The Lusts of Modern Theology

Dean Inge, an English churchman of another generation, cautioned that the theologian who weds himself to contemporary thought will find himself a widower tomorrow. Recent liberal and radical theologians have failed to take Inge’s marriage counsel too seriously. Lusting after modernity, they have united their Christian faith to some fashionable view, only to discover that the partners are incompatible. The result has been that many recent theological hopefuls have divorced themselves from Christian views, retaining only the name and surviving influence of their previous Christian association.

The theologian and preacher who intends to remain faithful to the essential biblical word must be alert to alien ideas that pass themselves off as Christian by retaining the name from their broken union. My purpose in this article is to look into some basic aspects of modern thought that have been united in a marriage of convenience with Christian faith.

Foremost among those characteristics is the abandonment of essentialism.

Until recently it was the generally accepted view, both in philosophy and in theology, that each person has a genuine selfhood, a distinctive human nature. Each begins his existence with a real “essence,” or a “substantive self,” as it is called, that then develops through life’s experiences. There is an “I” beyond, behind, and within all the psychic activities of individual life. The reality of this continuing substance, or essence, was considered a fundamental postulate of all truth and faith, and as such it had not only the backing of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition but also the blessing of the church.

Now this is supposedly obsolete. We are now assured that there is no such “static self’ behind man’s actions and functions. The self is only an observable unity of these actions and functions; just that, and no more.

This of course has serious implications for the doctrines of God and Christ. Following the lead of Paul Tillich, several modern theologians have denied outright the biblical view of God as divine personality. For if there is no distinctive selfhood in the individual man, made in the image of God, such a personal selfhood cannot be credited to God either. The term God is no more than a code word for a mere succession of ideas or activities or whatever that religious people pronounce divine. However God is conceived, we are told, he is not to be thought of as a personal being.

Such a conception is quite at odds with the biblical picture of God, and with what Christians know and believe him to be. In the Scriptures, God is revealed as the living God, as the possessor of a distinct selfhood. It does not make Christian faith easier to accept if God is presented as the ground of being or a stream of activity or some other such notion.

It is in Christology that the attempted wedding of this modern denial of the substantival self with biblical truth has been the most reckless. Since man’s nature is understood in terms of activity and function, so, too, it is argued, must Christ’s. He, like the rest of us, is the sum total of his actions and functions. True, in his case, these came to be esteemed as having a distinctiveness sufficient to designate him divine.

So there has arisen a crop of Christologies that deny that Christ is a unity of two distinct natures in one person. The right question to be asked concerning the person of Christ, it is asserted, is not “What is his nature?,” the question with which Chalcedon was preoccupied, but “What is his function?”

Although the answers given to the question of Christ’s function differ considerably in terminology, there is general agreement that when Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of God, and of God as “my Father,” he did not mean “of one substance with the Father.” Instead Christ is to be designated divine because he acted in a unique way. So, for example, John Knox, in The Humanity and Divinity of Christ (1967) contends that Jesus was credited with the terms of divinity solely because the church came to believe that God acted in him in a marked fashion. And Nels Ferré in his Jesus: Christ and Lord considers our Lord’s deity to consist in his possessing the agapé content of God’s matchless love.

Allied to the current view of human selfhood is the so-called dynamic view of the universe. Historical theology was framed in the belief of what we may call the “created-givenness” of the world. But this view, under the tutelage of Lloyd Morgan, A. N. Whitehead, and Charles Hartshome, is written off as static. Instead we are bidden to conceive of reality as essentially creative, as a process of becoming. There is no fixed order; there is movement, activity, development. This creative activity gives birth to mutations that bring forth new existences. There is thus both continuity of process and the emergence of novelty.

The union of this idea with theology has not been all bad. In some respects it has enriched our conception of God. On the other hand, it has had baneful consequences for Christology. It yields at best a Nestorian view of the person of Christ. For when Christology is approached from the perspective of process thought, Christ is seen merely as a signal mutation within the creative process.

One of the most thorough attempts to unite process thought with Christology is that of Norman Pittenger. In both The Word Incarnate (1959) and Christology Reconsidered (1974) he conceives of God as continually acting creatively in the world and somehow finding fulfillment in the process. Within this continuity of process, according to Pittenger, there has emerged in Christ a genuine novelty. But, then, every person is also a mutation in the development process; each is, in a real sense, a new product. God is at work in every man, but in the man Jesus of Nazareth he found full existential response, so that, in Christ, the union of God and man was “clinched” and “established.” The difference between Christ and other men is, therefore, only a matter of degree; in Christ the divine indwelling was raised to the highest pitch. Pittenger readily admits that this view can hardly be distinguished from Nestorianism.

A second major characteristic of present-day thinking is the repudiation of “verticalism.”

Early theology climaxing in Augustine strongly asserted God’s otherness from the world, and his action in it as sovereignly direct and immediate. During the Middle Ages, despite the counter horizontal emphasis made by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, this relation of God to the world was conceived virtually in a deistic fashion. God had brought the world into existence as a finished article, and it was to be accepted as it was. To interfere with it was considered irreligious and impious. This reasoning was advanced at the time against every scientific attempt to improve man’s lot. It was the church’s task to relieve what misery it could by acts of charity without seeking to alter God’s unalterable cosmos.

One prominent illustration of this attitude comes from the reign of Philip II of Spain. A suggestion was submitted to the authorities for improving navigation of the rivers Tajo and Manzanares so that easier communication might be had with isolated groups of the population. But the request was refused, on the grounds, according to the official report, that “if God had so willed that these rivers should be navigable then he would have made them so with a single word, as he formerly did when he said ‘fait lux.’ ” The report goes on to declare, “It would be a bold infringement of the right of Providence if human hands were to venture to try to improve what God for unfathomable reasons has left unfinished.”

The sixteenth-century Reformers did not greatly change this situation. For by portraying God’s relation to the world almost exclusively in terms of the divine omnipotence, they virtually excluded God from his world. The Reformation witnessed the abandonment of natural theology and introduced a fideism in which knowledge of God was restricted to faith alone. Thus was God left outside the rational sphere, the sphere that meanwhile was to dominate the life of Western man.

If the Reformers, for the very best of reasons, seemed to exclude God from the world, Kant in his turn certainly put the reality of God outside the realm of pure reason. But he did allow him a place within the areas of practical reason and morality. Schleiermacher, consequently, sought to relocate God in the emotions and feelings, an area where the rational understanding had not yet penetrated. But soon Freud was to appear and subject this region to scientific analysis, with the result that here, too, no place was allowed for God.

And so, with God edged out of the world both outside and inside man’s experience, where else could religion have scope but in action? It was concluded therefore that “the true interpretation of the meaning revealed by theology is achieved only in historical praxis [practical use]” (Gustavo Gutierrez, The Theology of Liberation, 1974 [English translation]). So general has this emphasis on praxis become that much contemporary theology is almost exclusively horizontal, and its validity is judged according to the measure allowed to man’s active participation in building for himself a better world. Man is consequently conceived as a one-dimensional being whose destiny is planned toward a more human future. Commitment to the world is then equated with the experience of faith, and the church’s sole reason for existence is to be in “the vanguard in humanizing the world” (Edward Schillebeeckx, God and the Future of Man).

This thesis, which has come to full flower in the theology of liberation, began with the publication of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung in 1964 (English translation, Theology of Hope, 1967). Moltmann emphasized the cosmic range of Christian hope and regarded eschatology as the dominating motif of the whole New Testament message. In contast to the Reformers, he discounted the desire for individual salvation and stressed the universal and social application of God’s reconciling work in Christ. The New Testament salvation (sõtria), he insists, must be understood as shalõm (peace) in the Old Testament sense. “This does not mean,” he then declares, “merely salvation of the soul, individual rescue from the evil world, comfort from the troubled conscience, but also the realization of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation.” Yet Moltmann did allow for an ultimate fulfillment of the eschatological promise by an act of God from beyond history, at an end-time, with the parousia of Christ.

But it was precisely on this score, that he had dispatched God to the future, that he was criticized. The critics asserted that he did “not keep sufficiently in mind the participation of man in his own liberation” (Gutierrez) and so, according to Hugo Assmann, “ran the risk of relegating man to the role of an inactive spectator.”

Moltmann yielded to the criticism. In subsequent works he took a more radical view of how the kingdom of God is to be brought about in human society, giving man a more active share in establishing its universal sway. This stronger stress on the fulfillment of “the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation” comes out in such declarations as this: “The humanity of man comes to its reality in the human kingdom of the Son of Man. In the kingdom of the Son of Man man’s likeness to God is fulfilled. Through this human man God finally asserts his rights over his creation” (Man: Christian Anthropology in the Conflicts of the Present, 1974 [English translation]). The Christian consciousness must consequently be a consciousness of mission. Such a consciousness, however, “does not ask about God’s universal plan for the coming ages, but asks rather about Christ’s universal mission to all men” (Planning and Hope, 1971 [English translation]). In his Religion, Revolution and the Future, the second word in the title struck a welcoming note with those who had come to believe that a more hostile posture was required of those who, in the interest of the kingdom of God, sought the liberation of man from all injustice and the equalization of all in a humanized society.

Yet Moltmann’s allowances were not enough for those who thought that the increasing radicalization of social praxis, the building of a just society based on a new relationship of the means of production, is the only way of establishing the kingdom of God.

The theologies of liberation and revolution drew upon several sources, including the naturalism of Feuerbach; Blondel’s “philosophy of action”; Bloch’s idea of history as open-ended, so that there is always the possibility of the novem, the new; and Marx’s thesis that social conditions are but the reflex and echo of the economic conditions, so that change for the better can be brought about only by the revolutionary redistribution of the economic forces of society. According to one advocate of the theology of revolution, Carl E. Braaten, “the vision of the radically new is what links revolutionary action with eschatological hope.” But basic to such theologizing is the obliteration of the natural-supernatural dualism that has always been a presupposition of biblical faith. Thus Gutierrez declares, “The temporal-spiritual and profane-sacred antitheses are based on the natural-supernatural distinctions. But the theological evolution of the last term has tended to stress the unity which eliminates all dualism” (The Theology of Liberation).

There is, therefore, only one world, the secular. We are to look to this world and not to one beyond for “true life.” In this connection the story of the Exodus from Egypt is regarded as “paradymatic.” Israel was promised a land in which it could establish itself as a society free from misery and alienation. In the whole episode the active participation of Israel is emphasized. “By working,” therefore, at “transforming the world, breaking out of his servitude, building a just society, and assuming his destiny in history, man forgets himself. In Egypt, work is alienation and, far from building a just society, contributes rather to increasing injustice and to widening the gap between exploiters and the exploited” (Gutierrez, The Theology of Liberation). So “man’s freedom is to become a praxis that makes the world different”; for “God needs man for the creation of his future” and “awaits for what man can give to the new tomorrow” (Rubem A. Alves, A Theology of Human Hope).

The result of all this is the rejection of a climactic return of Christ to bring an end to human history and to set up God’s eternal kingdom of righteousness beyond history. For the hope of the kingdom is to be realized within the historic process, almost totally by human endeavor. When salvation is viewed from the perspective of alienation, at once political, economic, and racial, the only right Christian response, it is maintained, is what Johannes Metz calls “a political theology,” which he equates with an “eschatological theology,” and which Braaten calls “the politics of eschatological hope for a society.” The ethical outworking of this thesis, as Rubem Alves sees it, is “the creation of a new world” by the liberation of man from the ills—such as poverty, exploitation, and disease—that result from alienation. In Moltmann’s theology of hope, God and man work together to bring about man’s salvation. In the theologies of liberation and revolution, man does it alone, with perhaps a helping hand from God now and then to steady him on the course.

Can what purports to be a Christian theology remain essentially biblical if it is squeezed into the framework of an alien metaphysic? It must surely be evident that Christian faith cannot remain biblical if it loses contact with its biblical foundations. To proclaim it truly one must maintain its own presuppositions. For faith has, as Augustine says, its own “secret metaphysic.” That is to say, there is a biblical world view in which alone Christian doctrines find their reality and their rationale. One pillar of this biblical world view is that there is a spiritual realm that cannot be totally equated with the material and the physical. If the spiritual sphere is denied and the doctrines of the Gospel are confined within a one-dimensional framework, the result must be an unbiblical faith, a Christianity cut off from historical revelation.

To have a biblical Word we must take with it the biblical world view. To maintain the Christian message we must retain the Christian metaphysic. The justification of this metaphysic is the task of the apologist. It falls to him to give cogency and certainty to Christian theism, in which context alone the biblical revelation of God comes with saving significance.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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