Review of Current Religious Thought: March 01, 1963

The well-known maxim of G. E. Lessing, that the “accidental truths of history can never be the proof of the necessary truths of reason,” had a clearly negative bearing upon the total question of revelation. The obvious fact that Christianity rests upon events which occurred in time and space served to put it into sharp antithesis to any form of religion which claimed to rest upon, and to confine itself to, truths independent of historical facts. The rationalism of Lessing’s day has, of course, fallen into discredit; but the central fallacy of his argument has been retained by forms of thought which are not directly related to rationalism.

Forms of “Christian” thought which disallow the validity of the Christian revelation-claim are finding themselves involved in fresh ways with the question of the relevance of historical fact for their systems. These forms share with the rationalism of the eighteenth century a quest for integrity, no less than a desire for some form of “universality.” Total creedlessness has proved to be unsatisfactory, while reason itself has been subjected to the most rigid criticism. History itself has been treated with increasing caution, particularly at the point of the alleged possibility of completely objective history.

Movements in biblical criticism have sought, in varying degrees, to reduce the narratives of the biblical record to terms of a purely natural form of historical events. The success of these attempts has proved to be less spectacular than critics of fifty years ago would have dreamed. So long as the narratives were accorded historical integrity at all, they had a remarkable vitality, a remarkable ability to reassert themselves in the midst of critical denials.

It needs to be noted that historicism itself has not been called into question by much of critical scholarship, but only certain types of historicism. In general, the pages of historical narrative which deal with usual and “natural” events have occasioned little concern. It has been the historical documents which purport to tell of supernatural and “saving” events which have compelled many theologians to take a long and jaundiced look. In the light of this, Lessing’s dictum with reference to “accidental” or contingent “truths of history” calls forth the observation that it is not the contingent and the relational in history per se which is held to be irrelevant to religious truth, but rather certain kinds of contingent events.

It was when Christians began to emphasize the historical reality of events which lay so far outside of the commonly accepted pattern of the “natural” as to suggest that they issued from a special and unusual form of divine activity that the several advocates of modern forms of rationalism became concerned. In connection with the method of much of contemporary biblical interpretation, Otto A. Piper suggests that “a great deal of modern interpretation of the Gospels still follows the pattern of eighteenth century rationalism” (Theology Today, XIX, 3, 327).

This is another way of saying that modern scholars have assumed for themselves the ability to know a priori the quality of the necessary (and perhaps absolute) truths of religion, and thus to be able to sit in infallible judgment upon the “accidental” truths of biblical history. Methodologies at this point will vary. Lessing held Jesus to be a human being, but one who possessed the faculty of reason in a superlative measure. Thus his teaching was regarded by this eighteenth-century thinker as marking a new high level in man’s approximation of the truth. Events recorded in Scripture, however, which would seem to support a view of His supernatural origin or divine person were held to be simply irrelevant.

This same motif of irrelevancy is applied to the contingent events recorded in Holy Writ which seem beyond the usual operation of the world of nature by the interpretative school headed by Rudolph Bultmann. To this scholar and his followers. Modern Man becomes the measure for the thinkability of a given historically-recorded event. That which lies beyond the ken of his usual experience is then regarded as without meaning for him, and hence irrelevant for our time.

Yet another application of the principle of reason’s ability to decide the validity or non-validity of the contingent events of history which lie beyond the quality-scope of the usual and the natural is that of the “kerygma-type” of interpretation, by which it is held that it is only a message which can possibly be relevant for Modern Man. This message is held to be derivable from a historical reductionism, by which only existential factors are recognized as meaningful. Applied to the Christian faith, this frequently narrows the range of the possibly-relevant to one pivotal event in the career of the Church—usually the Incarnation or the Resurrection.

Yet another contemporary treatment of the contingent events described in the Four Gospels is that centering in the assertion that they contain, not history as it is usually understood, but Heilsgeschichte, or saving history. This motif is a modern construct, which in its pure form asserts that the application of the usual positive norm of time has no place in the interpretation of “holy history,” whose movement is upon a plane quite different from that of positive history.

A final attempt to deal with the relation of positive history to theology is taking shape in the form of a “commitment theology” which begins with a retreat from all forms of rational footing, including a reliance upon historical facts. It holds, then, that the final and unassailable ground upon which the Protestant must place his feet is that of an irrational commitment, an abdication of rational responsibility for content of religious faith. The only intellectual commitment which is relevant is a commitment to the methodology of criticism, which “hopes against hope” that this will take him beyond reason and beyond history to something ultimate. It is difficult to distinguish between this and historical nihilism.

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