Thielicke on Trial

American theology—the saying goes—is the elephants’ graveyard of German heresies. The radical views of the German theological faculties eventually cross the Atlantic and here find their last resting place. Why? In part, at least, because of the veneration of American scholars in general and American theologians in particular for the world of German university scholarship. The logic is as doubtful as it is pervasive: we modeled our graduate faculties on the German plan in the nineteenth century, so we continue to look to German scholarship for our sustenance.

For the American evangelical, this approach poses a cruel problem. Since the rise of modern biblical criticism in the eighteenth century, the German theological faculties have served up the most radical attacks on Christian orthodoxy: Graf-Kuenen-Wellhausen documentary criticism of the Hexateuch, the Tübingen school’s caesura between Jesus and Paul, Schleiermacher and Ritschl’s subjectivizings of Christian theology, Dibelius and Bultmann’s form-critical dismemberment of the New Testament, and so on. Where could the American evangelical turn for German mentors? Since the days of Theodor Zahn, few candidates have been available. Today, Helmut Thielicke is by all odds the favorite.

Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Hamburg, internationally known through his writings and speaking tours, and a popular preacher, Thielicke has much that appeals to American evangelicalism. Unlike Pannenberg or Cullmann, he avoids rigorous epistemological questions; in line with most modern contemporary theological writing, he never defines his terms so precisely that one is forced to make clean distinctions between truth and error, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Yet he identifies himself with evangelicalism—and with Anglo-American evangelicalism at that! What other modern German theologian has even recognized that Spurgeon exists? Yet Thielicke actually produced an anthology lauding the English preacher (Encounter with Spurgeon [reprinted by Baker]). Eerdmans has been especially zealous in placing Thielicke before the American evangelical public (A Little Exercise for Young Theologians; Out of the Depths; The Hidden Question of God; The Evangelical Faith).

To be sure, Thielicke’s appeal for evangelicals goes deeper than this. He opposes the more radical Bultmannianism and post-Bultmannianism that still dominates much of German theology; his Theological Ethics supports the didactic (“third”) use of the law over against situationism. But too often overlooked are yawning chasms between Thielicke’s theology and the historic evangelical faith that insists with Luther and the Reformers that “the Scriptures have never erred.”

Thielicke’s mediating bibliology is painfully evident from his little volume, How Modern Should Theology Be? (Fortress); as Hugo Meynell perceptively observed in reviewing the book for Religious Studies (September, 1971), Thielicke’s claim that the Gospels should be viewed as documents related to preaching and “as such are not merely historical is really to evade rather than to resolve the main point at issue between the conservatives and the radicals.… The conservative case is that, if the Gospels are as inaccurate historically and as eschatologically misleading as is alleged by most of the radicals, and if their real significance is exhausted in the subjective impact they have on people here and now, it is all up with ‘Christianity’ in any sense of the term worth having; and hence that the more extreme radical theologians are rather purveying a substitute for Christianity than a purified version of it. The whole effect of this book, clear, honest, and well-informed as it is, is rather to conceal the irreconcilable nature of this dilemma than to resolve it.” Thielicke’s Evangelical Faith classes all attempts to begin theologizing with an unqualifiedly reliable biblical revelation as “Cartesian,” and—in what the Reformers would immediately have labeled as Schwärmerei (theological Enthusiasm)—attempts to substitute an encounter with the Spirit as the point de départ for the theological task. (Query: How, then, does one “test the spirits, whether they are of God”—First John 4:1?)

Recently, Thielicke’s position vis-à-vis evangelicalism has become much clearer. At the height of the Scripture controversy in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Thielicke visited the States and identified himself with the breakaway Seminex faction that has since left the LCMS, chiefly over Seminex’s insistence on using historical-critical techniques that impugn the inerrancy of the biblical text. On October 27, 1975, Missouri in Perspective (a pro-Seminex periodical) reported: “During the Oct. 12 interview at Seminex, Dr. Thielicke compared the stand of faith by Seminex students and faculty members to the stand of faith made by some Lutheran pastors and people in Germany during World War II when they resisted efforts by the Nazis to silence them.”

This academic year marked the inauguration of the first independent, evangelical university in Germany—where, traditionally, all universities have been creatures of the state and where university theological instruction has suffered from a doleful absence of church influence. In Thielicke’s own backyard, the Free University of Hamburg came into existence, with full accreditation, through the heroic efforts of Professor Helmut Saake, a recognized scholar. On December 23, 1976, Thielicke wrote an article for the Hamburger Abendblatt in which he declared, inter alia: “The designation ‘Free University’ has been granted to a questionable theological nursery-school enterprise that has no academic teachers of even the slightest rank at its disposal.” He compared the Free University to a hair dressers’ academy and stated that “the Reverend Ike has had two honorary doctorates from such a kind of institution conferred upon himself.”

The Free University immediately filed suit against Thielicke for libel, and on May 20, 1977, the District Court of Hamburg (case no. 74–0–25/77) rendered judgment against him for 5,000 DM money damages, plus 10,000 DM legal fees and court costs (with criminal penalties if not collected), enjoined him from making such accusations at any time in the future, and required him to publish a retraction at his own expense. The latter appeared in June 23, 1977, Hamburger Abendblatt.

The moral of the story for American evangelicals: hero worship is dangerous. Luther put it this way: “God’s Word alone is and should remain the only standard and rule, to which the writings of no man should be regarded equal, but to it everything should be subordinated.”

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