New-theology deviations and modernist substitutions are readily seen to be unacceptable
The truth of the Gospel can find indigenous expression in any age and culture without losing anything of its essential treasure. New insights into the faith once for all delivered are a proper product of ongoing theological study. It is one thing, however, to produce new articulations of the faith using contemporary thought-forms; it is quite another to adopt a prejudice against the supernatural and build a “new theology” on presuppositions unwarranted by Christianity’s early records and incompatible with two thousand years of Christian experience. If we call the latter theological subversion, it is out of a preference for scholarly objectivity, not because we are die-hard ultra-conservatives.
Of course, if the Christianity that the apostles preached to the world in all its saving light, life, and love has actually been a gigantic hoax, and God in his mysterious providence has waited until now to get the real truth of the matter across, then we must wish the theological subversives Godspeed. Perhaps then we should borrow C. S. Lewis’s figure of Christians as God’s fifth column in the enemy-occupied country and call the adherents of the new theology God’s fifth column for the subversion of a Church inimically occupied by trinitarians!
If, however, New Testament Christianity is both historically and theologically reliable, we must decide how to deal with what must surely be reckoned as theological subversion. And, since we hate to be at variance with our brethren, we must try to understand the motivation of those who busy themselves in destroying the truths upon which the Church was built. In the words of the Psalmist: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (11:3).
Frontal attacks on the Christian faith have rarely made great headway. The “God is dead” talk is so far out as to be resisted even by some of the other radical theologians who themselves are actually more subversive, because they are backed by structures of authority. These theologians claim to have the new word for the new age. They want us to think that they alone are intellectually respectable; the rest of us are ridiculed as mythologically oriented people who have not caught up with the Copernican revolution. Among their campaign tactics is the straw-man technique of saying that orthodox Christians are wedded to the pre-Copernican three-story universe. No intelligent Christian, however, has ever considered the Christian Gospel to be tied to any particular concept of the visible universe, although, as Bishop Stephen Neill says in his recent book on The Interpretation of the New Testament, “both theologians and laymen may be excused if they hold the view that the ancient language, if not taken with absurd literalism, is the best that could be found to express certain great religious ideas” (p. 227).
Untenable Conclusions
Despite their alleged up-to-dateness, the theological revolutionaries have been unable to come up with doctrinal conclusions any more exciting than the heretical positions that the really “honest-to-God” scholarship of the Catholic Church rendered untenable long before Copernicus upset the Aristotelian concept of matter adopted by Thomas Aquinas. These positions will doubtless remain untenable long after Martin Heidegger has served as a happy hunting ground for existentialist reinterpretations of Christianity.
The new-theology people picture the contemporary Christian layman as a theological moron who is either puzzled or else unthinkingly comfortable as he repeats the old creedal language in which Christ is said to “come down from heaven,” “descend into hell,” and “ascend into heaven.” But the Christian layman instinctively realizes that these phrases subsume in vivid, concrete images the wealth of mystery and saving truth in the mighty acts about which he reads in the Gospels and which have impinged upon him in his spiritual experience. He also finds the modernist’s substitute language pedantically abstract, verbose, and far less “relevant” and meaningful. To see this, all that theological teachers need is a saving experience of Jesus Christ; and this can happen as readily to the scholar as to the one in the comfortable or uncomfortable pew.
Theological or doctrinal Christianity is the product of Christ’s fulfilled promise to send the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of truth” whose role would include guiding the apostles into all truth—the truth we now have in the New Testament. This is not to say that there has been no ongoing work of the Holy Spirit’s guidance since the apostolic age. But it is to say that there is a certain abiding apostolic foundation for the Christian faith, and that any reconstruction that undermines this foundation is subversive and untrustworthy.
The truth as it is in Jesus has nothing to fear from the new knowledge of and changes in outlook on the universe brought about by ever-continuing scientific and philosophical thought. Evangelical Christians need not apologize for continuing to return to the Bible as the fountainhead of saving truth. Heidegger and Wittgenstein have had no more success in rendering the faith of the Bible untrustworthy than did Descartes and Kant. Nor will existentialist and positivist theologians succeed in producing a reconstructed faith intellectually more convincing than that held by articulate evangelicals who believe that God has spoken and that his Word, incarnate in Christ, will not pass away.
Broken Hammers
Original, first-century Christianity is an anvil on which many hammers have been broken. Its very existence today is a challenge to all to investigate its ongoing power among men of every age and educational level. And its implications for time and eternity are so tremendous that no one can afford not to find out whether it is true or not. The God who is the Author of it, if he is the Author of it, would not be so unjust as not to put within everyone’s reach a sure means of finding out whether it is true or not. Anyone can find out by studying the records of the eye-witnesses and offering himself unreservedly to be taught by God’s Spirit. A man might pray; “O God, I cannot find out by my own unaided wisdom; but if you will show me, I am willing to be made willing to follow all the light you give me.”
The trouble with most unbelievers is not that they are unable but that they are unwilling to believe. They are afraid to know the truth, lest knowing it they will be committed to believing it, and thus to obeying it. Christ is a “stone of stumbling” to everyone who wants to remain in an attitude of suspended judgment, to everyone unwilling to believe because he is unwilling to obey.
No one has a right to subvert or detheologize the Christianity of the New Testament who has not first tried it on its own terms and has not seriously considered its claim that God has taken the initiative in self-revelation, that theological Christianity is the result of that divine initiative, and that the revelatory principle is permanently available and operative (as expressed, for instance, in John 1:12 and 7:17). No one need remain in ignorance; but those who are unwilling to know and believe will remain in darkness.
The Holy Spirit will make you a Christian believer if you will let him. Will you let him? If you do, you will find yourself with a clearly articulated creed. You will find yourself believing from the heart all the theological statements of the historic creeds, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit will enable you to see that your “conservative” Christian faith harmonizes perfectly well with the new knowledge of the universe derived from non-revelational sources. For the Holy Spirit is given precisely “to open men’s eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light.” There has never been, nor will there ever be, any essential deviation from the creeds in men and women who have been taught by God’s Spirit, that Spirit who, as the Nicene Creed says, “spoke by the prophets,” the human authors of the Old and New Testament records.
The Heart Of Theology
The central doctrinal affirmation of theological Christianity, the truths which are a scandal to the unitarian mind and for which Christian martyrs have died, are these: The en-man-ment of God the eternal Word; his atoning death on the cross; his mighty resurrection; his glorious ascension as the God-Man, the Mediator between God and man, to the strategic position of “all power” at God’s “right hand,” where through the Holy Spirit, his vice-gerent in the continuing stream of history, he administers the saving efficacy of his once-for-all victory over sin, death, Satan, and hell; and finally, his work as Consummator, the Lord of history and of history’s beyond. In the life of the Church, theological Christianity is liturgically expressed by the ministry of the Word and Sacraments in the corporate worship and the constantly renewed self-oblation of the people of God as they are faithful to their missionary role in the world.
What motivates men to oppose the faith in its “conservative” (New Testament) form? What basic ideas and tendencies in men cause them to make humanist substitutions for the clear witness of the Bible? It is not surprising that men who find themselves in a kind of counter-apostolate to the Church’s faith as apostolically founded acquire an emotional revulsion toward all whose thought accords with the apostolic tradition. The striking thing, however, is such persons’ irrational unwillingness to consider lines of evidence that might threaten their avant-garde status. It seems as if they have prayed (with apologies to St. Augustine): “O Lord, show me the truth as it is in Jesus, but not yet.”
Original sin is at work in all of us, and not least in the theological thinker. Thus it is possible for apostasy to arise in the Church, just as it is possible for subversive movements to arise within the political sphere and anarchic movements within secular society. Unremitting vigilance against man-centered theological subversion is the price the Church must pay to guard against destroying itself and society with it.
Christ was persecuted precisely for his manifest glories, and the Cross remains for all of us the “sign” by which we “conquer.” Via crucis via lucis. The earliest biblical example of theological subversion may be seen in the broken faith and then in the broken fellowship of the first family. Cain rebelled violently against the revealed religion of his father as faithfully practiced by his brother Abel. In the early days of the Christian Church, Stephen was stoned because of the odium theologicum in religionists who lacked the spiritual conversion Paul later so dramatically evinced. And from that day to this, Christians have been persecuted simply because, as spiritual regenerates, they inevitably serve as a rebuke to those who, like Saul, “kick against the goads.”
LAMENT
Weep, weep for those
Who do the work of the Lord
With a high look
And a proud heart!
Their voice is lifted up
In the streets, and their cry is heard.
The bruised reed they break
By their great strength, and the smoking flax
They trample.
Weep not for the quenched
(For their God will hear their cry
And the Lord will come to save them)
But weep, weep for the quenchers!
For when the Day of the Lord
Is come, and the vales sing
And the hills clap their hands
And the Light shines
Then their eyes shall be opened
On a waste place,
Smoldering,
The smoke of the flax bitter
In their nostrils,
Their feet pierced
By broken reed-stems …
Wood, hay, and stubble,
And no grass springing,
And all the birds flown.
Weep, weep for those
Who have made a desert
In the Name of the Lord!
EVANGELINE PATERSON
What then is the secret of the quiet assurance of God’s faithful witnesses that they have power to out-think, outlove, and outlive their adversaries? What gives them the power to be God’s chosen agents in the work of reconciliation? What keeps them holding their theology unashamed?
The answer lies in Christ’s resurrection and the fellowship of believers with the living Lord. Christians know that when they trustfully surrendered to Christ, they “tasted the powers of the world to come.” They find they can speak experientially and thus theologically of that of which their baptism spoke sacramentally—namely, that their self-centered old nature has somehow been “buried with Christ in his death,” and that a new or Christian nature has been given them in a veritable “resurrection with Christ.” Christ, in the days of his flesh, spoke of his atoning work for a world’s salvation as a “baptism” with which he alone could be baptized; likewise, in the days after his resurrection he directed his disciples to “make disciples of all nations” and initiate them into those saving fruits of his once-for-all “baptism” that, while available for all, can be enjoyed only by spiritual rebirth and expressed only in sound theological (trinitarian) language.
Christians may or may not be theologically literate; yet they all are embryo-theologians. Their theological maturing is faster and more natural than that of unregenerate religionists, because the Holy Spirit gives them the ability to distinguish between the true and the false, although their ability to express their position may require biblical theological study.
The Double Pull
So the double tension is here to stay; on the one hand, the mystery of rebelliousness and the element of irrationality in unregenerate man; on the other, the ongoing story of invincible truth as incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ, enshrined in the historic creeds, articulated in orthodox Christian theology, and transmuted into adoration and praise in Christian worship. This truth is the hidden source of dynamism in Christian living and Christian mission and in all the self-forgetting usefulness of Christians to their generation.
There is no escaping this double pull. Let us accept it as one of the conditions of life. Indeed, let us welcome it as an opportunity to do battle for the truth, to rescue the perishing, and to enjoy a foretaste of that promised final vindication of the Christ of the manger, of the empty tomb, and of the Mount of Olives. Then we shall reign with him and join in the song: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.… Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.”
