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.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
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.
GD
______________________________________________________
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.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Same Spirit that Raised Christ Raises Us to New Life
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who lives in you (Romans 8:11).
I grappled with several related verses of the Holy Spirit breaking through to our spirit before settling in on Paul’s astounding epiphany in Romans 8:11. If Paul’s journey is any indication of ours we experience considerable struggle in fully coming to an appreciation of the audacious claims of this amazing verse. As Paul testifies and perhaps so do we, the undeniable reality of the persisting power of our first Adam identity in old life is all too alive and present in our own circumstances and self-perception in which “I do not do the good that I want” (Rom 7:16). Despite the best of intentions, at least for me, the old man of despair, skepticism, fear, and sense of inability to change in any profound sustainable way keeps on breaking into my life in thought, attitude and action. That is, the first Adam is present, despite the profusion of promises of the gospel hope of new resurrection in this life as well as in the life to come to which I cling with all my heart, mind, strength, and soul in the seemingly more perceptive moments of my life.
In Romans 7 Paul goes on to say that, “it is no longer I” who embodies this first Adam identity, “but sin that dwells within me” (Rom 7:17). For me, the very struggle for this “I” is a core component of my faith walk in which daily dying to self is the essential precondition “to putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” in which the real “I” begins to surface. The new creation reality to which Christ calls us is the central focus of Romans 8.
By contrast, the old man within me seeks a settled world where nothing substantially new breaks in. It is comfortable in a sense, but it does not lead to new life which requires a going beyond oneself, whether or not of a distinctively religious context. For me the most recent breakthrough of this type is the open door my wife and I took which led us last year from Connecticut to San Diego. However bold the move may have been, the self-reinvention remains limited in that I am holding back on old CT identity in the “safety” of my more isolated moments even as I have stepped out into new CA identity in small steps. The holding back takes many subtle and not so subtle forms; simply put, do I, in faith, take risks of new, but costly ventures, or not—costly in terms of time, in terms of risk of rejection or failure, in terms of fear of closing old doors, however little they are open in any event? Unlike Abraham in moving from the land to which he was called to the Promised Land, I have far from fully let go of my homeland of Ur.
When Paul talks about the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, he is referring to the totality of life in which the hoped for resurrection entails a cross in matters large and small. It is with this totality of the struggle in mind that I draw upon in working through the first 11 verses of Ch 8 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and from that pivot point, through the entirety of this central chapter toward the final crescendo in verse 38 in which “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
As we prepare ourselves through this Lenten season to deepen our walk with God, let us take every opportunity, large or small, to strive to make “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Let us dare to put the first Adam to the test of our faith of God reconciling the world in Christ to himself. Let us be willing to lay low the First Adam through the small still voice of the Holy Spirit and embrace new creation through the same power given to us that God, through the Spirit, bestowed upon Christ in raising him from the dead. Christ, who sticks to us closer than a brother, knows us better than we know ourselves. On that Friday he took on the risk of death and utter abandonment by his Father to be our pioneer, leading us to new life in God. He knows our pain. He knows our weaknesses. He empathizes with our struggles. In suffering with us he knows how to support us throughout the many moments of life, large and small, through thick and thin.
Prayer
We know that the work of your Spirit is ongoing in which you are ever calling us from mortality to immortality in this life as well as in the next. Your Son’s life, teaching, sacrificial death, and resurrection have opened the door to us to you. In our perpetual journey from Old Adam to New Adam let us come to an ever fuller realization of the power and utter gift of that same Spirit which raised your Son from the dead has been given to us to embrace new life in you to the fullest. In this season, Lord, help us rise up to the level of faithful and glorious living to come into the full realization that the very Spirit that raised your Son from the dead is in us too; that same Spirit, calling us to new life in your kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
I grappled with several related verses of the Holy Spirit breaking through to our spirit before settling in on Paul’s astounding epiphany in Romans 8:11. If Paul’s journey is any indication of ours we experience considerable struggle in fully coming to an appreciation of the audacious claims of this amazing verse. As Paul testifies and perhaps so do we, the undeniable reality of the persisting power of our first Adam identity in old life is all too alive and present in our own circumstances and self-perception in which “I do not do the good that I want” (Rom 7:16). Despite the best of intentions, at least for me, the old man of despair, skepticism, fear, and sense of inability to change in any profound sustainable way keeps on breaking into my life in thought, attitude and action. That is, the first Adam is present, despite the profusion of promises of the gospel hope of new resurrection in this life as well as in the life to come to which I cling with all my heart, mind, strength, and soul in the seemingly more perceptive moments of my life.
In Romans 7 Paul goes on to say that, “it is no longer I” who embodies this first Adam identity, “but sin that dwells within me” (Rom 7:17). For me, the very struggle for this “I” is a core component of my faith walk in which daily dying to self is the essential precondition “to putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” in which the real “I” begins to surface. The new creation reality to which Christ calls us is the central focus of Romans 8.
By contrast, the old man within me seeks a settled world where nothing substantially new breaks in. It is comfortable in a sense, but it does not lead to new life which requires a going beyond oneself, whether or not of a distinctively religious context. For me the most recent breakthrough of this type is the open door my wife and I took which led us last year from Connecticut to San Diego. However bold the move may have been, the self-reinvention remains limited in that I am holding back on old CT identity in the “safety” of my more isolated moments even as I have stepped out into new CA identity in small steps. The holding back takes many subtle and not so subtle forms; simply put, do I, in faith, take risks of new, but costly ventures, or not—costly in terms of time, in terms of risk of rejection or failure, in terms of fear of closing old doors, however little they are open in any event? Unlike Abraham in moving from the land to which he was called to the Promised Land, I have far from fully let go of my homeland of Ur.
When Paul talks about the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, he is referring to the totality of life in which the hoped for resurrection entails a cross in matters large and small. It is with this totality of the struggle in mind that I draw upon in working through the first 11 verses of Ch 8 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and from that pivot point, through the entirety of this central chapter toward the final crescendo in verse 38 in which “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
As we prepare ourselves through this Lenten season to deepen our walk with God, let us take every opportunity, large or small, to strive to make “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Let us dare to put the first Adam to the test of our faith of God reconciling the world in Christ to himself. Let us be willing to lay low the First Adam through the small still voice of the Holy Spirit and embrace new creation through the same power given to us that God, through the Spirit, bestowed upon Christ in raising him from the dead. Christ, who sticks to us closer than a brother, knows us better than we know ourselves. On that Friday he took on the risk of death and utter abandonment by his Father to be our pioneer, leading us to new life in God. He knows our pain. He knows our weaknesses. He empathizes with our struggles. In suffering with us he knows how to support us throughout the many moments of life, large and small, through thick and thin.
Prayer
We know that the work of your Spirit is ongoing in which you are ever calling us from mortality to immortality in this life as well as in the next. Your Son’s life, teaching, sacrificial death, and resurrection have opened the door to us to you. In our perpetual journey from Old Adam to New Adam let us come to an ever fuller realization of the power and utter gift of that same Spirit which raised your Son from the dead has been given to us to embrace new life in you to the fullest. In this season, Lord, help us rise up to the level of faithful and glorious living to come into the full realization that the very Spirit that raised your Son from the dead is in us too; that same Spirit, calling us to new life in your kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
J.I. Packer Jesus the Lord: Part II
Overview
In this post I will concentrate on Packer's in-depth discussion of the New Testament claims on the significance of Jesus as pre-existent Lord of creation and its importance in the lives of those seek identification and profess allegience to Christ as so depicted. This includes what Packer identifies as four primary propositions which in their cumulative significance provide a compelling set of reasons to take the core NT claims with the utmost seriousness in the shaping of contemporary belief in the life of the church and in formal Christological studies.
With this foundation lain Packer adds five crucial claims and seeks to respond to three compelling problems in the perception of God that he identifies with classical Trinitiarian Christology. For these enduring problems, which on their face seem contradictory, he offers plausible expanations while honoring the mystery of the entire Christian revelation, which by its very nature is infinitely beyond exhaustive understanding in which we see but in part.
What folows is both a summary and commentary on Packer's claims, including his assessment on their importance for the integrity of a vital Christian faith for our time and place. It is only by grasping something of their significance to the integrity a thoroughly orthodox Trinitarian theology and religious culture that one can appreciate the motives underlying Packer's critique. For this work Packer offers largely a constructive theology that includes a contrast to a view of Christianity that he argues moves beyond the orbit of a classical Christianity that includes embrace of a pre-Incarnate Christ as reflected in John and in some of the New Testament letters (e.g. Ephesans, Colossians.
Primary Propositions
The first is the claim that Jesus is God's promised Christ
In this post I will concentrate on Packer's in-depth discussion of the New Testament claims on the significance of Jesus as pre-existent Lord of creation and its importance in the lives of those seek identification and profess allegience to Christ as so depicted. This includes what Packer identifies as four primary propositions which in their cumulative significance provide a compelling set of reasons to take the core NT claims with the utmost seriousness in the shaping of contemporary belief in the life of the church and in formal Christological studies.
With this foundation lain Packer adds five crucial claims and seeks to respond to three compelling problems in the perception of God that he identifies with classical Trinitiarian Christology. For these enduring problems, which on their face seem contradictory, he offers plausible expanations while honoring the mystery of the entire Christian revelation, which by its very nature is infinitely beyond exhaustive understanding in which we see but in part.
What folows is both a summary and commentary on Packer's claims, including his assessment on their importance for the integrity of a vital Christian faith for our time and place. It is only by grasping something of their significance to the integrity a thoroughly orthodox Trinitarian theology and religious culture that one can appreciate the motives underlying Packer's critique. For this work Packer offers largely a constructive theology that includes a contrast to a view of Christianity that he argues moves beyond the orbit of a classical Christianity that includes embrace of a pre-Incarnate Christ as reflected in John and in some of the New Testament letters (e.g. Ephesans, Colossians.
Primary Propositions
The first is the claim that Jesus is God's promised Christ
Thursday, January 27, 2011
J.I. Packer's Jesus Christ the Lord Part One
I would encourage those who are interested in serious evangelical theology to obtain The J.I. Packer Collection, edited and introduced by one of Packer's biographer's and foremost champions, Alister McGrath http://www.amazon.com/J-I-Packer-Collection/dp/0830822879
The collection includes a selection of some of Packer's finest essays from 1954-1998 and demonstrates something of the combination of cogency and pietistic verve underlying Packer's rationalist theological reflections on a broad array of topics in Anglo-American Protestant religious culture over the second half of the 20th century. Uppermost among Packer's themes are the centrality of a deeply orthodox, firmly scriptural based Trinitarian theology, a fleshing out of a distinctively evangelical theology that Packer distinguishes from both fundamentalism, to which he is obviously closer, and Protestant liberalism. These essays also include an apologetic impetus in what he depicts as the various dimensions of contemporary idolatry both within and outside the church, and in-depth commentary on important Protestant writers as distinct as the largely unknown James Orr (1844-1913), J.I Robinson, author of the best-seller Honest to God, and the irrepressible C.S. Lewis. In this post I concentrate on Packer's 1977 essay, "Jesus Christ the Lord," originally published in John Stott's Obeying Christ in a Changing World. http://www.amazon.com/Obeying-Christ-Changing-World-Stott/dp/0006246397. As time allows I will comment on other essays in this fine collection of Packer's essays as I believe his work provides an important pathway to serious faithful evangelical renewal.
Jesus Christ the Lord Overview
"A generation ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed for query the theme, 'Who really is Christ for us today.' Since his time Christology has become a matter of new debate, and of fresh tension too. Tielhard de Chardin, in maximizing Christ's cosmic significance, has appeared to depersonalize him. And Protestant theologians, in stressing Jesus' humanness and historicality, have appeared to dissolve away the substance of the godhead. Should such Cristologies be taken as the last word, the faith-relationship with Jesus which we spoke [below] would not be 'on.' And merely by existing they make that relationship harder to hold on to, just as do current 'secular' pictures of Jesus as a troubles hysteric (e.g., Dennis Potter, Son of Man) and as a pleasant song-and-dance man (e.g. Godspell; Jesus Christ Superstar). Fresh clarification is called for, urgently! (p. 154).
The centerpiece of this article is the critical contrast Packer makes in juxtaposing a high Trinitarian vision of Christ as God fully embodied in human flesh against a more this wordly grounded humanitarian Christology focusing on Jesus' sterling character and his exemplification of God's spirit throughout his life. On this latter perspective, a follower can obtain a closer walk with God by imitating Christ's spirit and his example as the selfless man in service for others.
Packer acknowledges the value in the latter understanding, although he views it is egregiously incomplete, and thereby, in the most radical sense, heretical. Specifically, it falls far short of any claim of Christ as God including any appreciation of the Son in his pre-incarnate manifestation as the second person in the Trinity as commonly understood in traditional orthodox theology and embodied most fully in the new Testament in the Gospel of John. Neither does this humanistic perspective account in any profound sense for the clear NT vision of Christ as high priest whose sacrificial death was an apt substitute for the collective sins of humankind.
Packer focuses the brunt of his essay on his explanation of the core orthodox belief in an incaranational God "who is there," who has come into our world from his pre-incarnate presence, which is based, hr maintains, on a view of Jesus best aligned with Scripture in which any Jesus outside of the NT context is both unknowable in any meaningful way, which, in any event, would be some other religion than that characterized as orthodox Christianity in the full Trinitarian, incarnational, and canonically-based scriptural sense. "That the only real Jesus is the Christ of the New Testament history and theology, and that by parting company with the New Testament [in its comprehensive depiction of Christ] we do not find him, is a truth that cannot be too often emphasized today" (p. 155) When that is given up in quest of a more humanitarian interpretation in what is commonly viewed as Christ "from below," a great deal, indeed, is sacrificed, and not merely doctrine, but the very power of Christ in God as the means of reconciling the world to God, and all of the claims that are made, for example, in the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the first chapter of Colossians, the prologue in the Gospel of John, and virtually the entire tenor of The Letter to the Hebrews.
Opening Argument
"The Christian consensus has been that as Scripture is the proper source from which theology should flow, so Christology is the true hub round which the wheel round theology revolves, and to which its central spokes must each be correctly anchored if the wheel is not to get bent" (p. 151).
Packer draws on Scripture in the full canonical sense through the hermeneutical principle in which that which is clear and central in the Bible becomes the basis for interpreting that within Scripture which is more opaque in which Deuteronomy 29:29 might serve as an underlying interpretive principle. In the words of Puritan theologian John Robinson, new light often does break through in God's word as reflective even in the formation, of both the OT and NT canon, in which whatever new insights that do emerge are congruent with the core plotline and doctrinal claims as reflective foremost throughout the entire NT text. It is the entire NT narrative in turn, that forms the basis for the full Trinitarian and Incarnational theology in which Jesus of Nazareth is both son of man and son of God and who existed before the foundation of the world.
Any equivocation on this, however vast the gap between our understanding and the claim driven by faith in search of increasing knowledge, a distance of which Packer knows quite well, is to put into jeopardy the entire foundation of what John Stott refers to as basic and C.S. Lewis as mere Christianity. What is central, Packer insists, is the core claim that Jesus was not merely a holy person whose entire life embodied the spirit of God, but that he was and is divine and became flesh when the pre-existing son of God was incarnated into the world. In this Packer ascribes to the key claim made by Jesus as written in the Gospel of John, Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). It is this foundational statement that possesses unfathomable kergymatic and ontological power, however much the mystery of this revelation remains well beyond the human capacity to grasp in anything remotely resembling a complete sense. More than anything else, perhaps, the scandalous nature of this proclanmation is something, on Packer’s studied interpretation, that humanitarian Christology categorically rejects on its face.
Building on this core Trinitarian assumption, Packer insists on a God who is there, "actively and objectively" in the world, "in the place of power." It is the claim of faith that his existence is true irrespective of whether it "is acknowledged or not" This ontological statement is meant as a direct barb against any perception of the resurrected Christ as merely living in "his followers' memories and imagination" (p. 152) as a great deal of liberal or humanitarian Christology, as claimed in a great deal of liberal and humanitarian Christology and the consequent neglect of the divine Christ as the pre-existent Son, viewed as an antiquarian residue of an outdated historical mindset. The critique would equally apply to Rudolph Bultmann's existential interpretation of Christ in his quest to demythologize the text (Scripture) in order to remythologize its essence in a perspective not too different from the anti-theistic theology of Bishop John Spong.
This belief in an incarnational God "who is there," who has come into our world from his pre-incarnate presence, argues Packer, is based on a view of Jesus best aligned with Scripture in which any Jesus outside of the NT context is both unknowable in any meaning sense, some other religion than that characterized as orthodox Christianity, and in the most fundamental sense, heretical. In Packer’s words, “the only real Jesus is the Christ of the New Testament history and theology, and that by parting company with the New Testament we do not find him, is a truth that cannot be too often emphasized today" (p. 155). When that is given up in quest of a Christ "from below" perspective, a great deal, indeed, is sacrificed. It is not merely primary doctrine that is at risk, which is important in itself to preserve but belief in the very power of Christ in God as the primary and ultimately only means of reconciling the world to God, which is the basis for evoking the commitment to it. At risk also, are the entirety of the claims that are made, for example, in the first two chapters of the Letter to the Ephesians and Colossians, the prologue in the Gospel of John, and virtually the entire tenor of The Letter to the Hebrews in which the underlying message expressed in various ways is that in Christ “the whole fullness of God dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).
Final Points for Part One
In clearing the air for his broader argument, which I will review in succeeding posts, Packer makes three preliminary points on whether and the extent "we find the real Jesus in the New Testament" (p.155).
The first is Packer's argument that the NT in its varying books and genres exhibits an underlying unity much deeper than any differences. Thus, in their different ways, the synoptic gospel writers, Paul, and John have focused their central attention on the integrating fabric of Christ's life, teaching, core mission leading to Jerusalem, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, all of which presupposes the core message of the NT of "God who through Christ reconciled us to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19) through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit.
In this Packer is reacting against a 100+ year scholarly tradition which has pitted the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith with the corresponding claim popularized in the contention that Paul in emphasizing the risen Christ was the inventor of Christianity as a distinctive religion beyond Judaism. It is this sharp difference in the scholarly literature between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith that was also echoed in a different way in the Gospel of John written toward the end of the 1st century. There is little doubt that Paul's work was instrumental in creating a more inclusive movement in the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise as well as the vision of Isaiah of bringing in the gentiles to the household of God's kingdom through the galvanizing presence of the spirit of Christ. In that sense new light broke through.
Nonetheless, Paul's core belief, which formed very early (in the late 30s or early 40s) on the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal the risen Christ speaks volumes against any radical polarization between the theology of Paul and the writers of the synoptic gospels. When one considers, too, that Mark and Luke were very much immersed in the mission of Paul in which their gospels were written later than Paul's letters, then, even though their narrative focus is on the life and crucifixion of Jesus, with Luke addressing the post-resurrection sightings, then it is not a stretch to view at least their gospels as post-Pauline texts. In this respect, the synoptics provided narrative structure to core Christological claims made initially by the earliest reported followers of the Christian way and exemplified more thoroughly in Paul’s various letters.
A hint may be found in the opening statement of Mark, commonly viewed as the first gospel and the one most congruent with the "historical Jesus." Thus, "in the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God" (Mk 1:1), in which the entirety of the text that follows is commentary. Keeping both Mark and Paul in mind, one might plausibly surmise that Paul was in touch with close to the earliest versions of the resurrection tradition, embraced its core tenets which shaped its entire ministry. Mark, in turn, who was influenced by Paul's teaching of the crucified and resurrected Christ, was also close to Peter of whom he obtained first hand testimony in which the writing of the gospel itself was likely sanctioned, if not commissioned by the early church, and obviously viewed congruent with its teachings.
With these points and others in mind, Packer seeks to deconstruct a pervasive liberal bias in contemporary biblical scholarship, with its exaggerated emphasis on the importance of the historical evolution of the Bible and the diversity of literary genres while ignoring countervailing evidence. One of the chief problems, posits Packer is in its tendency to allow different emphases within the text to override the NT's underlying unity in its central Trinitarian keygmatic claim beyond myth in any superficial sense, though not beyond mystery as well acknowledged in the NT itself (Ephesians 3:4-10, I Corinthians 2: 6-16).
In wrapping up this portion of the review of Packer’s essay, Packer makes a couple of additional related points. This includes the somewhat contestable claim that the bulk of the NT texts, certainly the most important of them, which ultimately formed the canon, were written before 70, which included significant testimony from primary witnesses. Packer’s point here is that the memory of primary witnesses would have been sharp enough to accurately recall the basic events, including states of mind of primary actors, though I wouldn’t want to dismiss some authorial innovation in constructing synoptic texts as well as Acts based on a looking back from the perspective of Jesus as the risen Christ. Given that, Packer’s main claim still holds that the core gospel story of the resurrected Christ bestowing his presence on his first followers through the power of the Holy Spirit emerged very early, logically sometime before Paul’s conversion. It is this historical rebuttal which is the primary evangelical response that Packer makes in response to the thesis of a great divide between the historical Jesus and the Christian faith as emerging only decades after the event through the cumulative influence say of Paul and John and the distinctive communities that both spawned and were influenced by their work.
With the gauntlet laid down, Packer then proceeds to his more substantive constructive arguments on the biblical nature of Christ as described in the New Testament and to more extensive pointed critiques against a pervasive liberal theological interpretation characteristic of the dominant seminaries in both the U.K. and the U.S. A discussion of these matters will follow in additional posts.
The collection includes a selection of some of Packer's finest essays from 1954-1998 and demonstrates something of the combination of cogency and pietistic verve underlying Packer's rationalist theological reflections on a broad array of topics in Anglo-American Protestant religious culture over the second half of the 20th century. Uppermost among Packer's themes are the centrality of a deeply orthodox, firmly scriptural based Trinitarian theology, a fleshing out of a distinctively evangelical theology that Packer distinguishes from both fundamentalism, to which he is obviously closer, and Protestant liberalism. These essays also include an apologetic impetus in what he depicts as the various dimensions of contemporary idolatry both within and outside the church, and in-depth commentary on important Protestant writers as distinct as the largely unknown James Orr (1844-1913), J.I Robinson, author of the best-seller Honest to God, and the irrepressible C.S. Lewis. In this post I concentrate on Packer's 1977 essay, "Jesus Christ the Lord," originally published in John Stott's Obeying Christ in a Changing World. http://www.amazon.com/Obeying-Christ-Changing-World-Stott/dp/0006246397. As time allows I will comment on other essays in this fine collection of Packer's essays as I believe his work provides an important pathway to serious faithful evangelical renewal.
Jesus Christ the Lord Overview
"A generation ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed for query the theme, 'Who really is Christ for us today.' Since his time Christology has become a matter of new debate, and of fresh tension too. Tielhard de Chardin, in maximizing Christ's cosmic significance, has appeared to depersonalize him. And Protestant theologians, in stressing Jesus' humanness and historicality, have appeared to dissolve away the substance of the godhead. Should such Cristologies be taken as the last word, the faith-relationship with Jesus which we spoke [below] would not be 'on.' And merely by existing they make that relationship harder to hold on to, just as do current 'secular' pictures of Jesus as a troubles hysteric (e.g., Dennis Potter, Son of Man) and as a pleasant song-and-dance man (e.g. Godspell; Jesus Christ Superstar). Fresh clarification is called for, urgently! (p. 154).
The centerpiece of this article is the critical contrast Packer makes in juxtaposing a high Trinitarian vision of Christ as God fully embodied in human flesh against a more this wordly grounded humanitarian Christology focusing on Jesus' sterling character and his exemplification of God's spirit throughout his life. On this latter perspective, a follower can obtain a closer walk with God by imitating Christ's spirit and his example as the selfless man in service for others.
Packer acknowledges the value in the latter understanding, although he views it is egregiously incomplete, and thereby, in the most radical sense, heretical. Specifically, it falls far short of any claim of Christ as God including any appreciation of the Son in his pre-incarnate manifestation as the second person in the Trinity as commonly understood in traditional orthodox theology and embodied most fully in the new Testament in the Gospel of John. Neither does this humanistic perspective account in any profound sense for the clear NT vision of Christ as high priest whose sacrificial death was an apt substitute for the collective sins of humankind.
Packer focuses the brunt of his essay on his explanation of the core orthodox belief in an incaranational God "who is there," who has come into our world from his pre-incarnate presence, which is based, hr maintains, on a view of Jesus best aligned with Scripture in which any Jesus outside of the NT context is both unknowable in any meaningful way, which, in any event, would be some other religion than that characterized as orthodox Christianity in the full Trinitarian, incarnational, and canonically-based scriptural sense. "That the only real Jesus is the Christ of the New Testament history and theology, and that by parting company with the New Testament [in its comprehensive depiction of Christ] we do not find him, is a truth that cannot be too often emphasized today" (p. 155) When that is given up in quest of a more humanitarian interpretation in what is commonly viewed as Christ "from below," a great deal, indeed, is sacrificed, and not merely doctrine, but the very power of Christ in God as the means of reconciling the world to God, and all of the claims that are made, for example, in the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the first chapter of Colossians, the prologue in the Gospel of John, and virtually the entire tenor of The Letter to the Hebrews.
Opening Argument
"The Christian consensus has been that as Scripture is the proper source from which theology should flow, so Christology is the true hub round which the wheel round theology revolves, and to which its central spokes must each be correctly anchored if the wheel is not to get bent" (p. 151).
Packer draws on Scripture in the full canonical sense through the hermeneutical principle in which that which is clear and central in the Bible becomes the basis for interpreting that within Scripture which is more opaque in which Deuteronomy 29:29 might serve as an underlying interpretive principle. In the words of Puritan theologian John Robinson, new light often does break through in God's word as reflective even in the formation, of both the OT and NT canon, in which whatever new insights that do emerge are congruent with the core plotline and doctrinal claims as reflective foremost throughout the entire NT text. It is the entire NT narrative in turn, that forms the basis for the full Trinitarian and Incarnational theology in which Jesus of Nazareth is both son of man and son of God and who existed before the foundation of the world.
Any equivocation on this, however vast the gap between our understanding and the claim driven by faith in search of increasing knowledge, a distance of which Packer knows quite well, is to put into jeopardy the entire foundation of what John Stott refers to as basic and C.S. Lewis as mere Christianity. What is central, Packer insists, is the core claim that Jesus was not merely a holy person whose entire life embodied the spirit of God, but that he was and is divine and became flesh when the pre-existing son of God was incarnated into the world. In this Packer ascribes to the key claim made by Jesus as written in the Gospel of John, Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). It is this foundational statement that possesses unfathomable kergymatic and ontological power, however much the mystery of this revelation remains well beyond the human capacity to grasp in anything remotely resembling a complete sense. More than anything else, perhaps, the scandalous nature of this proclanmation is something, on Packer’s studied interpretation, that humanitarian Christology categorically rejects on its face.
Building on this core Trinitarian assumption, Packer insists on a God who is there, "actively and objectively" in the world, "in the place of power." It is the claim of faith that his existence is true irrespective of whether it "is acknowledged or not" This ontological statement is meant as a direct barb against any perception of the resurrected Christ as merely living in "his followers' memories and imagination" (p. 152) as a great deal of liberal or humanitarian Christology, as claimed in a great deal of liberal and humanitarian Christology and the consequent neglect of the divine Christ as the pre-existent Son, viewed as an antiquarian residue of an outdated historical mindset. The critique would equally apply to Rudolph Bultmann's existential interpretation of Christ in his quest to demythologize the text (Scripture) in order to remythologize its essence in a perspective not too different from the anti-theistic theology of Bishop John Spong.
This belief in an incarnational God "who is there," who has come into our world from his pre-incarnate presence, argues Packer, is based on a view of Jesus best aligned with Scripture in which any Jesus outside of the NT context is both unknowable in any meaning sense, some other religion than that characterized as orthodox Christianity, and in the most fundamental sense, heretical. In Packer’s words, “the only real Jesus is the Christ of the New Testament history and theology, and that by parting company with the New Testament we do not find him, is a truth that cannot be too often emphasized today" (p. 155). When that is given up in quest of a Christ "from below" perspective, a great deal, indeed, is sacrificed. It is not merely primary doctrine that is at risk, which is important in itself to preserve but belief in the very power of Christ in God as the primary and ultimately only means of reconciling the world to God, which is the basis for evoking the commitment to it. At risk also, are the entirety of the claims that are made, for example, in the first two chapters of the Letter to the Ephesians and Colossians, the prologue in the Gospel of John, and virtually the entire tenor of The Letter to the Hebrews in which the underlying message expressed in various ways is that in Christ “the whole fullness of God dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).
Final Points for Part One
In clearing the air for his broader argument, which I will review in succeeding posts, Packer makes three preliminary points on whether and the extent "we find the real Jesus in the New Testament" (p.155).
The first is Packer's argument that the NT in its varying books and genres exhibits an underlying unity much deeper than any differences. Thus, in their different ways, the synoptic gospel writers, Paul, and John have focused their central attention on the integrating fabric of Christ's life, teaching, core mission leading to Jerusalem, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, all of which presupposes the core message of the NT of "God who through Christ reconciled us to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19) through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit.
In this Packer is reacting against a 100+ year scholarly tradition which has pitted the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith with the corresponding claim popularized in the contention that Paul in emphasizing the risen Christ was the inventor of Christianity as a distinctive religion beyond Judaism. It is this sharp difference in the scholarly literature between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith that was also echoed in a different way in the Gospel of John written toward the end of the 1st century. There is little doubt that Paul's work was instrumental in creating a more inclusive movement in the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise as well as the vision of Isaiah of bringing in the gentiles to the household of God's kingdom through the galvanizing presence of the spirit of Christ. In that sense new light broke through.
Nonetheless, Paul's core belief, which formed very early (in the late 30s or early 40s) on the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal the risen Christ speaks volumes against any radical polarization between the theology of Paul and the writers of the synoptic gospels. When one considers, too, that Mark and Luke were very much immersed in the mission of Paul in which their gospels were written later than Paul's letters, then, even though their narrative focus is on the life and crucifixion of Jesus, with Luke addressing the post-resurrection sightings, then it is not a stretch to view at least their gospels as post-Pauline texts. In this respect, the synoptics provided narrative structure to core Christological claims made initially by the earliest reported followers of the Christian way and exemplified more thoroughly in Paul’s various letters.
A hint may be found in the opening statement of Mark, commonly viewed as the first gospel and the one most congruent with the "historical Jesus." Thus, "in the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God" (Mk 1:1), in which the entirety of the text that follows is commentary. Keeping both Mark and Paul in mind, one might plausibly surmise that Paul was in touch with close to the earliest versions of the resurrection tradition, embraced its core tenets which shaped its entire ministry. Mark, in turn, who was influenced by Paul's teaching of the crucified and resurrected Christ, was also close to Peter of whom he obtained first hand testimony in which the writing of the gospel itself was likely sanctioned, if not commissioned by the early church, and obviously viewed congruent with its teachings.
With these points and others in mind, Packer seeks to deconstruct a pervasive liberal bias in contemporary biblical scholarship, with its exaggerated emphasis on the importance of the historical evolution of the Bible and the diversity of literary genres while ignoring countervailing evidence. One of the chief problems, posits Packer is in its tendency to allow different emphases within the text to override the NT's underlying unity in its central Trinitarian keygmatic claim beyond myth in any superficial sense, though not beyond mystery as well acknowledged in the NT itself (Ephesians 3:4-10, I Corinthians 2: 6-16).
In wrapping up this portion of the review of Packer’s essay, Packer makes a couple of additional related points. This includes the somewhat contestable claim that the bulk of the NT texts, certainly the most important of them, which ultimately formed the canon, were written before 70, which included significant testimony from primary witnesses. Packer’s point here is that the memory of primary witnesses would have been sharp enough to accurately recall the basic events, including states of mind of primary actors, though I wouldn’t want to dismiss some authorial innovation in constructing synoptic texts as well as Acts based on a looking back from the perspective of Jesus as the risen Christ. Given that, Packer’s main claim still holds that the core gospel story of the resurrected Christ bestowing his presence on his first followers through the power of the Holy Spirit emerged very early, logically sometime before Paul’s conversion. It is this historical rebuttal which is the primary evangelical response that Packer makes in response to the thesis of a great divide between the historical Jesus and the Christian faith as emerging only decades after the event through the cumulative influence say of Paul and John and the distinctive communities that both spawned and were influenced by their work.
With the gauntlet laid down, Packer then proceeds to his more substantive constructive arguments on the biblical nature of Christ as described in the New Testament and to more extensive pointed critiques against a pervasive liberal theological interpretation characteristic of the dominant seminaries in both the U.K. and the U.S. A discussion of these matters will follow in additional posts.
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