Contemporary Theology and ‘Church Material’

On the surface the “bread and butter” principles of biblical interpretation (or hermeneutics) of evangelical and non-evangelical theory seem to be the same. Both stress grammatical interpretation, historical interpretation, and the necessity of understanding the culture in which a given book of Scripture was written. Both reject the Roman Catholic authoritarian interpretation by the teaching magisterium, and both recognize the dangers of an unrestrained allegorical interpretation.

Yet in following these standard rules the evangelical theologian and the non-evangelical theologian construct radically differing theologies. Some other factor must be at work to cause this digression in theology.

The evangelical stays close to the methodology of the Reformers. This means dedication to a certain pattern of authority in theology. The pattern runs like this: Jesus Christ is the fountain of living revelation for the Church; he chose twelve men as apostles to be his official and inspired interpreters of his mission, message, and deeds; these apostles and their immediate understudies wrote the New Testament; Christian theology is derived from a careful scientific interpretation of the New Testament.

During the nineteenth century, liberal or critical New Testament scholars were greatly influenced by the scientific history and literary criticism developed during the Enlightenment (documented in Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition). The net result was that another step was inserted into the Reformers’ and evangelicals’ program as outlined above. Between the apostles and the New Testament were added “church materials” (sometimes called Gemeindetheologie—theology of the church). These materials are very diverse in character, depending on whether they occur in the Gospels or in the Pauline writings. In general “church materials” are additions, interpretations, revisions of original materials, and unintentional accretions that came into the oral traditions and documents between the time of the apostles and the writing of the New Testament.

Inserting church material into the historical lineage from Christ to the New Testament has great theological significance. This is why, despite the apparent similarity of their hermeneutical rules, evangelicals and non-evangelicals produce such divergent theologies.

If the New Testament contains a large body of distortive church material, then the scholar or theologian has the right to sift the New Testament with the intention of discovering what reliable materials are there. And so the New Testament as it stands written can no longer be viewed as the unimpeachable source of Christian theology.

This does not mean that all non-evangelicals come to the same conclusions about the original nature of New Testament teachings. There is enormous variation. Nevertheless non-evangelicals concur on two methodological principles:

1. Because the New Testament is interlarded with church material, the theologian or scholar must sift through the New Testament to determine what is authentic historical material.

2. The scholar or theologian also has the right to attempt to reconstruct the original message of Jesus and his apostles and is therefore not bound to historic formulations of the essence of Christianity.

The validity of these two assumptions came to the surface in Bonhoeffer’s disagreement with Barth’s basic theological method. Bonhoeffer accused Barth of holding a dated revelational positivism. This means that Barth took the New Testament as it is and permitted no critical assessment of the text to challenge its complete normative authority in theology. Barth’s position has been sloganized in a German proverb, “Eat, bird, or die,” which comes across in English as “Like it or lump it.”

In this connection Bonhoeffer gave Bultmann a pat on the back. Though not a disciple of Bultmann, he did honor Bultmann for his honesty. Bultmann fearlessly faced the problems any modern intelligent man faces when he reads the New Testament, said Bonhoeffer; such a man recognizes the critical problems posed by the kind of documents that make up the New Testament, and recognizes the datedness of the conceptual apparatus of the New Testament.

Many evangelical New Testament scholars admit that there are church materials in the New Testament. The Great Commission (Matt. 28:19) has a strong trinitarian statement, whereas baptism as practiced in the Book of Acts was in the name of the Lord. It is presumed that the later strong trinitarian formula was put in by Matthew where perhaps a simpler formula was said. In Mark 2:4 the men bringing the paralyzed man to Jesus dug through the thatched or mud roof. Luke, writing to people who had a different kind of architecture, says they removed the tiles (Luke 5:19). When Matthew told the parable of the Marriage Feast he had city dwellers in mind, whereas when Luke told it he was thinking of country people (cf. Matt. 22:1–14; Luke 14:16–24). John’s Gospel is in some sense church material not only because of the enormous differences between John and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) but because the style of Jesus’ speeches and the style of the author’s editorializing are the same.

The non-evangelical approach to church materials is radically different. The classic is perhaps Rudolf Bultmann’s The History of the Synoptic Tradition; when he is through with the Synoptic Gospels, the historically trustworthy sayings and deeds of Jesus would scarcely fill a demitasse. The non-evangelical works with two assumptions: (1) Faith elaborates. That means the early Christian communities made up (with good intentions, of course) all sorts of sayings that Jesus never said, and all sorts of deeds that Jesus never did. The result is that the Gospels are heavily interlarded with faith’s elaborations—church materials. (2) The contemporary scholar has the right to assess these materials to see if he need believe them or not. In German this is known as Sachkritik, usually translated “content criticism.” Thus the non-evangelical may throw out the Incarnation as unbelievable and the Virgin Birth as a myth; he may interpret the Resurrection as “existential new birth” in the minds of the disciples. Jesus didn’t walk on water—that is contrary to the laws of physics; and dead men tell no tales, to say nothing of coming from the tomb like Lazarus.

Granting that there are church materials in the Gospels, the evangelical believes they are limited. What is there became part of the text for reasons of clarification or communication to a special set of readers or to a later group of readers. It is not a distortion or betrayal of the original Christian revelation but is part of the complex process whereby revelation becomes cast into the form of an inspired and authoritative text (and canon) for the Christian Church.

This is very different from the position of men like Ebeling, Fuchs, and Bultmann (to name but a few) that there is a great deal of church material, that it must be sifted for credibility, and that the interpreter has the right to reject any given passage either as spurious or as containing kinds of material that so-called modern man cannot believe. If a theologian or New Testament scholar takes such a view of the Gospels, there is no question that the theology he writes will differ radically from an evangelical theology.

The evangelical believes that whatever church material there may be in the New Testament is on a continuum with the original Christian message. Therefore his theology stems from taking the message as it is in the New Testament. Such a position can be (very briefly) supported by the following:

The assertions that (1) Jesus Christ is someone who is somehow normative for Christian theology (and here there is enormous variation), someone to whom Christianity must be related if it is to remain Christianity, and the assertion that (2) the New Testament is a document highly corrupted through the interlarding of church materials (frequently called legends as well as myths), are mutually incompatible.

To put in the form of a question: Is it really conceivable that God’s word of redemption, and God’s highest revelation to man in Jesus Christ, upon whom all our hopes rest in this world and the world to come—is it conceivable that these should rest upon a document that has been highly corrupted with church material and therefore has as its historical basis nothing more substantial than toothpicks?

To the evangelical, if the New Testament is so corruptly interlarded with church materials, then the most reasonable response is not to sift the New Testament with the hope of recovering the pristine message but rather be agnostic about the New Testament; this would seem to reflect a greater honesty than the boasted honesty of Bultmann.

On the other hand, we think the whole of Romans and First Corinthians 15:1–8 are fatal to the non-evangelical assessment of Christianity. First, their Pauline authorship is hardly questioned. Second, Paul’s understanding of Christianity dates from within about three years of the death of Christ. Hence his witness to the essence of Christianity is within three years of the death of Christ, a period far too short to account for the development of any significant body of distortive church materials.

With reference to Romans, Paul did not found the church at Rome. He could write to that church only what was accepted in all the churches as the true teachings of Christ and his apostles. Romans is dated about 57 A.D.

In First Corinthians 15:1–8 Paul uses the language of tradition which means he is expressing not personal opinion but the common heritage of the churches. This letter was written about 55 A.D. So damaging is First Corinthians 15:1–8 to non-evangelical theory that every device possible has been used to break its back. Mainly the effort is to show it is an addition to the text. But the situation is simple. First Corinthians 15:1–8 takes us back to Christianity as understood at the time of Paul’s conversion—33 A.D. If the back of this passage is not broken, it breaks the back of non-evangelical theology.

Romans and First Corinthians as genuine Pauline letters and as reflecting (1) the earliest tradition possible of what the Church believed and (2) what the earliest churches generally agreed upon—these substantiate an evangelical theology, not the various versions of non-evangelical theology.

This position about church material is not intended to stifle a critical investigation of the New Testament by cutting criticism off in an a priori way. I concur with what Machen wrote:

On the other hand, I have never been able to give myself the comfort which some devout believers seem to derive from a contemptuous attitude toward the men on the other side of the great debate. I have never been able to dismiss the “higher critics” en masse with a few words of summary condemnation [Contemporary American Theology, I, 257].

Nor do I wish to sweep under the rug some very hard problems, such as the divergencies of the resurrection accounts.

However, I believe one of the great dividing points between evangelical and non-evangelical theologies is how church material is assessed. Those who think this material significantly corrupted the original message of Jesus write one kind of theology. Those who think it is very limited in amount and is in harmony with the other material end up with an evangelical theology.

As long as this impasse continues, evangelicals must stand alone in their program of theology. A New Testament with historical integrity has a ring of truth (Phillips’s expression in reacting to what he considered the exaggerated skepticism of so many New Testament scholars). It is therefore the primary document of theology for the Church, the inspired document for its theology, the authentic document for its theology, and the authoritative document for its theology. It certainly makes heavy demands upon the best of our scholarship to learn it properly, but it does not need radical, critical sifting that attempts to find some real stratum of bedrock truth below its present literary or documentary form.

Bernard Ramm is professor of systematic theology at American Baptist Seminary of the West, Covina, California. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and is the author of about a dozen books.

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