it was. The fact that many northern U.S. clergy opposed the expansion of slavery and slavery itself in the 1850s, while having rejected abolitionism spoke as much to the complexity of the issue as to the charge of moral hypocrisy. Thus, to the accusation sometimes posited against the church for not firmly standing up against the obvious blight of slavery; from the vantage point of the 1850s some form of gradualism as argued by Horace Bushnell and other prominent anti-slavery leaning clergy may have been viewed as at least as plausible from God’s eye as immediate abolitionism. For some, especially of various Calvinistic persuasions, gradualism may have been viewed as even more akin to proximately meeting God’s will within the context of a fallen world in the midst of historical complexity in a society and political culture wherein slavery had been institutionalized for almost two centuries.

That slavery was sin of a most egregious social and moral sort was widely accepted at least amongst the clergy in the North by the 1850s. In this respect a certain convergence was coming together between the ultimate and penultimate over this hovering issue that raised the most searing concerns in the realm of political ideology as well as a moral sensibility on the overarching need for national redemption. The ethics in how to resolve the dilemma of slavery was driven by anything but consensus, a problem which came to a certain critical threshold through the kairos of the Civil War. The actual coming of the Civil War profoundly changed the focus of the moral debate. It also unleashed a broad array of emblematic problems over the enduring legacy of racism that carried on for over a century beyond the war.

To put this in Bonhoeffer’s terms God may have acted through the crisis of the Civil War. Yet the result was anything but a clear resolution in a restoration of America as New Israel redeemed through the cleansing blood that the war was imaginatively sought to have unleashed in the northern clerical mindset of 19th century evangelicalism. To put it again in Bonhoeffer’s terms, whatever sense of God’s ultimacy was unleashed through the Civil War became imperceptibly merged into the penultimacy of the ongoing flow of historical experience in which the spirit of Christ needed to be perceived and acted upon ever freshly anew even in the midst of the most searing ambiguity. One of the critical differences between Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr on this score is that the former kept his focus on the centrality of Christ as the critical point in the church/world dialectic, while the latter dwelt more on the paradox of the ambiguity of history as such in the tension between moral man and immoral society.

Bonhoeffer obviously did not deny that God acts in history, sometimes in very decisive ways. The life and death issues that he faced in the 1930s and 1940s give vivid testimony to the kairotic energies that were operating in Europe at that time in response to the most unimaginable evil. The challenge as Bonhoeffer posited is the central quest to discern the will of God in every concrete situation. In his expression, “Jesus Christ is the law of all earthly institutions.” Such a revelation is masked within the immediacy of the historical, which requires the most critical of theo-political discernment, which at best remains only partially revealing. Bonhoeffer’s plunge into the vortex of history, grounded in the ultimacy of God’s revelation of Christ as he understood it was the central strength of his project. From this theocentric vantage point he added a great deal to Barth’s grounding insights in fleshing out a critical theo-praxis only very partially developed in his Swiss mentor’s work.

Bonhoeffer’s testing ground was nothing less than the most devastating war that Europe had ever experienced in the midst of the most barbaric evil that the continent had ever experienced. The cost for Bonhoeffer was nothing less than his life in the need to surrender all for the following of God’s will as he understood it into the very bowels of hell if that is where it brought him. It is no small matter that in the process the extremities and the centralities of his theological probing expanded even in his always focused Christ the center vision as embodied within the church and within the world. What is critical for our purposes is not so much the crisis theology of the 1930s and 1940s, although that remains instructive. What is enduring is the force of Bonhoeffer’s praxeology of pressing the word of God to speak to the concrete historical situation in things great and small in bringing together the “secular” and the “religious” within a common interpretation.

Bonhoeffer's "Worldly Christianity," Part Two

Bonhoeffer’s testing ground was nothing less than the most devastating war that Europe had ever experienced in the midst of the most barbaric evil that the continent had ever experienced. The cost for Bonhoeffer was nothing less than his life in the need to surrender all for the following of God’s will as he understood it into the very bowels of hell if that is where it brought him. It is no small matter that in the process the extremities and the centralities of his theological probing expanded even in his always focused Christ the center vision as embodied within the church and within the world.

What is critical for our purposes is not so much the crisis theology of the 1930s and 1940s, although that remains instructive. What is enduring is the force of Bonhoeffer’s praxeology of pressing the word of God to speak to the concrete historical situation in things great and small in bringing together the “secular” and the “religious” within a common interpretation.

The relevance of Bonhoeffer’s “worldly” Christianity for our current setting may be further discerned by taking note of the four principle areas of application that he emphasized in Ethics: “labor, marriage, government, and the Church.” In all of these realms which continue to have an obvious contemporary ring, Bonhoeffer’s underlying theological principle remains constant. Whatever courses of action or attitudinal formation that may emerge in the many plausible contexts that give shape to vocation in and through these key institutions, the pivotal point is that “each in its own way shall be through Christ, directed toward Christ, and in Christ.” In this, Bonhoeffer dismissed any characterization of the first three mandates as “secular” in contrast to the last one only as being particularly “religious.”

Thus, Bonhoeffer fused what he meant by worldly and what he meant by Christian within a coherent theological vision that has a powerful current mediating potential in deconstructing tendencies toward world/church dualisms between critical mainline and evangelical sensibilities. The critical point is less the specifics of Bonhoeffer’s 1940s review of the theological underpinning of these sectors. The more fundamental matter is the core principle that God becomes self revealing through signs within the concrete settings to which human beings are called within the world and within the church for the purpose of attending to nothing less and nothing more than the small still promoting of Christ’s holy mandate within them.
Bonhoeffer’s core concept in his vocational theology is “deputyship” which we might interpret as stewardship, to give this a more contemporary ring.

In this, Bonhoeffer (1995) emphasized social role identity as the basis for theological construction and rejected any authentic Christian identity based on an ethos of radical individualism. Even those called to a more solitary life are so called for the purpose of servitude to Christ for the betterment in some respect for “mankind as a whole.”

This is in contrast to any merely self-fulfilling purposes, which Bonhoeffer viewed as vacuous in the most fundamental sense. In allegiance to Christ, the deputy works against two temptations; “set[ting] up one’s ego as an absolute” in drawing upon individual consciousness per se as the criteria for setting the pathway for one’s direction, or “set[ting] up the other man as an absolute” in the simple surrender of the self to the will of the other.

Such oscillating tendencies are compelling when the grounding for identity formation is culturally based without remainder. The synthesis, however imperfectly achieved, only comes through the deputyship of Jesus, “the incarnate Son of God” who “was not the individual desiring to achieve a perfection of his own, but…lived only as the one who has taken up into Himself and who bears within Himself the selves of all men.” In this respect, Christ “is the responsible person par excellence” the image through which the very notion of deputyship is to be formed among those who would like to be able to call themselves, if not his disciples, at least his ardent followers.

How one applies this to the specific realms of contemporary life can only be discerned within the complexities and the immediacies of specific events and circumstances. From such inevitable vantage points our task so often is not so much that of “turn[ing] the world upside-down, but to do what is necessary” through the prompting of Christ’s still small voice “at the given place” and time through which the mandate comes, and “with a due consideration of reality” in the discernment of right action. This bears, for example, on a decision at work on how a manager will mentor an insecure, but competent employee or on how parents of a child who has broken with them will respond or at least keep open to the possibility of reconciliation even if the prospect of healing is not likely to be achieved. It also bears on the political process, not only on which candidate and which sets of issues to support, but also in the discernment of the terms of engagement including that of one’s attitude toward one’s political opponent even when the stakes are seemingly large. Such examples, great and small which require a multitude of discerning moments that can only be enacted upon in the immediacy of time and place, can be multiplied a thousand fold and more.

The critical issue remains the same; that of discerning God speaking in the immediacy of the situation, and then acting according to the prompting of the small still voice. Attendance to the immediacy of the situation also requires a close discernment to the voice of the world. This necessitates rejection of any semblance of parody sometimes accompanying an evangelical caricature of liberal theology or secular culture. It also requires close listening for the voice of God first and foremost through a discerning reading of Scripture via the mediation of the Holy Spirit. This, in turn, requires among other things rejection of any caricature of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism or too easy charges of theological obscurantism. In both cases there may be grounds for such criticism, for which admonitions as well as affirmations are clearly called. Yet, in taking a tack from Bonhoeffer, such criticism, if need to be issued should come in a somewhat reluctant vein rather than as first impulse, seeking first, the voice of God speaking through one’s alter Christian identity.

The role of the church then becomes in the final analysis, the place and the body that gives specific articulation to God’s reconciling the world through Christ whether through preaching, teaching, liturgical practice, or theological explication. In short, the church in its foremost vocation is the called institution whereby God’s “word is repeatedly spoken, expounded, interpreted and disseminated until the end of the world” (p. 288). Given the importance of the lived experience of faith in the midst of an inescapably worldly setting, the church on Bonhoeffer’s reading plays an extremely important role. Specifically, it gives voice to the reality that shapes the identity and world view of those called to the various vocations where God places them in both confirming and conforming them to their most fundamental role as living members of the body of Christ.

In sum, Bonhoeffer calls Christians to be in the world but not of it. This is a mandate that as potential, yet never this side of the eschaton fully realized, has much to offer in bringing greater concord to the discordant sectors in American Protestantism that keep the fundamentalist-modernist divide so indelibly intact. It also holds the prospect of lending clarity to a common Protestant identity rooted in the priesthood of the laity through a theology of vocation grounded in the original vision of the Reformation. Bonhoeffer’s stance has the added benefit as serving as a mediating link between the ontological radicalism of Barth’s unequivocal embrace of biblical revelation and the pragmatic Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Reading Calvin Through the Prism of History and Faith

In my reading I am moving backward from the English Puritans to Calvin's Institutes. I read two abridged versions of the Institutes (about 250 pages each) and thought it was time to tackle the entire work whole for which I am planning several months. I'm working with the Henry Beveridge translated which is amiable in one volume from Eerdman's

Perhaps the following might be of some interest from Book One, Ch 14 where previously Calvin had been wearily taking on various heterodox positions challenging his understanding of the orthodox position on the mystery and revelation of the Trinity. Throughout the Institutes, Calvin seems quick to point out the gap between our knowledge and the unfathomable depth of God's awesome reality in which even the most professedly faithful catch only a glimpse or two. He says, "For though our eyes, in whatsoever direction they turn, are forced to behold the works of God, we see how fleeting our attention is, and how quickly pious thoughts, if any arise, vanish away." One might think that a holy God who made man and woman in his own image would have embedded human consciousness with the power to remain intimately connected to himself. If so that would make the gap twe all experience in our allegience to God through our flawed First Adamic fallen identity "as inconsistent with the power of God." Thus the conceit of human consciousness when it seeks to unravel the mystery of God's revelation on its own terms.

Such curiosity which seeks to move beyond what biblical revelatiion illuminates is not only vein,on Calvin's interpretation, but causes us needless suffering in the quest to seek fulfillment on our own terms rather than on God's. That is, as Calvin put it,"until human reason is subdued to the obedience of faith, and learns to welcome the alm quiescence to which the sanctification of the seventh day invites us" (p. 142).

One of the things Calvin is getting at throughout the Institutes is the sufficiency of Scripture for the knowledge we need to live in fidelity to the calling that God has gifted us with in which "his eternal Wisdom and Spirit are also set before us, in order that we may not dream or any other God than Him who desires to be recognized in that express image" (p. 143). To this I would add the significance of Deuteronomy 29:29 to the effect hat the secret things belong to God but the things that have been revealed are forever available to us.

Obviously one could critique Calvin from our 21st century vantage point in perhaps unnecessarily repressing the quest for knowledge particularly as manifest in the European Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, ad the ongoing quest of western secular intellectual thought, and this historical awareness is one factor that, in my view should be brought to the table in our own understanding of the faith once for all delivered to the saints and in our dialogue with those outside of the orthodox pathway. Yet, along with that historical conditioning in seeking to come to terms with Calvin's theology, I think it's equally, if not ultimately of more importance to seek to grasp something of what we perceive the Holy Spirit was conveying to Calvin throughout the various issues he was confronting in the Institutes and what that same Spirit,that same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead and bestowed upon us (Romans 8:11) is seeking to convey to us some almost 500 years later.

Without at all seeking to support an anti-intellectual position, the message I do pick up from these passages is (a) the importance of placing one's intellectual curiosity under the authority and protection of God's guidance so as not to create a false idol of the mind; (b)the realization that in faith we have been, are, and will be given the insight we need to move forward in our own journeys through the Promised Land.

That does not necessarily close off any intellectual pursuits, including critical biblical scholarship, but I think it does put a perspective on the matter that a reading of Calvin through both the prism of historical and scientific awareness and faith as illuminated through our very fallible grasp of the Holy Spirit as mediated through the ages in which God, while the creator of human history is greater than human history, which in our age has become an idol of the mind and spirit.