Fourth in a Series (Part II)
The Heilsgeschichte emphasis on historical revelation represents a development that moves beyond both Bultmann and Barth and that is as distasteful to one as to the other. Barth avoids the concept of Heilsgeschichte, preferring to speak instead of “the Geschichte Jesu Christi,” of that which “happens and continues to happen.” The tendency of both post-Bultmannian and Heilsgeschichte scholars to resurrect the search for the historic Jesus he considers a mistake that regrettably “returns to the way of the nineteenth century.” “It marks a retreat from the New Testament witness,” contends Barth, “to something behind the witness and existing independently of it.” “I don’t like the term ‘Historie’ [knowledge of what has happened],” protests Barth, and “much prefer ‘Geschichte’ [something that happens].” Barth’s view of the role of historical investigation in relation to faith remains so negative that historical research, as he sees it, not only may lead to a false construction but “must yield a Jesus not identical with the Christ of the New Testament.” Nonetheless New Testament scholars are increasingly pursuing exegetical and historical studies and are letting the dialectical theologians paddle for themselves.
Yet the Heilsgeschichte emphasis on historical revelation surrenders on the one side what it gains on the other insofar as it suspends the meaning of that revelation on spiritual decision rather than deriving it from an authoritative Scripture through historical investigation. Some Heilsgeschichte scholars view the truth of revelation not as universally accessible and valid for all men but, in agreement with Barth and Bultmann, as existing only for some persons in and through a miracle of grace. Thus the meaning of revelation is presumably carried not by saving history or the biblical interpretation but by spiritual decision.
Precisely at this point the young but growing Pannenberg school insists on historical revelation in a larger sense that incorporates additional elements of an evangelical theology. In his Offenbarung als Geschichte, a recently translated work, Pannenberg sees the denial of the objectivity of revelation as a threat to the very reality of revelation. Contrary to Barth’s contentment with “objectifying” elements in dogmatics, he insists upon the objectivity of divine revelation. Pannenberg vigorously opposes the way in which the dialectical theology relates revelation and its meaning to truth and history alike. He deplores the Barth-Brunner legerdemain with the problem of revelation and history—as when Brunner says that the kerygma which brings forth faith includes history “but not in the isolation which the historian demands.” It distresses him that whenever the dialectical theologians run into a historical problem they rise above it by appealing evasively to the self-communication of God.
Although he reasserts objective historical revelation, Pannenberg does not preserve the traditional distinction between general and special revelation. What has happened in time, he says, is God’s revelation as such, but what has happened in Jesus Christ is the real clue to the totality of happenings. Barth criticizes this approach, contending that no such “general revelation” exists, but only a particular revelation of God’s doing. Pannenberg holds that everyone stands in some relation to God and therefore has a general knowledge of God; but this knowledge he refuses to call revelation. Revelation he defines as the self-disclosure of God in the end-time (because at the end of his deeds) as realized proleptically in Jesus. In defining revelation as history, Pannenberg holds we must regain an original “eschatological understanding.” On this basis he criticizes Cullmann’s view of Christ at the middle of the time line of saving history, and holds instead that Christ is the end of history as fulfillment. Yet this end is at once always present and also future. Whereas Bultmann connects the Old and New Testaments in existential decision and Heilsgeschichte scholars connect them historically, Pannenberg relates them apocalyptically. Some Heilsgeschichte scholars protest that Pannenberg’s main interest is Universalsgeschichte, or universal history, rather than salvation-history; but Pannenberg’s correlation of divine disclosure with special revelation means that he, like Barth, views all divine revelation as saving. In fact, Pannenberg assertedly seeks to carry out the basic intentions of his former teacher, intentions that he thinks Barth weakened by his dialectical concessions.
Radical Transcendence
The main significance of the Pannenberg plea for objective historical revelation is its open recognition that unsatisfactory formulations of the transcendence of God and of the relation between eternity and time have dominated European theology since Kierkegaard. It is noteworthy that in Kierkegaard’s homeland the Copenhagen theologian N. H. Söe (who thinks S. K.’s influence is here to stay) criticizes Kierkegaard’s time-eternity disjunction as being objectionably philosophical. Kierkegaard, says Söe, finds his concept of time in Greek rather than in Palestinian motifs. Like Cullmann, Söe views time as created by God and made therefore to receive God’s revelation. But Söe does not on that account view divine revelation as objectively given in history, because with Kierkegaard and Barth he understands revelation in terms of singularity and as existing for man in any given moment only as an act of grace. At this point Söe’s thought mirrors S. K.’s Postscript. Despite theological perpetuations of Kierkegaard’s views, Kierkegaard now is little followed by European philosophers. And even among Danish theologians his positions are brought under increasing criticism. K. E. Lögstrup of Aarhus assails especially Kierkegaard’s individualistic emphasis and self-centered approach to the teaching of Christian love.
Anders Nygren of Lund, whom Gustaf Wingren groups with Barth and Bultmann in Theology in Conflict (1958) because of his inversion of Gospel and Law, is nonetheless a stern critic of Barth’s extreme disjunction of eternity and time. “We must be done,” he says, “with the docetic notions of revelation so popular in our generation.” Barth found his point of departure in Plato and Kierkegaard, remarks Nygren, and he was “right in drawing the consequences, that we cannot truly speak of God” once eternity and time are overseparated this way. “But,” counters Nygren, “on the basis of God’s image in man, now shattered, and especially of the incarnation, we may indeed speak of God.” Over against Barth, Nygren speaks of God’s continuing revelation in nature, history, and conscience.
Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg assails Barth’s and Bultmann’s radical disjunction of eternity and time from another angle. Their approach, he says, left the Church impotent to provide a social ethics. “The Barth-Bultmann theology was unable to stimulate the ethical concern of the Church, the latter because Bultmann places everything within the individual, the former because Barth so idealizes Christ that even Heilsgeschichte gets lost in a ‘supernatural Heilsgeschichte.’ Hence Barth must superimpose the New Testament imperative and indicative upon his dialectical formulation.” Although Barth was a strong opponent of the Third Reich, the effect of his theology, Thielicke contends, “was to call the Church to think of itself while the world was left to itself. No Christian criterion was given to the world whereby the world could judge itself. As a consequence, both the self-certainty of the Church and the self-certainty of secularism increased.” Unlike Barth, Thielicke insists upon general revelation. Although man is “subjectively closed to the revelation,” an ethical possibility exists different from Barth’s projection—though not without its own difficulties. Thielicke asserts that the kerygma-theologians “forget that the objects of theology are the actions of God—and that involves history.”
The Historical Jesus
Thus far rationalistic and irrationalistic liberalism alike have failed to discover the authentic historical Jesus. Both Bultmann and Barth deplore the historical critical method as leading necessarily to a false Christ. There is growing suspicion that not the facts about revelation and history and faith but prior dialectical-existentialist assumptions arbitrarily dictate this verdict.
Those who insist upon the importance of the Jesus of history as decisive for Christian faith now follow two main avenues—one illustrated by Ethelbert Stauffer, the retired Erlangen New Testament scholar, and the other by the Uppsala New Testament exegetes Birger Gerhardsson and Harald Riesenfeld. Stauffer proceeds on the nineteenth-century notion of a fundamental break between Jesus and the primitive Church. “I see only one way to find an objective basis for our Christian thought and life: the question of the historic Jesus,” says Stauffer. “The historical Jesus in the Bible is my canon.” And the starting point of this truly historical Jesus, he identifies infallibly with “those few hundred words” where the Evangelists give us what is a scandal to them or to the early Church. “There they record what belongs to the historical Jesus.” While Stauffer insists that “the word, the work, and the way of Jesus are crucial,” the Swedish scholars assail the presuppositions underlying his historical study. “A valid methodology,” protests Riesenfeld, “will recognize the continuity between Jesus and the primitive Church.” Nor are the Uppsala exegetes impressed by a second assumption that Stauffer shares with Hans Conzelmann, namely, that anything found in Judaism is not to be ascribed to Jesus. That is simply the myth of the total originality of Jesus, whereas Jesus is not without a point of contact in Judaism.
Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson boldly criticize one crucial presupposition of the Formgeschichte of Dibelius and Bultmann. In a climate of mounting criticism of Bultmann’s methodology, now also joined by Roman Catholic writers (most significantly Heinz Schürmann of Erfurt, Germany), they call for a new approach that treats historical questions earnestly. Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson dispute the Bultmannian notion that one can immediately elucidate the formulation of New Testament material by applying the form-critical method. While they grant that every Gospel pericope has its life situation in the history of the primitive Church, they reject the inference that the pericope has therefore been created by the primitive Church. They concede further that the content has been changed and modified by the primitive Church, but they insist nonetheless that a real tradition originating with Jesus himself is included. What the Uppsala scholars demand, therefore, is a methodology aware of the firmness of this tradition.
“The Bultmannian theology is a twin sister of the form-critical view of the origin of the Gospel tradition,” notes Gerhardsson. “The two presuppose one another. But I don’t find that the a priori skepticism, which determines the form-critical program, is historically justified. I am trying to find a method of exploring—by way of purely historical research—the way in which the Gospel tradition was transmitted—technically speaking—in the early Church. Historical research cannot solve theological problems—in any case not all of them—but it can help theology by way of providing some firm points and basic values. And the unwarranted a priori skepticism of the form-critics can hardly serve as a basis for a realistic theology.”
