The Fortunes of Theology

Second in a Series

We have noted the high mortality rate of contemporary theological theories, and the tactics many recent theologians have used to commend their novel views as authentically Christian. We now look at some other characteristics of neo-Protestant religious views.

3. The special appeal of each neo-Protestant religious theory lies in its dramatic correlation of some urgent concern or deep longing in contemporary life with segments of the scriptural revelation that have been obscured or neglected by other recent religious alternatives. Barth stressed anew an authoritative Divine Word; Bultmann, the critical importance of personal decision; Cullmann, the centrality of salvation-history; Moltmann, the irreducible importance of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead; Pannenberg, the revelatory significance of universal world history; and so on. Each view gains a magnetic hold on younger clergymen through the reassertion of certain facets of biblical theology. And each theory compounds the errors of its predecessors in two ways. It first superimposes upon the Bible an interpretative framework alien to it, and then subordinates other definitive elements of biblical theology to this.

These theories, then, gain a following in the Christian community by correlating theosophical or philosophical novelties with broken fragments of the biblical revelation. The Bible is not appealed to as an authoritative Book, plenarily inspired and constituting a divinely given rule of Christian truth.

4. In regard to knowledge of God as an objective reality, the formative theological views of the last hundred years are metaphysically agnostic. This trend crested into the ecumenical vision of a world church that raised social involvement above metaphysical consensus and creedal tests. Protestant modernism emphasized the experiential values of following Christ’s exemplary commitment to Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood. While Barthian theology located faith’s center in divine disclosure rather than in religious experience, it depicted revelation as paradoxical: the truth of faith, it said, defies expression in universally valid propositions. Bultmann, however, insisted that the self at the center of existential revelation is not the divine self at all; it is rather, he affirmed, the human self.

Supposedly to enhance revelation, dialectical-existential theology disowned logically consistent knowledge of God and portrayed faith as a cognitively vacuous leap. The Continental theologians therefore affirmed as Christianity’s special distinctive what in the minds of logical positivists reduced Christianity to nonsense—the notion that the reality of God turns not on intelligible rational evidence and objectively valid truth but rather on personal decision and inner response. More recently such post-Bultmannian theologians as Fuchs and Ebeling, and even such proponents of external historical revelation as Moltmann and Pannenberg, have likewise deprived Christianity of any final cognitive affirmations about the ontological being of God.

This loss of the rationality of divine revelation in recent modern theology prepared the way for the notion of God’s demise: if God cannot be truly known for what he assertedly is, the Living God is in epistemic eclipse. Contemporary theologians show almost cultic fanaticism in forfeiting ontological knowledge of God’s nature as he is in himself. Their works remind one of Clifford Irving’s supposed revelations concerning the inaccessible Howard Hughes: publishing houses are available to disclose secrets of the life and deeds of the Great Unknown; biographers tell of special access vouchsafed to them alone; readers await an up-to-the-minute revision of what the existing versions declare to be the unchanging truth. Then—at last—the necessary authorization of legitimacy is found to be missing, and the real voice and word of the Invisible Shepherd, known and recognized by his sheep, is admitted to point another Way.

5. The attempt to resuscitate process theology as the wave of the future is faltering. Process theology is one among many ripples on an agitated theological surface. It lacks firm basis in the He-brew-Christian Scriptures, and is more a philosophical than a theological explanation. Its current appeal is largely limited to students unfamiliar with related proposals from earlier in this century; the present versions are much like a return of an old movie.

Liabilities of process theology are numerous. Among its intellectual difficulties, two stand out. First, it obscures God’s causal relation to the universe; the emphasis that the universe is as necessary to God as God is to the universe compromises the biblical doctrine of creation. Second, its insistence that God is an aspect of the whole of reality precludes any absolute distinction between good and evil. Indeed, the more intimately God is correlated with man and history—particularly in a century vexed by devastating international wars and the social violence of Nazism, Facism, and Communism, as well as the pervasive moral decline of the world—the more difficult it becomes to maintain any adequate view of sin.

6. The positive significance of radical contemporary views—for example, the “theology of revolution” and “black theology”—lies in their rejection of other sub-Christian alternatives rather than in any espousal of authentic and permanently valid positions. A commitment to violent revolutionary change cannot accommodate in any event a final theology or controlling Logos; what destroys all must sooner or later be self-destructive.

Revolutionary theology mounts an extreme reaction against the misidentification of the status quo as essentially just or as acceptably Christian, a costly error that the Christian Church has too often made. Black theology is a reactionary insistence that theology can be done only by blacks, a notion no less exaggerated and extreme than the assumption that God is white. To write Christian theology in terms of any culture-orientation is hazardous. The neglected emphasis that theology needs to revive is that the Christian revelation has permanent implications for all oppressed people.

7. The unenviable consequence of neo-Protestant theology’s revolt against reason and rationality is that its positions cannot be regarded as true. It should be apparent that any movement that disowns the instrumentality of reason in establishing theological positions or in validating its objectives cannot rationally defend its own perspectives. Philosophers may speak of religion as a “special kind” of truth, and theologians may deplore the pursuit of objective truth about God as prideful presumption; but unless the man in the street is convinced that spiritual claims belong to the same order of truth as life’s other persuasive commitments, he will not take Christian claims seriously. He will turn rather to cults that claim to give such knowledge or will probe the mystical, astrological, or merely magical. The religious revolt against reason is sure to issue in a harvest of aberrant and inventive alternatives to biblical faith. [To be continued.]

CARL F. H. HENRY

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