Fact and Faith in Modern Theology

Today a new conflict has developed between religion and the scientific method, and it is nowhere more evident than in the pages of twentieth-century theology. The former struggle was concerned with factual data and their interpretation—data in nature as opposed to data in the Bible. The new conflict is concerned with the absence of any factual data and with the place that faith should have in compensation.

In his book Jesus Christ and Mythology, Rudolf Bultmann grapples in the closing chapter with the isssue of religious knowledge. The activity of God, he assures us, does have an objective reality; likewise, our faith in God’s activity is no mere psychological exercise but relates to the real action of God in his speaking to our existence. But when faced with the question of how one knows that God acts (either in the present or in the past), Bultmann must describe the act of God as something “not visible, not capable of objective, scientific proof” (p. 61). Rather, we know God’s action only by “faith.”

Traditional theology has insisted that the Christian faith is derived not from an empirical scrutiny of the universe but from a revelation from God. Yet the revelation itself, notably the incarnate ministry and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was, in fact, visible and objective. Whether received in faith or not, the revelation was public, and men were and are responsible on the basis of its clarity. Paul fastened his Areopagite appeal for repentance on visible, objective truth-claims: God has given assurance of judgment to all men “in that he hath raised him [Jesus Christ] from the dead.”

Much contemporary theological thinking, however, is characterized by (1) a depreciation if not exclusion of evidential foundations for faith and (2) an emphasis on faith as an act of cognition, in which knowledge is furnished merely by believing.

The insulation of religion from external objective fact is apparent throughout the contemporary religious scene. In an article entitled “How is Theology Possible?” John Macquarrie says, “When challenged to produce the credentials of his subject, the theologian cannot in the nature of the case offer a proof, but he can describe this area of experience in which his discourse about God is meaningful …” (New Theology No. 1, p. 33). In the same volume, Eduard Schweizer of Zürich, speaking of the Easter event, declares, “Even if we had the best sound film of a Jerusalem newsreel of the year A. D. 30 (or whatever it was), it would not help us much since it could not show what really happened on that day” (pp. 45, 46). Then what will? “Only Easter, the revelation of the Spirit, shows what really happened.” And, again, the role of faith as a foundation is advanced: “Historical facts never create faith, only faith creates faith” (p. 51).

Modern theology’s presumed goal is to protect the Christian position from any and all criticism, but the price is enormously high. The furniture of Christianity has been moved into the water-tight room of faith to protect it from the flood of criticism. But isolation from criticism means also, in this case, isolation from reliable knowledge.

Finding the roots of this epistemologically fatal approach is not difficult. They are in Kierkegaard’s notion of faith as sheer risk and in Barth’s concept of non-objective revelation. What was latent in Barth has become patent in Bultmann and his progeny.

If revelation is not linked clearly to public history (historie), faith may very well not be linked to reality. This divorce of faith from fact is vigorously pointed up by the Cambridge unreconstructed liberal J. S. Bezzant. In a paragraph dealing with the theology of Bultmann he says:

It is even said that Christ crucified and risen meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. Faith in the word of preaching is sufficient and absolute. There is no possible philosophical natural theology, next to no reliable historical basis of Christianity. Believe the message, and it has saving efficacy. But what is the ground for believing? The answer given is Jesus’ disciples’ experience of the resurrection. But this is not, he [Bultmann] holds, a historical confirmation of the crucifixion as the decisive saving event because the resurrection is also a matter of faith only, i.e., one act of faith has no other basis than another act of faith [Objections to Christian Belief, p. 90, emphasis mine].

Bezzant’s closing barrage against this approach, the bluntness of which is typically Bezzant, is also worth including:

… when I am told that it is precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation from the charge of being mythological, I reply that immunity from proof can “secure” nothing whatever except immunity from proof, and call nonsense by its name [p. 91].

But, in the eyes of many modern theologians, the absence of evidence for faith, far from being nonsense, is a positive virtue. Bultmann even compares it with the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith and announces that “the man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build this faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 84). Similar expressions run all through the current literature on the subject of the historical Jesus; for example, “This conception of the person of Jesus [as divine Saviour] rests on faith and not on historical knowledge” (Jacob Jervell, The Continuing Search for the Historical Jesus, p. 74).

Radically different is the New Testament picture of faith. In the New Testament, faith always draws its life from valid evidence of God’s reality and power. A typical specimen is Paul’s statement in Second Corinthians 1:9. Certain events had impressed the Apostle that “we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.” Here faith in God has a foundation in an earlier sample of his power so that Paul is not advocating a blind leap (“nothing at his disposal on which to build this faith”); rather, his faith is informed by objective evidence of God’s trustworthiness.

Similar examples abound. Peter in his sermon on Pentecost preached “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus … God raised … up” (Acts 2:22–24, RSV). This passage is valuable not only to show that the apostles put no premium on the lack of objective evidence but also to show that divine revelation was open to public view. Whether accepted or not, it still carried with it compelling indications of its divine origin.

The prologue to Luke’s Gospel takes the same approach. Luke declares that he has foraged among all the available historical data—eye-witnesses, “narratives” of former writers, the lot—to the precise end that Theophilus “may be sure of the reliability of the information” he had received. John, in his first epistle, speaks of “seeing,” “hearing,” and “handling” the Word of life—an impressive statement of the objectivity of historical revelation.

It takes very little reflection to see why faith must be rooted in something objective. Faith, as Charles Hodge reminded his generation, “is limited by knowledge. We can believe only what we know, i.e., what we intelligently apprehend” (Systematic Theology, III, 84). Without an evidential foundation, the believer is in company with the queen in Alice in Wonderland, who could believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast.

All this is not to say that the clear evidence of God’s revelation in history cannot be rejected. A Roman soldier can stand beside the empty tomb in Joseph’s garden and completely miss—or, better, suppress—the obvious significance surrounding it, just as a modern historian may choose to explain the origin and unique growth of the Christian Church without any reference to the central message of the early Church—the empty tomb. Indeed, as sinners neither the soldier nor the historian can afford to acknowledge clear revelation, for this acknowledgment would have dramatic implications for his personal life. However, the equivocation of a revelatory event like the resurrection is always awkward and frequently foolish, as the earliest attempt demonstrated (Matt. 28:11–15).

Special revelation, like natural revelation, can be mentally resisted, explained away, ignored, denied. But its clarity is nonetheless a sufficient basis for responsibility before God, as Paul announced even to men who categorically denied the possibility of resurrection (Acts 17:16–34).

To recognize divine revelation, to submit to it, to have life imparted from it, always involves the activity of the Holy Spirit. How else can we explain the response of that other Roman soldier who, standing by a crucified Jew when he looked least like the Son of God, confessed his deity! The soldier by the empty tomb—an example of man’s stubborn blindness; the soldier by the cross—a monument to great grace. The evidences can be resisted. But they are tools in the hands of the Spirit, and accepted they are the basis on which true faith can rest.

When men, through grace, cease to resist the clear statement of revelation and submit to its claims, they exercise “faith.” Edward John Carnell’s definition of faith is especially serviceable in our day: “Faith is a resting of the heart in the sufficiency of the evidences” (Introduction to Christian Apologetics, p. 365). To such a definition one could say more but never less. For New Testament faith is not faith in a vacuum; its roots are sunk deeply into the public ministry of Jesus Christ, his death “under Pontius Pilate,” and his resurrection reported to us by his apostles, to whom he “showed himself alive … in many convincing ways, and appeared to them repeatedly over a period of forty days …” (Acts 1:3).

Can it be that, in the twentieth century, the weakness of the Church is traceable to its neglected foundations? “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.