The Hegelian Dialectic in Theology: Second of Two Parts

The Hegelian dialectic, as applied to the historiography of the origins of Christianity, is, as Oscar Cullmann has said, a scientific dogma from which we should free ourselves. We will be able to do so in all honesty, however, only if we are able to give genuine substance to our affirmation of the distinctiveness of biblical revelation.

In almost all modern scholarship dealing with the origins of Christianity, there seems to be a general acceptance of the dialectical thesis of two trends in primitive Christianity—a Jewish Christianity of the earliest time, located in Palestine, and a Gentile Christianity of later development, located outside Palestine in the environment of Hellenism. Here the previously mentioned article by Oscar Cullmann (“A New Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel,” Expository Times, October, 1959, p. 8) supports the view that the Hegelian schematization is not satisfactory. In the Fourth Gospel, Cullmann states, there are incontestably Hellenistic elements but at the same time these are “closely related precisely to those Jewish and Jewish-Christian currents which we know particularly well, thanks to the recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Thus Hellenization did not arise as a later type of Christianity. Rather, any Hellenistic elements found in the New Testament must have coexisted with the origins of Palestinian Christianity, where Palestinian Judaism itself was not so homogeneous as we are sometimes tempted to believe.

In replying to those who have relativized the biblical revelation by the thesis that the New Testament has been influenced by pagan cults, we need to remember the following points:

1. Definite information about the doctrines and rites of the pagan cults in New Testament times is scantier than we would like, no doubt because of the secrecy to which the initiated were bound. Although the influence of these cults was widely diffused through the Roman Empire, literature is scarce.

2. The problem of chronology remains. It is often impossible to say for certain whether particular mystery rites or beliefs were contemporaneous with early Christianity or emerged later. It is wrong, therefore, to assume that Christianity imitated the mystery religions, when the opposite could just as well have been true.

3. Whereas the history-of-religions school unearthed invaluable information about the times surrounding the early Christian Church, James Moffatt has a point when in Grace in the New Testament he shows how Reitzenstein and Bousset, in reading back the main doctrines of the mystery religions into first-century Christianity, were in fact “more ingenious than convincing.”

4. The history-of-religions school tended to relativize Christian revelation by finding countless parallels in the surrounding cults of that day, but that has not been the only approach to this study. In Sweden, in the works of Nathan Soderblom (1903) and Einar Billing (1907), these same comparative methods have been used, not to relativize Christian revelation, but to emphasize the distinctiveness of early Christianity over against the non-Christian religions.

What impresses one about the New Testament message is its distinctive originality and not its similarity to the mythology of the mystery religions contemporaneous with the primitive Church. Although Christianity emerged in an environment from which it inherited a language and thought-forms, the essential message of the Church, the “kerygma,” was in conflict with the spirit of its day (cf. 1 Cor. 1:22, 23). Whatever thought-forms it needed to use, in whatsoever language or culture, the apostles were intent that the message was not to be accommodated or changed (cf. Gal. 1:6–9). The words of the language they were called upon to use in the missionary situation of the Hellenistic world were themselves filled with the new wine of this distinctive message of resurrection (Acts 17:18–21, 32–34).

There is in the New Testament an unmistakable dislike for the popular myths of the day. The early Church found itself in lively conflict with the polytheistic and syncretistic outlook of its contemporary world. This is borne out from the record itself, for in each of the five instances where “myth” is used in the New Testament, it is used with utter contempt and disdain (cf. 1 Tim. 1:4; 4:7; 2 Tim. 4:4; Tit. 1:13, 14; 2 Pet. 1:16). In First Timothy 4:6, “myth” is contrasted with “the words of faith and of good doctrine,” by which was meant the proclamation of the historic facts of the resurrection glory of Christ, as related by apostolic eyewitnesses and not in terms of sophisticated myths (2 Pet. 1:16). Giovanni Miegge writes, “The attitude of the New Testament writings towards myth reflects the contemptuously critical judgment of the popular philosophy and the rational literature of the time” (Gospel and Myth in the Thought of Rudolf Bultmann).

Dean Inge points out that the early Christians refused to come to any terms with the accommodating spirits of the syncretistic religions (1 Cor. 8:5 ff.). The lowly man of Galilee raised to glory would tolerate no rivals, for he was none other than “the only-begotten God” (“God” is used in many reliable texts of John 1:18). The fact that the early Christians refused to come to terms with the religions of their day is evidenced in the great persecutions. What impressed the heathen world was not that the Christian religion was so like their own but that it was so distinctively different.

In his article on “Myth” in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary, Gustav Stählin is in keeping with the whole tone of the dictionary when he stresses, by means of careful philosophical study and comparison, the originality of the categories of the New Testament thought, in contrast with Hellenism and contemporary Judaism. Although the study of the Gentile world throws considerable light on the background of the primitive Christian Church and the setting of the New Testament, H. J. Cadbury concludes that there is a noticeable “absence of traceable Gentile religious influence in the New Testament.” To this J. S. Stewart adds, “It is hard to see why the twentieth century should force upon the first and second centuries parallels which they themselves would not have recognised. Even the syncretizing pagan recognised in Christianity a new thing on the earth” (Man in Christ).

As Dr. John R. Mott has so ably expressed it:

It is proved that the more open-minded, thorough and honest we were in dealing with these non-Christian faiths, and the more just and generous we were, the higher Christ loomed in His absolute uniqueness, sufficiency and supremacy—as One other than the rest, strong among the weak, erect among the fallen, believing among the faithless, clean among the defiled, living among the dead—the fountain-head of vitality, the world’s Redeemer and lord of all [International Review of Missions, Jan., 1931, p. 105].

Particularly important is the consistent way in which the New Testament endorsed its claims about Christ and the Gospel with direct reference to the Old Testament (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1–4).

Ethelbert Stauffer, in New Testament Theology, feels that the New Testament directs us along quite different lines from the conclusions of the history-of-religions school. He points out that although there are a few quotations from the Hellenistic literature in the New Testament, these are ornamental rather than fundamental. There are, furthermore, possible references to rabbinic literature and the Halacha and ideas characteristic of the Alexandrian Jew Philo. By contrast, however, the first thing that strikes one in the New Testament is the immense number of Old Testament quotations. The Old Testament is quoted as an authority of self-evident validity. Moreover, this appeal to the Old Testament grows rather than diminishes in the primitive Church.

What the New Testament writers read in the Old Testament became the starting-point for their own formulation of ideas. The Old Testament concepts of monotheism, creation, man, history, are all basic presuppositions that were accepted by contemporary Judaism and the Church alike. These became something already known and acknowledged, making Christ’s appearing to be in a very real sense “in the fullness of time.” Stauffer thus concludes that when theological concepts in the New Testament are not self-evident, we must turn first to the Old Testament to find their antecedents, and not to the heathen world.

The fact that the New Testament is dependent on the Old, while being a hermeneutical principle of basic importance, nevertheless raises the fundamental problem of semasiology.

Since the New Testament was written in Greek for people living in a Greek-speaking world, the reconstruction from the original Aramaic-speaking Palestinian situation and idiom in which Jesus lived must present problems. Undoubtedly the discovery of the Papyri has shed light on the interpretation of the New Testament. But such philological discoveries must be viewed in perspective, as one takes cognizance not only of the usage of the Greek and the Hellenistic world to which the message was addressed but also of the source of the message within the Hebrew-Aramaic context from which it came.

The real problem is how the Hebraic concepts could possibly be recast into Greek words and yet retain their original sense and meaning. Thorlief Boman deals with the problem of the Hebraic and Greek thought-forms in the New Testament in “The Problem of Ontology” (Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation, edited by W. Klassen and G. F. Snyder). He approaches the problem by looking at the two thought-patterns from a number of different angles:

1. Hebrews experienced the world through listening, whereas the Greeks did so through seeing.

2. Hebraic thought was dynamic, with the world in a state of movement in which God and man are active; the Greek thinking was static, with the search for Immutable Being.

3. The Hebrews lived in Time, with Space sinister; as the Greeks lived in Space in which Time was negative.

4. The Hebrew conceived of existence in terms of History; the Greeks considered existence as Nature.

5. Hebrew imagery was functional, instrumental, nonvisual; Greek imagery was optical and perceptible.

6. Hebrew thought was pragmatic, whereas Greek thought was idealistic.

To this one could add that the Hebrew conceived of knowledge in terms of morality, while the Greek viewed knowledge in terms of intellectualism.

It becames clear, then, that concepts and thought-forms of Hebrew and Greek mentalities are incommensurable and to a point contradictory. The dynamic way of thinking in Hebraic thought must have been difficult to comprehend from the Greek point of view. A classic example of this is found in “Dialogue Theatetus,” where Plato openly declared that he could not understand the teaching of Heraclitus of Ephesus and that it would be necessary to invent a new language to express that teaching correctly. Notwithstanding these logically irreconcilable realms dividing the two languages, Cullmann’s point seems valid when he says that Hebraic thinking and Hellenistic thinking were already in collision at the beginning of Christianity, and not merely in the later ecclesiastical constructions of the New Testament writings and dogma, in which “hellenization” represents a decline from a pure, original Christianity. Boman agrees that the interplay of Hebrew and Greek is very early.

The Septuagint, in which we have the first comprehensive attempt at expressing Hebraic ideas through the medium of Greek words and formulas, seems helpful and important in this discussion. Like Judaism in its translation of the Old Testament, Christianity in its Semitic setting was committed in its missionary program to translate its message from one world into another. This would explain why the Christian writers accepted the Septuagint, for here they found that their work had in part already been done for them. Here was a translation in which the faith of the Old Testament had already been expressed in the Greek.

Their real problem was a missionary one, not unlike the task of Bible translation in our own day. Dr. Eugene A. Nida has pointed out that often a literal translation of the Bible into a heathen tongue conveys an entirely different meaning to the hearers than is intended. Thus a word in the idiom of the people must be introduced in order to convey the true meaning of the message at its very source. Although Greek ideas, words, and idioms were employed to convey the message, what is important is that during the period of the interplay of Hebrew and Greek thought, the Greek words were themselves filled with new theologicial intent, under the influence of the theological concepts embodied in the Hebrew words they were intended to represent. Thus, for example, hilaskesthai, normally used of man’s act in appeasing a god in the Hellenistic environment, already in the Septuagint was employed to represent kipper, in the sense of God’s act of expiation, in the Hebrew context. The translation had to convey the message as understood at its source.

All this is important, for it endorses the contention that the pursuit of the Hegelian dialectic is both false and unprofitable. The basic thesis is that the Hellenization of the message meant the departure from the original message. This the New Testament Church would surely not have tolerated.

Also important is the fact that the original gospel tradition did not arise merely in the mission preaching or in the communal instruction of the primitive Church. The Gospel is sui generis and has its sitz im leben in Jesus himself.

This thesis cuts clean across the Hegelian dialectic schematization. Bultmann, not unlike Wrede, contends that Jesus by no means considered himself as one with a unique divine commission. Bultmann’s study of the so-called forms in which the gospel traditions were handed down orally, before they were stabilized in writing in the Gospels as we have them today, led him to deep misgivings about the historicity of their content. These, he argued, presented Jesus not so much as he was but as the primitive Church came to believe him to be. It was a record of the faith of the Church rather than the facts of history.

This point of view has been challenged of late by Professor Harald Riesenfeld of Uppsala, in his study in the limits of Formgeschichte (The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginning). Riesenfeld’s thesis is that the gospel tradition originates in Jesus himself, and not merely in the Church’s understanding of him. It is the historical link between the Jesus of history and the proclamation of the Gospel by the Church that is missing in Bultmann’s approach. Riesenfeld points out that Jesus was a teacher, especially in his relation to his disciples. He gave them instruction, and in this we are reminded mutatis mutandis of the method of the Jewish rabbis. This implies that he taught his disciples, “and furthermore that he made them learn by heart.” Thus the apostles had a distinctive part in the transmission of the Gospel, which had its origin in Jesus himself. Birger Gerhardsson has substantiated this point of view (Memory and Manuscript).

Here we agree with Oscar Cullmann, who states: “An essential characteristic of the early Church’s faith in Christ was its conviction that Jesus believed Himself to be the divine Son of Man, the Servant of God.… The early Church believed in Christ’s messiahship only because it believed that Jesus believed Himself to be the Messiah. In this respect Bultmann’s faith in Christ is fundamentally different from that of the early Church” (The Christology of the New Testament), and again, “Jesus Himself, not the early Church, is the Source of the command to proclaim him the Messiah.” There is no reason why we should not believe that Jesus is the Messiah and thus share the convictions of the early Church, which have their origin in Jesus himself. The only thing to prevent us is our choosing to remain within the system of the Hegelian dialectic. But how could the primitive Church possibly have had a greater consciousness of Christ than Christ who gave it that consciousness?

An alternative to the Hegelian dialectic in biblical studies enables one to develop a method of addressing theological enquiry to the whole Bible, the Bible as a whole. Wingren has said that apart from the two exegetical systems of Old and New Testament “there ought to be a method of enquiry in which the Old and New Testaments are read together under the presupposition that there is a common factor expressed in both the ‘testaments,’ and therefore in the Bible (Creation and Law). This enables us to expound Scripture as a whole, without having to use one set of hermeneutical principles for the Old Testament and another for the New.

The real task of theology will not be a radical recasting of the fundamental categories of the Scriptures, as some urge on the grounds that our age cannot accept these categories. Granted, there must be a firm reiteration of the message of the Gospel in such a way that men will be able to understand it. But we need to remember that even in New Testament times this message was a “stumbling block” and “foolishness” to those who would not believe. If we break away from the underlying idea of the Hegelian dialectic, we will come to realize that if modern philosophical language cannot accept the word of Scripture, we are in no position to change the message to accommodate the spirit of the age. As Helmut Thielicke has said, where modern thinking is a revolt against God, then “even the terminology of the modern myths must make an act of repentance if it is to become a suitable vehicle for the kerygma.”

The problem may not always be that men do not understand the categories or the message; it may be that they choose not to know it. If Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis is true, if there is in our time “a pride of power … which does not recognize the contingent and dependent character of its life and believes itself to be the author of its own existence, the judge of its own values, and the master of its own destiny” (The Nature and Destiny of Man), then we must accept the fact that this message will not always be acceptable.

The preaching of the Cross and the Resurrection was not acceptable in its original setting, nor has it been acceptable in any age where men chose not to believe. We must glory in the message itself, and may it please God through the preaching of this Word to save those who believe.

An Open Letter To Linda Kasabian

DEAR LINDA,

All I know about you is what I read in the papers of your testimony at the Sharon Tate murder trials. But I felt I just had to write. You’ve been in the public eye so much lately that I suppose it’s only natural that you’ve been on my mind.

Whatever else the long testimony about your teen years, about life with Charlie Manson and his “family,” and about the grisly murders at the actress’s mansion a year ago reveals, it shows that you are an impressionable young woman who has been seeking—desperately—to find the meaning of life and who you are. And to find God.

Truly, you’ve searched almost everywhere. You’ve tried drugs, sex, marriage, motherhood, “hip” philosophy, even brutality. And if your testimony can be believed (I for one am inclined to accept it), somewhere along the line you realized that none of these routes was leading you to the peace and fulfillment you craved.

Like you, I believe in visions. If you now believe you are an emissary from God sent to tell the world that Manson isn’t the Christ you once thought he was—but rather, “the devil” and a “false prophet,” then that latter vision is nearer the truth than the former one. Charlie talked about love, but he made you afraid. Perfect love, says the Bible, casts out fear. Charlie used to say, “Never ask why.” The Scriptures tell us “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Now you are free, physically, because you were the state’s star witness in a sensational trial that has gripped the nation for weeks. But you will be free—really free—from the bondage of sin, when you know the Truth. I want to tell you about that Truth, Linda—you and the many young people today who are trying to turn on to reality in a myriad myopic ways. You were close when you were “into the Jesus thing.” But the way to God isn’t through pills or pot, however pleasant the euphoric illusion. And it isn’t through a wild-eyed mystic who preaches love but practices hate, even if he does wear the long hair and beard often associated with the One with whom you confused him.

The Truth is Jesus Christ. Oh, you won’t find him in some head shop. And, like so many of your generation, you may have trouble finding him in a stained-glass sanctuary. You can learn about him in the Bible. He is alive and well, living in the the hearts of thousands who acknowledge him as Lord. He loves you with an eternal, undying love. He’s already at work in your heart. The tug you’ve been feeling is the Holy Spirit, telling you God wants you to be a member of his family. Christ wants your love in return. The moment you confess your sins to Christ, God will forgive you. Christ died for your sins, Linda—and mine. He can forgive the most heinous ones as easily as those “respectable” sins of “good church people.”

Charlie Manson was afraid of people with a different skin color, and he is charged with killing seven persons to start a race riot. Jesus Christ loved all men so much that he gave his life that everyone who believes in him may live forever.

There’s a choice of heroes, Linda. You decide. And when you’re free to do so, please help other young people to find the real Jesus Christ. He’s closer than they think!

In His love,

RUSSELL CHANDLER

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