Eschatology and History

During the early decades of the twentieth century theological liberalism gave shape and buoyancy to the hopes and ideals of a multitude of Americans. The force of the movement is now largely spent. No one today suggests turning to W. Adams Brown, H. Nelson Wieman, or to Shailer Mathews for help. Liberalism’s inadequacy has been too convincingly demonstrated, its exuberant estimate of life’s potentialities too battered by life’s actualities.

There was irony in liberalism’s decline, since the very thing with which it sought reconciliation arose to destroy it. Claiming that orthodoxy had forfeited its claim upon modern man by its failure to update Christianity and that no man could any longer be orthodox and intellectually honest, liberalism accommodated Christianity to what it regarded as the demands of modern scholarship. It was therefore ironical that history itself arose to discredit liberalism by demonstrating that the actual world was something quite different from the one to which liberalism had adjusted. History itself undid liberalism’s faith in its character and inevitable progress. In the deep crisis of the twentieth century there appeared a depravity and demonic brutality which demonstrated that liberalism’s morally intact man ever moving toward perfection was nonexistent. Although an estimate of the human situation has rarely been more mistaken, liberalism would still to be very much alive had it been challenged merely by orthodoxy. It has, however, been challenged and discredited by history itself.

The Role Of History

Nevertheless, although history proved to be too much for it, it was liberalism that brought the category of the historical into a large role in theological thinking.

In his new book, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism, W. K. Cauthen shows that liberalism, led by its assessment of advances in epistemology and in the natural and historical sciences, reinterpreted Christianity in terms of three basic tenets. First, God must be regarded as wholly immanent within the world. Liberalism urged that even if orthodoxy’s transcendent God existed, his unknowability would render him of no practical concern. Fortunately, it was said, modern knowledge demanded that God be regarded as one aspect of a single reality, internal, not external, to nature, man, and history. Second, man is autonomous in his knowledge of God. Knowledge of God does not come as a divinely guaranteed repository of truth transcending and judging human experience. Rather, knowledge of an immanent God is disclosed within experience, and by virtue of this immanency, man is morally intact and competent to judge what is authentic knowledge of God. Third, liberalism urged that Christianity must henceforth reckon with the fact of historical evolution. The historical consciousness which emerged in the nineteenth century was said to reveal that reality is not static but dynamic. God, nature, man are all aspects of a single, growing reality, moving in the changes of history toward an ever greater truth and perfection.

These basic tenets in terms of which liberalism reinterpreted Christianity—an immanent God progressively disclosed within man and a world moving toward greater truth and perfection—are obviously an insistence that the category of the historical should play a large role in Christian theology. Yet for all this insistence, the historical consciousness of liberalism was faulty for it contained no awareness of the eschatological and apocalyptic aspects of history so clearly enunciated in the New Testament. Even before it was discredited by history itself, Albert Schweitzer pointed liberalism beyond itself by his insistence that eschatology was an essential ingredient of the New Testament understanding of Jesus. Liberalism’s faulty view of history stems from the fact that it constructed its view of history within the Kantian contention that a rational knowledge of a transcendent God is impossible and within the contention of the prevailing science that the world is a closed system of cause and effect, allowing no intrusion by the divine from without.

The Problem In Neoorthodoxy

After the basic tenets of liberalism had been discredited by the historical convulsions and upheavals of the early part of this century, to which it had contributed and for which it had so dismally prepared men, liberalism’s insistence on the crucial significance of the category of the historical in theological thought was accepted in the neoorthodox movement.

Neoorthodox theologians refuse to be identified either as orthodox or as liberal. Because of their peculiar dynamic view of the historical, they accept but reinterpret various orthodox doctrines which liberalism had rejected as outmoded. Nonetheless, the heart of their difference with orthodoxy concerns the historical character of divine revelation. While orthodoxy contends that revelation can be identified with the historical and can therefore exist in the form of the Bible, neoorthodoxy contends that revelation, while always an historical occurrence, cannot be identified with the historical and hence not with the Bible.

Neoorthodoxy also refuses the designation of liberal, and again the heart of the difference lies in the question of revelation and its relation to history. It has uttered a loud NO to liberalism’s immanent God everywhere accessible within human experience and to the concomitant idea that man, being neither a radical sinner nor radically in need of divine grace, possesses the autonomy to discover and evaluate the authentic revelation of God.

Thus it is neoorthodoxy’s peculiar view of revelation and history which accounts for its rejection of both the orthodox and the liberal classification. And it is its peculiar view of the precise nature of the conjunction of revelation and history which, on the one hand, makes it impossible for orthodoxy to accept neoorthodoxy and, on the other, lends credence to the liberal’s claim that neoorthodoxy is in the tradition of liberalism.

Whereas liberalism denied the possibility of a miraculous inbreak into the world’s natural and historical processes, neoorthodoxy insists that God in his act of self-disclosure enters into history from outside and beyond history. Yet the precise nature of the conjunction of the revelational with the historical is in question. God is said to enter history tangentially; revelation is defined as Event, yet as Event is said never to be identical with the historical. Hence the distinctions between Geschichte and Historie, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, the New Testament life of Jesus and the kerygma, sacred and secular history, between the Bible as something which is and as something which becomes the Word of God, all of which are so common in neoorthodox thought, as is the need for and wide usage of such terms as myth, saga, and symbol.

Where The Answer Lies

This question of the precise nature of the conjunction of revelation and history—and in consequence the question of the nature of our knowledge of God—is the crucial problem of modern theology. In this situation what should evangelical theologians do? Should they take heart, as Cauthen does, because modern physics today is not so certain that the world is a closed system, thus allowing for the possibility of a revelational inbreak of the divine which would violate neither nature nor the continuum in which history occurs? This would not only place theology again at the mercy of science but would be a gross neglect of the very revelation of God to which orthodoxy is committed. It is rather in the Scriptures themselves that orthodoxy must seek light on the admittedly complex question of the relationship of revelation and the historical. The Bible has a vast and rich doctrine of eschatology which liberalism so completely ignored and which orthodoxy has so largely rendered impotent for the solution of this vexing problem by its reduction of biblical eschatology to a number of items associated only with the calendar end-time of the world. Yet it is precisely in the biblical eschatology that one is confronted both with the fact of revelation and with the fact that it both occurs within history and alters history, which means that biblical revelation, on the one hand, is an authentically historical revelation, and yet, to the degree that it alters history, cannot be simply identified with history. This crucial problem of present-day theology is obviously a complex and intricate one, yet orthodoxy can neither afford to ignore the problem, nor surrender the genuine historicity of revelation by taking recourse to the merely mythological or symbolical. Neither classical Protestant Lutheranism nor Calvinism has absorbed into the structural part of its theology the biblical eschatological significance of the Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, Pentecostal coming of the Spirit, and the dynamic moment of gospel proclamation. Even millennial theologies, with all their eschatological concern with an end-time millennium, do not express that eschatology which in the Bible is grounded in the Cross and the resurrection of Christ. In biblical thought revelation is not merely historical; it is also eschatological, that is, a modification of history. In this profound sense the Bible speaks of the Cross not only as an historical event which occurred some 2,000 years ago, but also as an event which so alters history that the time of its occurrence is described as an event of the end-time. Similarly, the Bible speaks of the Resurrection not merely as a given datable historical event but as an event which is also a new beginning, one which so modifies history that it is permissible to speak of a man within history actually being in Christ, and of a new song, a new covenant, a new society (the Church), a new and eternal life, all of which within history are free from the historical ravages of death, sin, and the onslaughts of hell. And around these central events there are, according to biblical teaching, a whole galaxy of eschatological truths which stem equally from a revelation which at once is historical and yet alters the historical. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is perhaps the classical biblical exhibition of the Gospel as the historical revelation of God in Christ in which the eschatological is shown to be an essential ingredient running through the whole.

The central theological problem of our time cannot and must not be solved in terms of the imagined demands of modern thought, whether of science or of philosophical existentialism. The relation between revelation and history must be learned by listening to the Scriptures, particularly to its eschatology, which deals precisely with this problem. Here lies a field almost untouched by evangelical thought, one rich with promise both for the advance of evangelical theology and for the central theological issue of our time. END

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