NEO- ORTHODOXY
• The revolt against Immanence
• Transendence in Neo Orthodoxy
Introduction
• WW1 marked the end of the progressivism of the century of optimism and set the stage for the underlying current of pessimism characteristic of ensuing years.
Why was there a need for revolt
• Barth and Brunner stand for a call to a return to God’s revelation. As radically coming outside of human experience, something new, something different, something Transcendence, something other.
• World War 1 if a war like this one can break out then there is something wrong with our theology.
• 19th Century liberation theology was filled with optimism about what humans could do. WW1 demonstrated that humans were not that advanced after all. WW1 drained the optimism of that generation. A pessimism set in that has remained up to this day.
• This reaction is called Neo Orthodoxy because it is characterized by the attempt by theologians to rediscover the significance of traditional doctrines for modern thought (page 17)
• Mordern theology wanted to be relevant, Neo Orthodoxy theologians said no you are stretching too far.
• They were concerned that Protestant liberal theology had been so intent on making the Christian faith palatable to the modern mindset that it had lost the gospel.
• A God without wrath created men without sin and brought into a Kingdom through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. (H. Richard Niebuhr)
SOREN KIEKEGAARD
• Often referred to as the Melacholy Dane
• Danish, he was a prolific writer,
• He waged a bitter attack on the state church, exposing the disparity between early Christianity and the contemporary Danish version.
• He rejected the view that reason was able to answer the basis religious questions of life. He rejected the Hegelian philosophy.
• Truth begins with the concrete individual in the concrete situation of life. His defn of truth “An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation—process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth”
• Because the truth of Christianity is grasped only by faith and not by reason . Being a Christian, involves a willingness to venture forth in faith where reason cannot take us.
• Last paragraph page 65 Grenz and Olson.
• Writes- Attack on Christendom
KARL BARTH 1886- 1968
Transendence as God’s Freedom
• Single most influential thinker and the most important Protestant theologian of the 20th Century
• He studied theology at the universities of Benn, Berlin, Tubingen and Marburg.
• In Berlin he came under the influence of Harnack and at Marburg he became a disciple of the great Ritchlian theologian Wilhelm Herrmann. Later he repudiated this theology to the dismay of his teachers.
• He never completed a PhD program
• Quote page 65 last paragraphs
Break with Liberal Theology
a. Liberal theology was useless in his weekly task of preaching the gospel to the people of Safenwil. So he undertook a careful and painstaking study of the Scriptures and he discovered “the Strange New World Within the Bible”
• In the Scriptures he found not human religion, not even the highest and best thoughts of pious people, but God’s Word.
• It is not the right human thoughts about God, which form the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men.
b. Was an event- his teachers their support of German imperialism led Barth to believe that something must terribly be wrong with their theology, if it could so easily be compromised in the face of the ideology of War
• Wrote a Commentary on Romans – which fell like a bombshell on the playground of liberal theologians
• Not theology from below but theology from above
• Barth was calling for a revolution in theological method, a theology from above to replace a theology from below
• Page 68 first paragraph
• In 1934 he helped write the Barmen declaration for the Confessing Church which opposed Hitlers program.
• Did not hail Hitler, so he was dismissed from his teaching position at the university of Bonn and he moved to Basel Barth left German and went to Swiss
• At Basel he kept working on his Church Dogmatics.
• In 1962 he retired from full time teaching at the age of 75 and embarked on his first trip outside Europe-went to the US lecturing, sightseeing and meeting people.
• Time Magazine honored him with a cover story, and the University of Chicago bestowed an honorary doctoral degree on him.
• At end of his life he was discouraged by the rise of secular theology and theology of the death of God. But he was encouraged by the changes within the Roman Catholic Church- 2 Vatican Council- at which he was an invited observer
• Died at home in Basel 9th Dec 1968. his death marked the passing of a theological giant.
Theological Method
• No place for natural theology in Barth’s theology
• He tried to undermine the fact that we can know God on our own
• According to Barth natural theology submerged God’s true revelation.
• True revelation is not natural but something that breaks from outside.
• God is the one who reveals himself to us.
• Christology dominated Barth’s thought.
• In Christ according to Barth we know the father and there is no other way.
• The ability to receive this revelation and ability to accept it is radically a gift from God.
• Faith is not something we do, it’s a gift.
• He emphasized the Sovereighty of God
God’s Word and the Bible
• Bible is God’s word
• Jesus is the Word first paragraph page 71
• Barth said “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that he speaks through it.”
• Barth distinguished the Bible and the Word of God affirming that “what we have in the Bible are in any case human attempts to repeat and reproduce this Word of God in human words and thoughts and in specific human situations”
• For Barth the Bible is the Word of God because again and again apart from any human decision or initiative, God uses it to produce the miracle of faith in Jesus Christ. Bible mediates Christ’s authority to the Church.
• He held to a verbal inspiration of scripture,
• He was not willing to use historical methods of interpretation
• Did not hold the dictation view of inspiration
• Hermenuetics is a wasted discipline
• We don’t interpret Scripture
• He condemned any effort to take notice of the historical differences for the 1st Century and 21st Century – this is God’s revelation revealed to us.
Christology and Trinitarian Theology
• The structure of Barth’s theology is Christocentric, the beginning, center, and end of every doctrine is the event of Jesus Christ.
• Centrality of Jesus Christ for Barth’s theology
• Christ is God himself not close picture
• If Jesus is truly God then the Trinity is no problem .
• Barth also place the doctrine of the Trinity at the beginning of his theology.
• God’s revelation is God himself. God is who he reveals himself to be
• Jesus is identical with God- truly human and truly divine.
• The reality of Jesus Christ is that God Himself in person is actively present in the flesh. God Himself is person is the Subject of a real human being and acting.”
• Barth affirmed the full divinity of Christ and the Trinity
• If Jesus is truly divine then the Trinity is no problem
God as Who Loves in Freedom
• Response to those who say God needs the world
• God is totally free and doesn’t need the world
• This way he avoided pantheism- God’s love for the world is truly gracious.
• Last three sentences page 73.
• Page 74 second para; discussion- does not this make sin inevitable.
• God freely chooses to love
• Hence creation not something God needed to do to actualize himself.
Barth’s doctrine of Election
• God elects Jesus first of all
• He adopts humanity
• God chose Jesus to be the revelation of himself to the world
• All humans are elect in Christ Jesus.
• God’s election extends to everyone- universalism
• Barth has been accused of universalism- in his response he refused to give a straight answer “ I do not teach it, but I also do not not reach it”
Evaluation
• Total reliance on revelation as foundational to his theology for him there is only one source in the Wesleyan Quadrelateral . Revelation of God through Scripture.
• No place for reason- liberal theologians have dismissed his approach as fideistic
Strength
• Strength of the Barth’s theological method lies in its total reliance on revelation- theology this way is truly theological being free from dependence on philosophical systems or cultural, intellectual fads.
• His theology is able to take a prophetic stance toward the world – this was shown in his denunciation of Nazism as a form of idolatry
• His theology remains a theology of proclamation that is a theology of preaching.
• Barth’s theological method preserves theology’s autonomy over against other disciplines. Theology remains the irreducible science of God’s Word.
• Returned the doctrine of the Trinity which had been lost from Liberal Theology onward.
Weakness
• His refusal of every kind of rational justification of the truth of revelation leads theology beyond autonomy into isolation.
• No connection between belief and experience
• Barth restricted knowledge of and about God to what is revealed in Christ. This leads to a denial of general revelation.
• Jesus Christ is both the subject and object of predestination. But exactly where are God the Father and human beings in this scheme? His theology is one sided and it neglects the roles of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and human beings in salvation history.
• His doctrine of the Trinity is implicitly modalistic, it reduces God to a single subjectivity by identifying God’s one essence with his person and by employing the term modes of being for the Trinitarian distinctions. Though in later volumes of the Church Dogmatics he denies this view.
• Problems with Verbal inspiration and a radical distinction between God’s Word and the Bible
Whereas Schieimarcher made the mistake of trying to talk about God by talking about humankind in a loud voice, Barth made the mistake of trying to talk about humanity by talking about God in a very loud voice.
EMIL BRUNNER
• 1889-1966
• Born in Zurich, Swiss
• Attended the university of Zurich- doctorate in theology in 1913. He taught there from 1924 to 1955, also taught at Princeton University in the US 1938-1939 and the Christian University of Tokyo from 1953-1955.
• Died in Zurich in 1966.
• His publications The Mediator, The Divine Imperative, Man in Revolt and Revelation and Reason
• A contemporary of Barth, was overshadowed by Barth and Bultmann.
• He studied in England and America.
• Lived a short distance from one another
• Directly opposed each other
• Brunner was overshadowed by Barth
Theological Concerns
• Attacks those who rely on natural theology which makes humans the measure of all things
• Martin Buber gave him the idea of I thou not an it, I it relationship
• Brunner followed Buber, one must first distinguish between two kinds of truth and knowledge: ‘it truth’ and “Thou Truth’ – the former is for the world of objects whereas the latter speaks to the world of persons.
• A fundamental difference exists between objects and persons; failure to recognize this difference and carry through its consequences in all areas of life lies at the foundation of the errors of philosophy.
• Any theology that treats the knowledge of God as analogous of objects is fundamentally wrong headed.
• Knowledge of God is personal, and it calls for personal decision, response and commitment.
• Need to encounter God as I Thou
• Liberal theologians had made God to be it
• Describes truth as an encounter with God
• Page 80 last paragraph.- distortion of faith into some form objective knowledge.
• Revelation as encounter
• Brunner- human words can never be revelation
• To limit revelation to the words of Scripture was to make God to be an object to be fully known.
• Words and propositions about God can never have the status of revelation because they inevitably objectify God and fall back within the sphere of it knowledge
• Revelation proper is always an event of personal relationship in encounter that overcomes the subject object division and truly communicate God to the human person.
• Two elements –historically in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and presently in the inner witness of the Holy Spirit to Jesus Christ that makes the believer contemporary with Christ.
• Main point of Brunner’s doctrine of revelation. God does not communicate something about himself, but himself.
• Brunner was trying to avoid the heresy of ‘Theologismus’ – putting doctrine or theology in the place of personal faith.
• Words about God are never to be confused with revelation
• Doctrine lies in the realm of it truth and not Thou truth- it cannot be an object of faith, and belief in it cannot replace true faith
• On Scripture- Brunner refused to identify revelation with the words of Scripture. Scripture is a unique vehicle and instrument of revelation in that in contains the witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Not everything in Scripture is of equal value or even true.
• Page 82 quote
• Bible is the basis and the norm of Christian doctrine.
• But Jesus according to Brunner is the real norm and authority for Christian faith all others are open to criticism and correction.
• Brunner was careful to say that these secondary instruments of revelation are indispensable to faith.
• Brunner recognized the difficult of distinguishing the Word of God and the words of men- - the disciples confession of Jesus as the Son of God as the testimony of the Spirit of God in human words.
• Brunner also recognized that without any sort of propositional element, divine revelation cannot serve as a source and norm of Christian doctrine. Revelation remains only a subjective experience.
• There is a sheer inconsistency with his doctrine of revelation.
• Revelation is not a prepositional truth but a life transforming encounter with God himself
• ‘No speech, no word, is adequate to the mystery of God as Person’
Brunner’s Controversy with Barth
• Barth rejected natural revelation but Brunner permitted a place for it.
• Some relic of the image of god. Brunner called it a point of contact within humanity for God to contact us.
• Brunner writes a book Nature and Grace – Christian Natural theology. One that does become the basis for human works.
• Limited defense of God’s revelation in creation how could we respond to God without a point of contact- What makes us responsible – able to respond
• Barth responded by saying Nein German for No we must not allow
• “I have to reply with a No! to Brunner and the whole chorus of his friends and disciples and those who share his opinions.” The tone of the article was very harsh.
• He saw this theology as giving aid to that theology of compromise which was leading to the subversion of the German church to Nazi ideology.
• Barth used the analogy. Page 84 quote- someone swimming.
• Barth said there is no point of contact except that one created by the Holy Spirit, which is always a miracle.
• The two giants of dialectical theology became reconciled b4 their death.
• Class Discussion- Ask students for their opinion? On this issue
RUDOLF BULTMANN: TRANSCENDENCE OF KERYGMA
• Bultmann was not a theologian but a New Testament scholar
• His method spilled over
• Contemporary with Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer
• He believed with Barth that 19th century theology had made the human person rather than God the center of theology.
• Sought to make Christianity, biblical Xty relevant to the modern mind
• Philosophical principle that he follows – Existentialism- existence & essence. God has created in us certain ways God’s essence about us determine our existence. Particularly the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
• Sartre –“existence precedes essence” we determine our existence. We give ourselves meaning
Faith and the Historical Jesus
• Jesus of history and the Christ of Faith. Which is normative, the Christ proclaimed in the New Testament texts or the real historical Jesus lying behind the texts.
• Liberal scholars went with the historical Jesus hence the quest for the historical Jesus- an attempt to determine exactly what Jesus himself had said and done.
• Albert Schweitzer in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus 1906 concluded that the search had ended in failure. The person scholars had constructed was nothing more than the reflection of their own image. To him Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who was completely foreign to modern humanity and therefore could have no message for our day.
• Bultmann said we can never know the historical Jesus. The NT is not concerned with the Jesus of History, its focus is on the Christ of faith.
• Our faith is not to be in the Jesus of History, our faith is our personal encounter with the Jesus proclaimed in the Kerygma- message of the early church.
• It is not the facts about the historical Jesus but a personal confrontation with the Christ in the present.
• Faith can only be the gift of God’s grace that comes to us in the kerygma.
• No historical event can prove that God has acted in any past event.
• God’s action in historical events is not determined through historical research, but is open only to the eyes of faith.
• While we may appreciate the desire it also cause problems, since we cannot reliably know the historical Jesus we should not base our faith on that we have no knowledge for- including the resurrection what we know is the kerygma of the church that Bultmann- what ever happened was a life changing thing.
• We don’t know what took place but the that took place. That became the basis for the church’s proclamation.
• We have faith in the early church’s faith in Jesus.
• But Christianity is a historical religion, if Jesus is not raised from the Dead then our faith is in vain-
• Historie- linear, factual, data
• Geschcte- meaning of events,
• The Kerygma is in the call to believe, it’s a decision to follow Christ – Bultmann leans against Existentialist
Mythology
• Theorists including Bultmann, claimed that the NT reflected the use of the myths of the mystery religions, esp the myth of the descent of a redeemer god, to describe the work of Jesus the Christ.
• Liberal theology sought to cut away the mythology from the NT.
• Bultmann rejected such a move. Removing the myth, Bultmann claimed, could not be accomplished without losing the kerygma, the real message of the NT.
• Bultmann advocated not removal but interpretation of myth in order to see the true meaning. This is what he meant by the term demythologizing. We need to understand the mythical elements in accordance with their underlying existential meaning.
• He felt the 19th Century liberals were trying to remove the myth but Bultmann said we can not do that without losing the meaning.
• Bultmann’s overriding concern is that each hearer of the gospel be confronted existentially with the reality of the transcendent god. The program of demythologizing is vital because it facilitates this encounter.
Hermenuetics
• the Biblical authors were raising the question of personal existence, the same question that lies at the heart of the human quest in any age.
• Existentialism offers the proper pre understanding for approaching biblical documents, for it provides “the most adequate perspective and conceptions for understanding human existence.
• By bringing the crucial question of human existence to the texts, we are able to hear the Word of God addressing us through the biblical kerygma and thereby be confronted with the Transcendent One.
Transcendence of God
• Transcendence means God stand before us in the existential moment of decision, addressing us with His Word and confronting us with the Challenge of responding in faith, thereby creating authentic existence.
• Relied on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Faith and the Gospel
• Authentic existence is solely the product of the response of faith to the grace of God.
• Response itself is a miracle wrought by God.
• Cross is God’s liberating judgement on humanity.
• Resurrection signifies the elevation of the Crucified One to the status of Lord.
• Faith is willingness to understand oneself as crucified and risen with Christ.
Soteriology
• Faith in the proclamation of the church’s proclamation of that event
• People develop an authentic existence when they accept the Being all that God created you to be. Unauthentic existence is turning away from the moment of decision.
Critique
• To his credit Bultmann- his emphasis on the necessity of the Christian message to speak to questions raised by contemporary humans- Christians often find themselves asking question that nobody is asking- truth must grip the soul of the hearer.
• Also his attempt to reestablish the transcendence of God.
negative
• Bultmann undercut the need for history at all
• We must have some historical foundation for our faith
• Some thing must have histories not just geschte
• Gave up on too much of the traditional doctrines of the church
• Existentialism philosophy has little room for community , it comes down to the individual
• His program results in a too narrow privatized faith. – risk of excluding the corporate and social dimensions of Christian faith.
• Bultmann underscored the necessity of personal justification but did not lead to sanctification, to the dynamic of actual Christian living and spiritual growth as disciples of the LORD in community with one another and in the world. His theology provides a helpful Soteriology, but lacks a satisfying ecclesiology.
• Trancated view of God. God can be known only as acts in me, as he creates authentic existence, so that theology becomes the reflection on the experience of the encounter that leads to authentic existence. No statement can be made about God that does not at the same time speak about the human person.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR- TRANSENDENCE REVEALED THROUGH MYTH
• Most influential theologian of the church in America
• He was a preacher, and a pastor, a social ethicist, an apologist and a circuit rider among the nation’s colleges and universities.
• Niebuhr was listened to by presidents and he affected public policy
• Exerted influence on the nation’s political life
• Even secular and humanist thinkers pay attention to him- a rare achievement.
• He rejected the label of Neo Orthodoxy because he associated it with Karl Barth whom he criticized.
• But he also saw the naivete of the 19th Century theology
• Comes out of a Pietistic background
• Ministered in Detroit Michigan- Automotive mobile
• Workers were being used for peanuts
• Liberal theology was not sufficient for the assembly line workers . Liberalism that he was trained in was useless.
• In 1928 he was called to teach ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He taught there until 1960.
• He was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures at Edinburgh in 1939. He published a book on his lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man.
• The three things that dominated his thought
o Practical Christianity
o Proximate Justice
o Christian Anthropology
Practical Christianity
• Christianity that could work – in the present world
• Wanted a Christianity that would make the world a better place
• Program for getting to the kingdom of God
• His goal was always to establish the relevance of Christianity to contemporary life
• Sought to apply theological insights to realms as diverse as politics, international affairs, human rights, and economic systems.
• He was interested in the defence and justification of the Christian faith in a secular society.
• Felt that Xty had the solutions to the problems
Proximate Justice
• Perfection of an impossible goal
• As human beings we always stand under infinite possibilities and are potentially related to the totality of existence, but we are nevertheless always creatures of finiteness.
• Our solutions to social ills or our fervent efforts to alter society will inaugurate the perfect human order.
• Our attempts to redress evils will breed other injustices
• The best we can hope for is a more just situation today than was present yesterday.
• The Kingdom of God is an achievable goal, a standard we can never reach, but that continually stands as judge over human society.
• It does not come within history, that is, by human action, but is God’s gift from beyond.
• Impossible possibility- sermon on the Mount
• The ethic of Jesus is an individual ethic but not for a society
• Jesus’ ethic is impossible but still relevant
• Moral man and Immoral Society. A man can be moral but not the society.
• Christian Realism – His kind of thought
Christian Anthropology
• Nieburh was concerned about the right condition of man
• He developed the doctrine of original sin. Doctrine of sin is what is most relevant to Christianity. The Nature and Destiny of Man.
• In contrast to what he saw as liberalism’s naïve optimism, emphasis on human reason and faith in education, the Bible presents a realistic picture, Niebuhr argued.
• It is empirically, historically and rationally verified
• Saw original sin as key for understanding human sin
• Humans are sinners, and because of sin, they are to be loved but never trusted.
• Sinfulness is combated by power. Use power to fight evil. Defended democracy best form of govt
• Nieburh alternative is Christian Realism
• Containment of Communism
Rejection of Liberalism
• It crystallized in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932.
• A sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behavior of individuals and of social groups.
• Human societies and social groups are more susceptible to ‘unrestrained egoism’
• All human self help programs are doomed to fall short of the ideal.
• Double locus of moral life consisting of two different perspectives and two corresponding ethical ideals. For the inner life of the individual the ideal is unselfishness and human social life can only be that of justice.
• He saw in it a lack of awareness of the depth and power of sin
• Liberalism fails to delineate the religious heights disclosed in the gospel.
• Liberalism misunderstood the radical disjuncture between the ideal and the actual- the radical way that love transcends all human ideas and achievements-It lacked political and social realism
Divine Transcendence
• In his view the modern age was guilty of substituting “the God of reason and nature for the God of revealed religion.”
• Thereby it had forgotten the finiteness and creatureliness of humankind.
• As a result it had lost the sense of Transcendence, it could not subject human righteousness to a Transcendent righteousness, the righteousness of God.
Critique
• Neiburh sought to insert a note of realism into what he sensed was a naively optimistic cultural and religious climate. His greatest contribution has been his greatest weakness.
• Unreal symbols- he removed symbols from the realm of actual history.
• Nieburh is the most significant challenge to Wesleyan theology more than anyone else.
• Wesley would say it is a possible impossibility
• No to absolute perfection but yes to the relative perfection that Jesus calls us to.
• Nieburh was too pessimistic
• Did not recover the doctrine of grace, sovereighty of God to match that sin. While he was too optimistic about sin he was too pessimistic about God helping us out.
• Where is God in all this?
• The cross as the central symbol of Christianity. Cross acknowledgement of sin.
• He has a trancated pnuematology- Neibuhr simply did not develop the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the affirmation of Christ as the 2nd Adam to his understanding of our being in Christ.
• The intention of the heart is very important Niebuhr would not affirm entire sanctification. Niebuhr forgot that society begins with an individual.
THE DEEPENING OF IMMANENCE
• Some felt that Neo Orthodoxy had gone too far in emphasizing the Transendency of God
• Paul Tillich provides perhaps the most lucid example of a neo liberal who existentialism as theology’s conversation partner.
• And the broad mvt that utilized the philosophical theme of process illustrates the attempt to correlate theology with the emphasis on change and evolution characteristic of modern science.
• Chastened liberalism- one that had gone through the fires of Neo Orthodoxy
•
PAUL TILLICH : THE IMMANENCE OF THE GOD ABOVE GOD
• 1886-1965
• When Neo Orthodoxy was emphasizing Transendence
Life and Career
• He is often referred to as an Apostle to the Intellectuals
• To set forth a theology dispensable to the modern people
• His theological contribution is comparable to Barth’s thought different in approach.- he produced a massive system of theology- which was granted the acclaim of secular society.
• He strove for positive correlation, if not synthesis between modern secular philosophy and Christian theology.
• Contemporary with Barth and Brunner and Bultmann
• Chaplain in the WWI- he saw the horrors of war face to face
• Left the battle field and joined social field
• Clashed with Nazis- considered an enemy of the state
• His book The Socialist Decision was burned publicly on May 10, 1933. The Gestapo began following him everywhere. Had he stayed his life would have ended in a concentration camp.
• Left to German and went to USA – friend to Reinhold Nieburh
• Taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York until his retirement in 1955.
• In 1940 he was given an honorary doctorate by Yale University and was cited as a Philosopher among theologians and a theologian among philosophers.
• In 1951 Tillich published the first volume of his Systematic Theology in which he expounded on his theological method, reason, and revelation and God.
• He accepted invitation of Harvard University to become “University Professor’ the most prestigious academic position in America. Retired in 1962.
• Last paragraph page 114 Grenz and Olson
• Died on Oct 22, 1965.
Tillich’s Presuppositions
a. Theology should be Apologetic
• Question ask students: whats the meaning of this statement
• It must address the modern situation
• It must answer the questions the modern man is asking not answering questions nobody is asking.
b. there is a common ground between the Christian message and contemporary culture.
• Christianity is relevant , it has answers for the modern man
c. The role/importance of philosophy in doing theology
• He is the most philosophical of all
• Many people of his day felt the two cannot meet
• Refused to accept that philosophy and theology are irreconcilable.
• Going back to Thomas Aquinas.
• “No theologian should be taken seriously as a theologian, even if he is a great Christian, and a great scholar, if his work show that he does not take philosophy seriously”
• The God of Abraham and his sons is the same God of Philosophers.
d. the kind of philosophy most useful to theology is ontology, esp existentialist ontology.
• Ontology is the analysis of those structures of being which we encounter in every meeting with reality”
• Philosophy is ontology the study of being- its center.
e. The final presupposition of Tillich’s theology is the special nature of human existence in ontology.
Method of Correlation
• Relationship between theology and philosophy – Philosophy ask questions, Theology answers.
• Philosophy helps to frame the questions, Philosophy also helps us to frame the answers.
• Theology through revelation helps us to get the answers.
• Its questions and answer kind of engagement
• Theology and Philosophy correlates each other.
• A kind of correlation between reason and revelation, gospel, the existential situation, Christian messages and contemporary culture.
• Tillich had little regard fro traditional Christianity which was answering questions not asked by the modern mind. “man cannot receive answers to questions he never has asked”
• Tillich gave too much independence to philosophy, philosophy needs to be transformed. How do we know philosophy is raising the right questions.
• In the practical out working of his method – revelation gives the answers but philosophy had to reshape it to be relevant.
• Revelation had to fit our mind, making revelation to conform to reason. Unlike Aquinas reason is the handmaid of revelation.
Philosophy and Ontology
• Ontos being- orienting concern for Paul Tillich. Arguments based on the being – idea of ontology in theology. Being is the heart of reality- it participates in being.
• Human are unique because they are aware of their participation in being. The fear of non being exists.
• Non being is the awareness of ones’s finitude
• Theat of non being is always present
Tillich’s Theological Formulation
a. God
• Power of being, New being, the ground of being or God
• God does not exist, he is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.
• Existence is a mode of finite being. – the condition of fallenness or enstrangement.
• If God were a being he could not be the object of ultimate concern and the power that answers the question of finitude- something else would then be God. Hence the God above God.
• Tillich has been accused of being an atheist, inspite of his talk about God.
• Ultimate concern- God
• God is the answer- We have preliminary concerns-
• God is the answer implied in human finitude.
• Ultimate concerns of every one, whether they realize it or not is God
• God determines one’s being or non being- God is the ground for non being, creation participates in God.
• God and the world participates in one another. God is immanent in the world, and the world is immanent in God.
b. The Bible
• Tillich did not find a role of the Bible in revelation
• The Word is God manifests
• It participates in revelation as the document that records the event of final revelation in Jesus the Christ.
c. Creation and Fall
• God is the Creator- mixture of being and non being
• Which creates tension Genesis stories not literal stories of my life but they are universal
• The fall of humanity not an event- but symbolic expression of the predicament of Humanity, our inevitable, estrangement from essential humanity and therefore from God, the ground of being, essence of that potential being unactualized, Perfect state of things, state of humanity before our departure from dreaming innocence.
• Existance is life after we have begun attempt to actualize our potentiality, our fallen, depravity nature into sin.
• Our existence lead to our enstrangement not participatory and filling into no being- the curse of sin.
• God does not exist, because is the ground of being for being not between being and non being.
• Existence necessarily implies enstrangement – the moment one leaves the dreaming innocence you are enstranged from self, God, the ground of being.
• Problem makes the fall inevitable, necessary- Adam and Eve had no choice- for Tillich to be human is to be sinful- God sets us up for the fall. In trying to recover the Fall Tillich destroys the doctrine of creation for him sin is identical with creation.
Temptation and Fear
• Temptation is the fear of non being- leading us to seek false ways to secure our being- ways that are apart from being- rather than participate in being itself. Sin is when we do it.
• When we seek seek security outside from being itself we sin. You will be like him (the Serpent)
Salvation
• Salvation is new being- under the conditions of non being. We cannot make our existence conform to our essence
• New being is a gift from God- it is the saving and healing power in all of history, courage to be, to ground our own being in the ground of being.
Jesus Christ
• Human beings have a quest for a New Being that will break through estrangement
• For Tillich Christ is the answer. The Christian symbol of Christ is the symbol of a New Being appearing under the conditions of existence yet conquering the gap between essence and existence.
• Christ is the title we should say Jesus Christ
• In Jesus the enstrangement between essence and existence is overcome. New Being is released
• We find essential man coming into life under the condition without being enstranged.
• Tillich had no use for the two natures – If Jesus is not divine, then he is not what the Bible say He is. He is compromising Jesus humanity – how can he be Human yet enstranged.
• Tillich flatly denied that Jesus was ‘God become man’ the doctrine of the incarnation must be interpreted to mean that JESUS CHRIST was essential man appearing in a personal life under the conditions of existential enstrangement.
• His dubious analysis of human existence led to the need for a concrete yet universal power of essentialization, a ‘New Being’ in history to reunite humans with their essential being. The power must be from God, but cannot be God, because God the ground of being, cannot appear under the conditions of existence.
• Jesus must have been a human being who achieved a union with God that belongs essentially to every human being.
• Christ has nothing to do with the man Jesus of Nazareth.
• His view of Christology is dualistic, Gnostic, denial of full divinity of Christ.
Demons
• Demonic is the tendency to elevating the preliminary concern to a position of ultimacy
• Demons represent the way in which we allow other concerns Spirits to control us and drive us to non being.
Life and Spirit
• Sanctification – experience of new being as process
• Soteriology – is participation in being
• Includes increasing awareness
• Increasing freedom
• Increasing self transcendence
History and Kingdom of God
• K of G in ambiguous life together
• God is not a person
• Tillich tried to make theology relevant
EVALUATION
• He went to far in allowing the form of the questions to determine the content of the theological answers.
• His theology leans toward panentheism – radical immanentism
• This explains why proponents of Christian atheism in the 1960s proclaimed him as their mentor.
• He denied the natures doctrine for Christ, Jesus is not divine
PROCESS THEOLOGY
• Parmenides change is impossible- Heraclitus emphasized becoming. “you cannot step twice in the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you,”
• 19th century industrial revolution and developments in science. Darwin the idea of dynamic change at the heart of biology.
• The ultimate goal of process theology is to indicate the relevance of the Christian faith, esp its conception of the relation of God to the world, in a culture inbued with the sense of becoming.
• Process thinkers envision is a reconciliation of theology and science.
Theological features - “The Evolving God”
• Center of Process- Claremont College - Carlifornia
- Process philosophy was developed after 1st world war by A.N Whitehead (d. 1947) and Charles Hartshorne. This philosophy has been adopted to give rise to process Theology.
- Theologians here include Alfred North Whitehead, J.B Cobb, and a Roman Catholic version by Teilhard de Chardin- who studied paleontology (study of early forms of life as recorded in the fossil records)- HE WAS FRENCH
- Classical Greek philosophy upholds dual realms of existence: - Being and permanence as primary – and – Becoming/change as secondary/relatively unreal
- Process philosophy on the other hand holds that primary reality is the process, becoming, and change is the ultimate truth about reality.
- You never step in the same river twice. Change is fundamental to reality.
- Process philosophy fits well in an evolutionary world – reality as dynamic and unfolding rather than static and “given”.
Whitehead’s Metaphysics
• Was a mathematician- philosopher- British 1861-1947.
• Father of process philosophy and theology
• Wanted to restore the study of Metaphysics to its rightful place to give it a scientific footing.
Building Blocks of Reality
• Actual entities} not objects not material moment of experience, occasion in time
• Actual occasions
• Not the substance but the changing
• Every actual occasion has built into it a drive to become . It has an initial aim.
• The process of becoming is called concrescence
• The actual identity does it by prehension
• Prehension is the movement from the past to the present- relatedness of each occasion to the antecedent universe.
• Actual occasion that has finished its concrescence is now satisfied- selects and rejects in the process free to accept or reject.
God
- Whitehead- God is one entity among other entities in the world.
- According to Classical Greek upholds that God is unchanging and free from emotions or suffering. Salvation is escaping the realm of becoming. God is outside time.
- Accordingly the Greek God is a being outside time and change. Process theology says the God of the Bible is different – He relates to us and acts in time, dynamically involved in the world, affected by the experiences of his people.
- Traditional Christian theology attempts to balance the two, which process theology sees as irreconcilable conflict between biblical and philosophical views of God.
- Process theology rejects classical theism. Replaces it with a “dipolar “concept of God, based on the distinction between “abstract existence “and “concrete actuality”.
- In the abstract sense, God is eternal since He is always been and will always be, but He travels with humanity along time. He is unchanging in that his love remains constant but not static and in active. He is the cause of all things (origin and dependence), but is affected by creation. (e. g When I sin I offend him). He is “dipolar” as cause and effect. This view is also called “neoclassical theism”, or “panentheism”, God both affects and is affected by the world.
-
Classical theism - God unaffected (uncaused) by the world
Pantheism -God identified with world
Panentheism -The combination of the two - all that happens takes place in God like the mind and the body.
This way, process theology claims to return to a more biblical view of God unlike classical theism.
• God is not outside the system, He is inside it.
• Process thought emphasizes Immanence rather that the Transcendence
• God is in the same predicament – he is changing
• The true God is passionate, involved in creation, concerned about our lives. All of this implies change
• Moses- I am going to wipe out the whole Israel
• The whole idea of prayer- if my people who are called by my name!!!
• Class discussion: Yes or No does God change?
• No he does not change- he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
• God has two natures the dipolar- the primordial nature of God and the consequent nature of God.
• The primordial nature of God may be seen as his eternal nature- Transendent immutable- present actual occasions with the aim. God works in life through persuasion not through coercion.
• Consequent nature is his temporal nature- concrete a which is affected by humans Immanence a reaction to the world to God the world does affect God, God is himself is in process- he needs the world to be God.
• God and the world- both need each other – both are bound up with the other.
Process Theology
1. God is not aloof from the world , nor unaffected by the world, rather God and the world are interdependent.
2. God works in the world primarily through persuasion, rather than coercion.
3. We ought not to view God in terms of omnipotency, but as the one who suffers with the world. The same with omniscient- God knows the future only as possibility, never as actuality.
John B. Cobb
Disciple of Whitehead
Attended the university of Michigan and Chicago which has been the a major center for the advancement of Whiteheadian process theology.
God and the World
• God is in the world and the world in God
• Sin came as a result of our freedom
• Evil came into the world as a result of the fall
• God calls us into the process
• Trying to wrestle theodicy
• Evil is radically our step not God
• God has not permitted sin
• No creation our of nothing.
• God seeks us, he lures us. God as the one who calls.
• All nature is being called forward toward ever new possibilities.
• God does coerce but he persuades
• According to Cobb, the future is open, progress can occur. The opposite of progress remains a possibility as well, we may choose self annihilation.
• Cobb, dealt with a wide array of isses- dialog with other traditions, challenge posed by liberation and feminist thinkers, he came to view process theology as political theology, he was also disturbed by the growing ecological crisis., economics
• There is no end to the process, because God is not omnipotent, there is no guarantee that good will triumph.
Creativity
• The driving force behind the process is creativity
• God is also under the laws of the world
• Creativity is the ultimate power, the engine that drives the world
• God is not the creator but the traffic policeman. God directs the process of becoming.
Evaluation
1. Process theology falls into the trap of allowing its philosophy to distort/direct its understanding of God.
2. It denies that God knows the future since that future does not yet exist – God’s omniscience means he knows all that exists and knowable. God doesn’t know the mane of my father’s third wife, because she never was nor ever will since my father is dead already. This, according to process theology does not undermine his omniscience. Similarly, he does not know the future since it does not yet exist.
o The Bible however presents God as one above time and space, with all knowledge of the future – that is what prophecy is all about. Immanent and transcendent at all time.
3. God is made a prisoner of time. God is not completely in charge.
4. Loss of the Divine Transcendence. God is within the process as one example of the principles of its cosmology
5. Evil is a by product of the process, even a necessary part of the world’s movement toward God, rather than an alien intruder into the world.
6. It denies the independence of God from creation. Classical theism sees God
as impassible; not changed by the events of creation. Process theology often held that God needs the universe and that the universe is eternal.
LESSON 7: RADICAL THEOLOGY
Read first paragraph Grenz and Olson page145
In the 1960s thinkers struggled with the meaning of the secular and its significance for theology.
The doctrine of God became central to their musings, as evidenced by the Radical death of God movement
Contributing to the ferment of the 1960s was the retirement of the theological giants of previous decades- Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich.
1960s – formed what has been termed radical theology
The theologians launched a new quest for the immanence of God, finding the presence of the divine reality within the temporal reality of modern life.
More than anything the theologians of the new Immanence found their inspiration in the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is therefore, with Bonhoeffer that the story of the immanental theology of the early 1960s must begin.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
TRANSENDENCE IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
a. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• To make theology relevant
• He deserved to be studied as a theologian
• He was not a systematic theologian
• No opportunity to systematize- wrote Letters and Papers from Prison.
• Born 1906 died 1945
• A child protegene- composed something at the age of 4
• At the age of 12 he began reading theology. Studied at the university of Tubingen and Berlin.
• At age 21 he had a doctorate. His Dessertation Sanctorum Communialist – Communion of Saints Karl Barth called it a miracle
• He went on to become a Lecturer at the University of Berlin
• Two opportunities to go to America – Union theological Seminary – met Reinhold Niebuhr 1931-
• Met Karl Barth- started teaching
• Hitler his rise to power in 1932 changed the course of Bonhoeffer’s life
• Bonhoeffer saw the evil behind Hitler’s Nazis party- German church supporting. He joined the confessing church-which broke its ranks with the state church over the issue of Nazi ideology- he became a leader of this church.
• In 1933 he left he abandoned academia, taking a leave of absence from the university and moving to London, where he served two congregations as pastor.
• In 1935 he returned to Germany to direct an illegal seminary for training ministers for the confessing Church.
• In 1940 the secret police closed the seminary, yet not before Bonhoeffer was able to record the principles employed in the innovative experiment in two books, The Cost of Discipleship 1937 and Life Together 1939
• Defends the Jewish people suffering persecution
• Barmen declaration- people who denied the allegiance the German church was giving Hitler in this document.
• Condemned cheap grace – forgiveness without repentance.
• Writes a little book- creation and fall for the morning devotion.
• 1939 WWII begins, Bonhoeffer goes to America in June returns in July of 1939. He said what right wil I have to reconstruct Christian life in my country if I don’t face the trials with my people.
• Helped get information to the outside world. He was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested and put in prison
• He was incarcerated in Tegel Military Prison in Berlin, where he wrote the documents subsequently published in his famous Letters and Papers from Prison.
• April 3rd 1945 he was executed three days before that area was rescued by Britain and America.
• His composure in the face of death led the camp doctor to remark “in the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
b. Bonhoeffer’s theology
• Not fully developed , his writing are fragmentary
• He did not live long enough to systematize his thinking.
• He had been a pacifist but later joined a plot to assassinate Hitler.
• In the first period of his life Bonhoeffer focused on the church , in the middle period he focused on the cost of discipleship, and at the end of his life, he focused on worldy holiness.
• Central to his thought is his understanding of Christ.
Key themes
i. Christ the center
• In his entire life Bonhoeffer wrestled with the question , ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’
• His Christology is developed in two treatises Christ the Center and Ethics
• Christology was very important for him. What does Christ mean for us today?
• He found the presence of Christ in the church, understood in terms of community
• As a prisoner of Hitler’s regime he engaged in an intense struggle with the question of the presence of Christ in the world.
ii. Religionless Christianity
• Disregarded cultural Christianity
• To set forth his understanding of the true Christian faith in the midst of false religion he had already rejected earlier in his carreer.
• Bonhoeffer Rejected cheap grace- this grace has no cost to it, and it results in no transformation at all
• Rejected religious apriori- pushes God away
• Rejected the God of the gaps- science had had said that what Science cannot answer theology fills the gap
• He wants a Christianity that speaks to the real world we live in in.
• He rejected the notion that religion has to do with our weaknesses, to him that is religion and not Christianity- A religion that deals with our strength.
• “In the contemporary world come of age we must view God as weak and powerless in the world, the one who “allows himself to be edged out of the world and on the cross.” On this way can God be with us and help us. According to Bonhoeffer the God of the Bible conquers power and space in the world by his weakness.
• Rejected a privatistic understanding of faith. Which limited religion to the spiritual realm or was so otherworldly in orientation. Wanted a faith that can come into the public square
• A faith that will salty the world
iii. Holy Worldliness
• For Bonhoeffer this understanding of God, is coupled with a radical Christian discipleship characterized by holy worldliness.
• Where is Christ to be found? In the World. Following Jesus into the World
• The call for a Christian ‘worldliness’ is the application of this Christological axiom to the life of discipleship.
• He saw the chief temptation faced by Christians as the lure to withdraw out of the world into pious enclaves, to erect private spheres of religiosity or to view religion as one activity or dimension of existence in addition to the others.
• To be a Christian for Bonhoeffer means to participate in the life of the world, to serve God in the world and merely in some sterile religious sanctuary or in an isolated sheltered Christian enclave.
• The Church “is to stand in the center of the village’ and the Christian life is to be lived in the world.
• This participation as a Christian means sharing in the sufferings of God in the life of the world.
• The Christian living in the world come of age, he argued, must accept full responsibility for the world’s history.- becoming vulnerable in the service of the world.
• Thus a Christian is to aspire to be a human being, not a saint.
• Read Bonhoeffer Grenz and Olson- quote on page 154.
• Being a worldly Christian does not give a licence for an immoral or indulgent lifestyle, being a worldly Christian necessitates living close to the presence of God- to live in Christ. Only this way can a believer become strong to face the challenge of life.
Conclusion
Transcendence
• Like Neo Orthodoxy theologians, Bonhoeffer sought to reestablish the Transcendence of God in the face of the immanental theology of liberalism.
• But his understanding of Transcendence was not that of the in-breaking Word, for his Transendent God is ‘beyond in the midst of the world,’ the reality of the ultimate that gives meaning to the punultimate, the presence tapped by means of the secret discipline that gives sustenance to the believer and the church in their task of being in the world.
SECULAR THEOLOGY
• Springs our in the 1960s
Why Secular theology???
• These thinkers set themselves to the task of carrying to completion the program suggested by Bonhoeffer.
• Barth had removed God from the realm of everyday life , radical theologians rebelled against Barth’s exaggeration of God’s Transendence
• The dichotomy established by Barth between true faith and human religion resulted in a rejection of the division between religious and secular life.
All of the theologians found inspiration in Bonhoeffers call for a religionless Christianity. But they went beyond what their theological mentors had envisioned.
All desired to remove from Christianity the traditional emphasis on the otherworldly.
Radical Theology
a. Death of God Movement
Chronological seen , the first significant stream of radical thought in the 1960s was the death of God movement.
Despite its publicity it never gained a wide following.
A two man show- William Hamilton and Thomas J.J Altizer.
They proposed a thoroughgoing radical accommodation to the world come of age.
That was their response to Bonhoeffer’s call for a secular interpretation of the gospel.
No contemporary theological expression has created as much as the Death of God
TV and radio, choruses with the refrain ‘God’s not Dead’ bumber stickers with the slogan “My God’s is Not Dead- Sorry About Yours!’
Time Magazine featured it in a cover story entitled ‘is God Dead?’ in October 1965.
The death of God was it a historical event, A linguistic event? A cultural event? Or was it an affirmation of the divinity of humankind- the deepest expression of the immanence of God? All are possible interpretations of the intent of Hamilton and Altizer.
Hamilton averred, the death of God theology was not just ‘a complicated sort of atheism but a truly Christian form of theology.
Altizer only a Christian can truly affirm that God is dead
WILLIAM HAMILTON
Professor of Church history at Rochester Divinity school in the early 1960s
Studied under Niebuhr and Tillich at Union theological Seminary in New York.
Book the Essence of Christianity 1961
In this book he began to introduce the concept of the death of God, building on Nietzche, Camus and Tillich
The book was a protest against the concept of divine providence ruling history and a call of Christians to stand in the midst of a culture without God and not to wait for some reappearance of the divine.
For Hamilton, the true essence of Christianity is to live active, worldly lives without God in the place defined by Jesus- alongside the neighbor, participating in her struggles and sufferings.
In 1966 he coauthored Radical Theology and the Death of God with Altizer who called him the most articulate leader of the death of God movement in America.
He suggested that he sees belief in God as dangerous.
He still considers himself a Christian, based on his firm commitment to Jesus Christ as the one who shows the way to be human.
THOMAS ALTIZER
He is considered the leading exponent of the death of God theology or Christian atheism in the 1960s
He was at the Methodist related Emory University in Atlanta
Book The Gospel of Christian Atheism.
Influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche, poet William Blake. These three, Altizer said formed the primary sources of his theology.
Hamilton and Altizer dedicated their book to Tillich- Altizer cited him as the modern father of radical theology.
Overral theme is the absolute Immanence of God in humanity
Theology must come to terms with the modern consciousness of humanity’s full liberation and responsibility as articulated by its prophets who are the modern world’s secular, profane minds: Freud, Marcuse, Sartre, Blake, Hegel and Nietzsche.
He viewed the death of God as an event in history, not just a symbolic expression of modern humanity’s autonomy. He labeled this event the ‘self annihilation of God’ and interpreted it as the ultimate act of kenosis symbolic in the doctrines of the Incarnation and cross.
Altizer says ‘the Christian proclaims the God who has totally negated or sacrificed himself in Christ’
Critique
Langdon Gilkey: without God language, this theology cannot consistently hold into the category of the Lordship of Jesus.”
It cannot be a Christian theology
Criticisms brought about the death of the death of God theology in the late 1960s
It was rejected as too radical in its absolute immanence an its elimination of Transcendence
SECULAR THEOLOGY
JOHN A.T ROBINSON
• Other radical theologians attempted to salvage theology in the midst of secular culture.
• This movement came to be known as the ‘Secular Christianity’ movement.
• The theologians were concerned about the church’s response to the modern situation. – they claimed secularity as the work of God and participating in the building of the new humanity, the new secular city of humankind.
• They were rethinking Christianity in the midst of the world come of age.
• 1963 came a book by Paul van Burren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel.
• Also the publication of a controversial book Honest to God, by Robinson at that time bishop of Woolwich in the church of England.
• Because of his position, he task was pastoral not explicitly theological.
• According to Robinson God is not to be seen as up there or out there. Therefore he looked to personal freedom and love as the chief categories of Transcendence.
• He argued that God is what gives meaning and direction to the world, esp to human relationships in the world.
• He expressed confidence that Christians can indeed come alongside others in the world and point them toward the Christ in the midst of life.
• Christ is the man for others, and his understanding of the life of the Christian as worldly holiness.
Christianity and the Secular
• Theologians of the movement baptized the secular and sought to show how the church ought to become enmeshed in the buiding of the new humanity, the new secular city of humanity
• They advocated a positive appraisal of the secular
• The question that a secular man asks is Will it work? Away from the religious questions.
• Thus the secular point of view emphasizes the temporal rather than the eternal and focuses on this worldly realities rather than the otherworldly dimension.
• The secular movement held a distinction between secularity and secularism.
• Secularity refers to the outlook characterized by the attitudes of modern science and this worldly concerns. , it is actually a liberating development.
• Secularism is the attitude that only through sciene is any trustworthy knowledge attainable and only the tangible and human affairs of the world are important. This attitude is dangerous, because it too readily becomes a new closed worldview than can even function like a religion.
• These theologians attempted to bring God back into the world, because this is where God is to be found, while avoiding the false ideas of the age.
Harvey Cox
• Book the Secular City published in 1965. The most influential articulation of the secular theology movement.
• Trained at Yale and Harvard, in 1965 he joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School.
• His theology found practical application through his activism both in inner city ministry and in the civil rights movement.
• His foundational thesis is that the process of secularization is in profound agreement with the Christian faith.
• Secularization is simply the legitimate consequence of the impact of biblical faith on history.
• Secularity is dedicated to what is truly authentic and basic to the gospel namely liberty and responsibility
• Call of the gospel to conversion is an admonition to the acceptance of adult responsibility.
• He asserted that the proper basis of the doctrine of the church lies in a theology of social change even revolution symbolized by the image of the secular city
• Out of this he came up with the three fold mission of the church
Kerygmatic- she announces the coming of the new era
Diakonic- function is healing the urban fractures, ills of urbanized existence and struggles together with people of no faith for the wholeness and health of the city
Koinonic- function of the church is that of making visible the city of man. To demonstrate visibly what it proclaims (kerygmatic) and to what it points (diakonia)
• Theology today must be that reflection in action by which the church finds out what this politician-God is up to and moves in to work along with him.
• God wants us to be interested in others not in God, we might need to lay aside the word God in favor of another designation of the reality that confronts us the secular city a new name of God’s own choosing that would emerge in God’s timing.
•
Conclusion
• Secular theology dissolved the Transcendence of God too completely into the world
• In this way immanence once again overshadowed Transcendence.
• It is to Harvey Cox’s credit that he was able to herald the dawning of the next theological movement, the theology of hope, and its orientation to the future as a way out of the impasse of secularism and the death of God theology.
THEOLOGY OF HOPE
Transcendence and Immanence in the Future
What doctrine is central to he theology of hope???? Eschatology
a. Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg
• Theology of Hope rises immediately after the Secular theology. Rising after the ashes of WWII and Europe has been destroyed physically and even theologically.
• The old way of thinking about theology –God
• Holocast and Hiroshima- how can there be a God in the face of such evil.
• Theology of Hope is the response to such and it rises as an alternative to the death of God which proclaimed that Secular theology- Secularism is the best.
• Book a Theology of Hope came in 1965. in this book Moltmann called for a shift to eschatology, to the traditional doctrine of las things but reinterpreted and understood afresh, as the foundation for the theological task.
• According to Carl Braaten, the theologians of Hope were interested in responding to the third of three questions posed by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason: What can I know? What ought I to do? And, What may I hope? Now it was time to devote theological attention to the third, and thereby to set forth a point of contact with the secular human.
• A more fundamental question, What does it mean to hope? Preoccupied the theologians of Hope.
• Many people in Evangelical Christianity felt that this theology was the one to give their support.
• They found in Moltmann an intellectually sound theology for their time.
• Many Christians found theology of Hope a positive direction after the WWII
b. Jurgen Moltmann: Life
• Born in 1926 – a soldier in Hitler’s army
• Served and got captured by the British army in 1945 and remained a prisoner of war until 1948. that event created his own crisis of faith.
• Moltmann credited Christian hope as something that made him to survive.
• Studied at Gottingen, under teacher strongly influenced by Barth.
• He received a doctoral degree in 1952, and served as pastor of a small Reformed church until 1957.
• Taught at Bonn and Tubingen- professor of Systematic theology.
• Other publications, The Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, The Trinity and the Kingdom, God in Creation, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Perspective
• Returns to German devastated by war and German need a theology to pick it up. The theology of evangelicalism had terribly failed for many God died in those concentration camps.
• God is there with us struggling with us
• Many people where looking for a fresh start new beginning while taking the evils of the world seriously.
c. Eschatology as Central
• True center piece of theology is Hope- the coming of God in Hope – Hope that will transform the future
• Eschatology as central to the Bible
• People like Albert Schweitzer had mentioned that Jesus’ message was eschatology.
• Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.
• Theologians of Hope where asking the question what is this hope that we have.
• The idea of the future was critical to both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
• Old Testament- anticipation of the Messiah
-New Covenant in Ezekiel and Jeremiah
-Promise something better
-All of the Covenants
• New Testament-Great Commission
-2nd Coming of Christianity
• For Moltmann the whole of the Bible is an eschatological presupposition. You cannot find a passage of Scripture that is not eschatological.
• Transcendence of the future. God is distance is maintained through time rather than through space.
• God is not swallowed up to the Immanence of the present but calls us into the future.
• Discussion of eschatology should come in the beginning
• Eschatology is not accidental to the message of the NT it is the message of NT
• “From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present”
• His eschatology is the coming of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is central to this Eschatology
• The future is the one in which God calls to move in the direction of the kingdom.
• The present world is a fallen world, infested with evil, injustice characterize the present world.
• God is not satisfied with the present, not put his stamp of approval on the present but calls us to the future.
• God brings the kingdom but we are participants trying to make the world a better place to live.
• Moltmann’s hope is not a hope that escapes the present but tries to change the present.
• He says a God of Hope is not a obstruction (a truly Christian understanding of Hope) or a barrier to Social change but it is the real foundation for it.
• Response to Marxists- Hope without God is groundless and shallow.
• Resurrection of Christ gives substance to hope. A new thing altogether.
• Revelation as promise. God draws us into the future. John 14 I am going ahead to prepare a place for you.
• The future determines the present and not the present determining the future.
• Page 175- the resurrection of Christ.
• Crucifixion is equally important where God is identifying with ourselves. God comes to us and identify with us. Resurrection – Jesus is raised from the dead- hope
• For Moltmann the World is necessary for God. The trinity does not happen apart from God’s involvement in the world. The world brings out the Trinity. The world affects God.
d. Revelation as Promise
• Moltmann wants his theology to be biblical founded, eschatologically oriented and politically responsible.
• He sees the task of theology not so much as to provide an interpretation of the world as to transform it in light of hope for its ultimate transformation by God.
• In his Ontology, the future is not determined by the present but itself determines the present.
• The future is ontologically prior to the present and the past. It is not becoming from the present, but coming to it, drawing it forward into totally new forms of reality.
• Only Christian hope, based on God’s revealed promises for the future, can make happiness in the present world possible, because hope makes us ready to bear the cross in the present.
• Promise is important in understanding revelation.
• Based on promises the early church lived in hope with a view toward the future and toward mission, experiencing the faithfulness of GOD while remaining restless for the coming of God’s kingdom of righteousness.
• What promises did the early church live with, what promises do we have?
e. The Trinitarian History of God
• Moltmann explored the connection between the doctrine of the Trinity and eschatology in two major books, The Crucified God and The Trinity and the Kingdom.
• Moltmann concluded that this event not only has an effect on humanity in the dynamic of reconciliation, but also on God.
• The Cross according to Moltmann is the occasion in which God constitutes himself as Trinity within history: ‘what happened on the cross was an event between God and God. It was a deep division in God himself, in so far as God abandoned God and contradicted himself, and at the same time a unity in God, in so far as God was at one with God and corresponded to himself.’
• The Cross cannot be understood apart from the Trinity.
• What happens in history happens in God because the cross opens God to the world;
• God would not be what he is without the Cross. ‘this means that God’s being is historicl and that he exists in history. The story of God then is the story of the history of man.’
• God not only understands, as in process thinking, but he helps.
• God’s loving and gracious choice to allow his own life to be constituted by the history of the world entails self limitation. ‘in order to create a world outside himself, the infinite God must have made room beforehand for a finitude in himself.’
• Similarly, in order to redeem the godforsaken world GOD enters the godless space created by his self limitation and suffers it, thus bringing it within his divine life in order to conquer it.
• Moltmann labeled his own view ‘trinitarian panentheism’ and claimed that it preserves and deepens the truths in both views while avoiding their weaknesses.
f. Trinitarian Panentheism
• Moltmann insists that Jesus’ cross and resurrection as well as the sending of the Spirit to the church constitute the Trinitarian life of God, his Trinitarian view of the cross raises the question: Would god be Trinitarian apart from the events of world history?
• Moltmann quoted Karl Rahner: ‘the economic trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.’
• We can conclude that according to Moltmann God would not be Trinitarian without his historical interaction with the world, even though this would move his doctrine of God even further away from classical Christian theism toward a pantheistic dissolution of God in history.
g. The shift to Immanence
• Though he began his doctrine of God in Theology of Hope with a strong emphasis on transcendence- throughout his books Moltmann moved steadly toward an overemphasis on God’s immanence within history.
• He underscored the relationship between GOD AND THE WORLD - a relationship of fellowship, mutual need and mutual interpenetration, and he strongly suggested a model of the world as God’s body.
Critical Evaluation
• No other theologian has done as much to explore the implications of eschatology and of the cross of Christ for the being of God.
• Moltmann has done more than anyone since Karl Barth to revitalize the doctrine of theTrinity in contemporary theology
Negative
• Moltmann’s theology is riddled with tensions, how the future, which is still open, can impinge on and influence the present. Is God who is present and active in history, future to himself?
• His is a tritheism not a monotheism.
• His theology falls to the detriment of the contemporary theologies to emphasize the God’s immanence to the detriment of his transcendence.
h. Wolfhart Pannenberg: transcendence in Reason and Hope
• Talks about hope, the future
• Talks about the reasonableness of Christianity
• Christian Apologist
• Wants to make Christianity credible to the people of Europe after the WW2.
• He talks about natural theology. God reveals himself to humanity through nature and reason
• Christianity was a philosophically sound religion
• Unlike Schliermacher he did not want to throw away history. He saw history as essential.
• Christianity must have a historical foundation
• This is the central event of Christianity . If its not historical then we don’t have ground to stand.
THEOLOGIES OF LIBERATION
a. Introduction
• Enough of this ivory tower staff
• Theology must make a concrete difference in our world. If it is to be relevant
• Our situation is of poverty, oppression
• Theology must address this context. It must takes the crimes of the world
• Examples- feminist theology, Black Theology, Latin American theology, Asian Theology, African Theology
b. Latin American Liberation Theology
• Historical background
i. Conference of bishops
• The church was guilty of siding with appression
• Institutional violence
ii. Vatican II
• A revolution for the Catholic church
• Gave the Catholic church permission to speak to the modern movement
• It was now ok to talk about these things
• Roman Catholic movement
• Gutierrez 1971 A Theology of Liberation
c. Criticisms of Traditional Theology
i. Traditional theology had been two distant, speculation from real life, ivory tower theology. Dealing with question that nobody was asking.
ii. Traditional theology was guilt of aligning itself with the forces of oppression. Wanted to keep things the way they are.
iii. Traditional theology only emphasized the spiritual, privatistic individual life. Only talks about individual salvation. Emphasized just the spiritual aspect.
c. Liberation Theologians
Gutierrez A Theology of Liberation
• Born and raised in Peru
• Went to school in Europe
• Saw the poor people and interacted with them
• Medellin 1968, Puebla 1979, are the documents that he refers to
• Liberation theology is the theology of deed of action
• Works are what makes you righteous
• Doing justice is to be holy
• His revelation is of liberation
• God needs the poor to be God
• We understood God from the view point of the poor
• God of the poor is different from the God of masters
• God of the Bible has identified himself with the poor
• The poor are the Christian those who receive the gospel
Leonardo Boff
• Book Jesus the Liberator
d. Key Elements in Liberation Theology
i. Context matters
• Jesus asked them who do people say I am
• Theology must be contextual
• Theology must be intrinsically linked with a specific social and cultural situation
• You cannot escape context. Theology is always contextual
• Theology is never universal, theology from New York cannot be imposed upon Latin America
i. Poverty
• The context is poverty
• Dehumanizing poverty internal and external factors that contribute to that.
• Foreign government, multinational corporations
• No economic freedom
ii. God’s preferential option for the poor
• God sides up with the poor
• He despises injustice
• Poor people are more virtuous than the rich
• Whoever is suffering injustice God will be on their side. Poor are in a priviledged position to understand who God is.
• Blessed are the poor, Exodus from Egypt
iii. Theology as critical reflection on praxis
• Theology is our involvement in the struggle
• Traditional theology reflection first
• Liberation says we act and then we let our action or we reflect on those actions.
iv. The use of Marxist Social Analysis
• Marx the story of Class conflict – between the rich and poor. Capitalism is evil- enables the owners of the means of production to oppress the poor.
• Advocated for a classless society
• Marx was right according to liberation theologians
• Agreed with Marx that capitalism is evil, socialist is close to ideal
• Marx – God is the creation of the oppressors
• Question- can you use Marx’s social Analysis without falling into this? We have always been doing that – use of Plato pagan philosophers.
v. Use of the Bible
• Three steps process
a. Analysis of contemporary reality rather than examination of the ancient historical context. You begin by examining your historical context.
b. Creative interpretation of Scripture involves the adoption of a clear political sociological or theological stance. Partiality that is acceptable.
c. The meaning of the text is disclosed not only in reflection upon it but also in concrete social action based upon it.
e. Doctrinal Formulations
i. God
Preferential option for the poor
God is consistently on the side of the oppressed
ii. Sin
Sin is less seen as an individuals act and primarily seen as social structures that oppress people and dehumanize them.
Benefiting from such social structures then you are a sinner
iii. Christ
Jesus is our liberator. He comes as the bringer of God’s salvation. Christus Victor
Jesus is our example- brought liberation in the lives of the people
iv. Salvation
Salvation for the liberation theologian is holistic integral – body, soul and Spirit
Physical salvation, liberation
They have been accused forgetting the soul
Salvation is corporal, systemic
Salvation is liberation from oppression
v. The Church
If God is on the side of the oppressed, Jesus is the liberator then the church should take the mission of redeeming the oppressed
The church should identify with the oppressed
Base ecclesial Communities- vehicles for bringing liberation
vi. Eschatology
We are not supposed to wait around for God to do something. We must take up the struggle against oppression.
God depends on our participation
f. Critical Evaluation
i. Positive
a. Critique on traditional theology in being too individualistic. Reality has a communal and systemic connotations to it
b. Liberation theology deserves credit addressing the social, historical situation of oppression in particular neo colonialism – injustices should be corrected. This is consistent with scripture.
c. The importance of the context for doing theology.
ii. Negatives
a. strong emphasis on the Immanence of God, totally neglected the Transcendence of God
b. Criticized for neglecting individual salvation. All social change begin with the individual. Individual transformation is the foundation for social change. We cannot just pass laws.
c. Neglect of the spiritual aspect of salvation. It emphasizes the physical, salvation from physical oppression . But we need to be reminded that there is a heaven and hell.
d. The use of scripture. The context determines the meaning of the text. Praxis determines theology. We begin with the situation and allow that situation to guide us in the understanding of scripture. Hermenuetics works almost in the background. If the context determines, how can we affirm that this is universally wrong.
e. Understanding of Jesus as a liberator. Jesus consciously avoided association with a kind of political messiah refuse to identify himself with the Zealots. Triumphal entry on a donkey not on a war horse. The salvation he brought was not primarily political.
f. The failure of communism – Soviet Union, Cuba. Where Socialism has been tried its not been successful.
g. The rise of the evangelical church/ Pentecostal, people are living the Roman Catholic Church, then liberation theology has not been able to keep the masses not addressing other issues.
3. AMERICAN BLACK THEOLOGY
• Arises during the times of slavery
• Desire for a God who delivers, sympathises with us
• Hope for Negroes
• Civil Rights movement- still not equal
• Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, Black Power
• Arises out of the 1960s into the 70s and 80s
a. Black Theology and Liberation Theology
i. Theology must arise out of a context which informs it
ii. The context is oppression.
iii. Theology must seek to change the situation not to explain it.
Difference
• Black Theology was done in isolation from Liberation Theology . North American context and Latin American Context.
James Cone
• the most widely known and representative Black theologian is James H. Cone, Charles Briggs Proffessor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York.
• Cone had the academic credentials necessary to gain a hearing in the largely White dominated theological circles.
Why God is Black?
• Involved in the experience of the Blacks
• Christ as the oppressed One. God was humiliated like us
• The essence of God is to be found in Black
• An Early Voice
• Joseph R. Washington
1. FEMINIST THEOLOGY
Read Grenz and Olson page 224 last paragraph
• What is Feminist Theology
• Arises out of the turbulent times of the 1960s
• It was a period of questioning authority
• There is a prior history of feminism- feminism that begins in the 19th Century- Christian feminism during the abolitionist movement
• Emancipation of slaves and women shared some biblical basis.
• Giving women the right to vote shared some history with feminism
• The Holiness movement of the 19th Century ordained women into ministry.
• The 1960s began with the appointment of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in the US.
• Two years later 1963 Betty Freidan’s book The Feminist Mystique
• Several activist women responded by forming the National Organization for Women (NOW)
• The church was one of the institution that fell under the scrutiny of the movement. Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father (1973).
• Feminist theology like all liberation theologies begins with a situation of oppression, thereby becoming critical reflection on praxis- the experience of oppressed persons freeing themselves from domination.
a. Feminist Theologians
a. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza- professor at Harvard Divinity School
Books: In Memory of Her
b. Rosemary Ruether
c. Letty Russell
b. Varieties of Feminism
• Different groups have been categorized
Secular feminist
New Age Feminist
Liberal Christian Feminist
Evangelical Feminist
i. Secular Feminism
• Disallow God, revelation, and religion in the discussion of feminism
• View the Bible as no relevance to us. Comes out of the past of our oppression.
• Christianity is part of the problem and not the solution
• Traditional social structures are part of the problem
• Society need an overall overhaul
• If a womam want to truly realize herself she should not marry, give birth, lest she oppress herself
• A king of lesbianism is found in this.
• People like Betty Freden, Germanine Green, Simoine de Beavoir, Gloria Sternem
• Women were prevented from becoming free human beings by myths.
ii. New Age Feminist
• Are pagans who are typically involved in the worship of feminine god or goddess.
• They say we worship mother earth. Christianity is considered patriarchal.
iii. Liberal Christian Feminist
• They operate within a Christian framework but approach feminism from a very liberal perspective.
• Believe that Biblical writers were simply men of their time hence they wrote a document that was patriarchal in nature, A hermeneutic of suspicion. "systematically assume that the Bible's male authors and interpreters deliberately covered up the role of women in early Christianity
• Systematically assume that the Bible writers deliberately covered up the role of women. In the Biblical history even though in actual reality the story was not.
iv. Evangelical Feminist
• Are those who generally hold to conservative view of the Bible.
• Bible is inspired Word of God.
• If the Bible is rightly understood it supports their views.
c. Feminist Positions in Bible
1. The Bible is hopelessly patriarchal and oppressive of women and it should be discarded, set aside. It is part of the problem not the solution.
2. The Bible in its present form is patriarchal but we can find in it hings of the original egalitarianism that was intended by God. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorence wrote a book in Memory of Her.
3. The Bible is not patriarchal in its essence, but like any of God’s good gifts it can be misused, distorted in way that have been oppressive of women. If rightly understood it supports the rights of women and equality. Galatians 3:28- your sons and daughters shall prophesy.
d. Underlying Themes
1. Traditional theology is patriarchal, done by men for men. Making men the center of the universe.
2. Traditional theology has caricatured, ignored the women and women’s experience.
3. This had negative consequences for women led to the inability of women.
4. Women must begin to be theologians in order to develop an understanding of God and his salvation.
e. Feminist Critique of Christian Tradition
f. Feminist Theological Method
• The experience of women is the norm in doing theology – that experience is oppression at the hands of patriarchal society.
• Orthodox theology has been male dominated.
• Scripture alone cannot serve as the principle of authority for theology because the Bible is thoroughly permeated by patriarchy
• Divine revelation is an ongoing process, we cannot restrict it to the past, even if we recognize some historical events such as Jesus Christ as paradigmatic for future revelation.
• One must also recognize women’s feminist experience as divine revelation and elevate it as a primary source and norm for contemporary Christian theology, if theology is to be credible to women and liberated men.
Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Belief
a. God
• Central tenet needing transformation is the doctrine of God
• The traditional imagery of God as male is so oppressive that it hardly needs any discussion (Ruether)
• Ruther uses Tillich’s concept of God as the ground of being which she prefers to call the primal Matrix or God/es
• God is the Transendent matrix of Being that underlies and supports both our own existence and our continual potential for new being.
• God/es is no more to be identified with humankind than with nature. On the contrary God/es embraces all such dualities in a dynamic unity
• Ruether’s theology also suggests monism- nature personification Mother Goddess of the radical feminists who worship the earth and themselves.
b. Christology
• Their biggest problem is to explain how a male savior can be of benefit to women.
• Most Christian feminist theologians regard Jesus Christ as a paradigm of true humanity- humanity freed of the evil of patriarchal attitudes and behavior patterns.
• Other humans can also become representatives of true humanity according to Russell
• Ruether ‘once mythology about Jesus as Messiah or divine Logos with its traditional masculine imagery is stripped off, the Jesus of the synoptic gospels can be recognized as a figure remarkably compatible with feminism.’
• In Ruether’s opinion Jesus was the liberator who denounced the power and status relationship that defined privilege and deprivation.
Critical evaluation
• It is important to distinguishe the movement for women’s equality within the churches and feminist theology
• Feminist theology has done a great service to the Christian community by pointing the evils of androcentrism, patriarchy and misogyny- they have helped the church become more inclusive and therefore truer to the image of God as both male and female and to the universality of the gospel. "systematically assume that the Bible's male authors and interpreters deliberately covered up the role of women in early Christianity
Negative
• It threatens a new schism within the body of Christ by its support and encouragement of the Women Church movement
• The rejection of authority except that exercised by feminist consciousness.
• Feminist theology has gone too far in cutting itself loose from Christian tradition
• Feminist theology is guilt of becoming monism therefore it fails to balance the transcendence and the immanence of God.
NEW CATHOLIC THEOLOGY
a. Introduction: History of Catholic Thought
i. Protestant Reformation and Council of Trent
• Catholicism and Protestantism existed in their own separate worlds
• Council of Trent was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation
• Catholic thought has been a response to Protestant thought
• Sola Scriptural versus the teaching of the church
• How are they going to respond to modernity
• Popes sought to stamp out modernism
• Some felt the church needs to accommodate modernity
• The leading theologians were silenced or even deposed from their teaching positions, a mood of fear settled within the theological community. Innovation was considered dangerous at best, evil at worst.
• Key events is Vatican 1- often referred to as the 22nd ecumenical council by those in the Catholic tradition.
ii. Vatican I 1869
• Those heresies condemned by the Council of Trent which denied the authority of the Church.
• Rise of modernism and Protestantism go hand in hand
• Documents approved- Syllabus of Errors
• No hope for anyone not in the Catholic church
• Some felt that the Pope ought to reconcile himself with modernity
• Vatican I was a conservative reaction to modernity
• Catholic theologians were held and not be able to do theology, many of them were condemned
iii. Vatican II 1962-1965
• 21st Ecumenical Council
• Over 2000 bishops from Africa, Latin America
• Called by Pope John XXIII caretaker pope
• Became a reformist, Catholic church needs to change
• Beginning a new era for Roman Catholic around the world
• Catholic church can now enter into dialogue with other branches of Christianity. Protestant delegates were invited.
• The liturgy of the church could now be done in vernacular language
• Acknowledgements of other doctrines of faith
• Two scholars who contributed immensely are Karl Rahner and Hans Kung.
• The two believed that Catholic theology had been too dualistic in its approach, tending to separate the supernatural from the natural, grace from nature, transcendence from immanence, they sought to do justice to the presence of the Spirit of God in the world.
• Moderates look to Rahner, and radical progressives look to Kung.
a. Karl Rahner 1904-1984
The transendency of Human Subjectivity
• First paragraph on page 238 Grenz and Olson
• Most influential theologian of the Roman Catholic church in the 20th Century
• He functions as a kind of universal god father to contemporary Roman Catholic theology.
• He has been compared to Thomas Aquinas, Fredrich Schleirmacher, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich.
• It is impossible to understand the changes taking place in Catholic theology in the later half of the 20th century without paying attention to the role played by Karl Rahner.
• How can we bring out change without being kicked out of the church
• Influential at Vatican II – his ideas found their way on the documents used passed by the council.
• Mediating theology –it seeks a middle ground between two extremes that have been at war with one another in the Catholic church for over one hundred years.
• ‘Theology much be so presented that it encourages a genuine dialogue between the best of traditional thought and exigencies of today’
Rahner’s Life and Carreer
• Born Catholic, and he became a priest- Jesuit Order.
• Studied to become a professor of Philosophy – studies under the famous existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Freisburg.
• His dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of human knowledge was rejected by the Catholic faculty because they found it too heavily influenced by Heidegger.
• Eventually published as Spirit in the World 1939- received high acclaim as a work of a genius.
• Taught at the university of Innsbruck, Austria in 1937, later moved to the university of Munich, later Munster.
o Prolific writer, published 3500 books and articles
o Produced a one volume systematic theology Foundations of Christian Faith 1987
o He gave a summary of his entire theology as follows
I really only want to tell the reader something very simple. Human persons in every age, always and everywhere, whether they realize it and reflect upon it or not, are always in relationship with the unutterable mystery of human life that we call God. Looking at Jesus Christ the crucified and risen one, we can have the hope that now in our present lives, and finally after death, we will meet God as our own fulfillment.
Transendental Method
• Rahner’s theological method reflects this conviction ‘the dilemma of the immanence or transcendence of God must be overcome without sacrificing the one or the other concern’
• Rahner considered philosophy an essential moment or aspect of the task of theology.
• Begins with fundamental theology- within humanity is the quest for Transendence- our faith rests on intellectual grounds.
• Humans are by nature open for revelation. We are by nature religious creatures- in other words they are transcendent.
• Rahner argued that humans transcend nature and themselves in every act of questioning and thinking. They are not closed in on themselves but open toward, oriented to and receptive of divine revelation.
• Scientists got to know of the existence of Neptune before they saw in on a telescope in 1846.-they deduced its existence in the solar system from observing certain irregularities in the mvts of Uranus that could be explain by the existence of another planet.
• Rahner calls this method transcendental reflection. What is the apriori transcendental condition for the possibility of (human) subjectivity?
• God is not alien to human nature, but an intrinsic part of it as the necessary condition for human subjectivity.
• Philosophical anthropology – human are restless until they find rest in God. All humans have a God shaped empty space, in their beings that can only be filled only by God.
• God is not a threat to human self fulfillment, rather God is the necessary horizon of human subjectivity and therefore belongs essentially to human nature.
• Yet the holy mystery remains transcendent-even to the transcendence of the human subject that reaches out toward it.
Transcendental Revelation
• We are open to that revelation
• Catholic thought uses- nature and grace
• Trying to avoid the danger of radical immanence Rahner cautioned ‘he who is essentially open to being cannot by his own capacities set limits to the possible object of a revelation’
• Fundamental theology then must be restricted to the status of being a preparation for the gospel and not become a predetermination of it.
• Extrinsicism- the position that divine self communication contradicts human nature -traditional theology, intrinsicism – the position that divine self communication is captive to human nature-contemporary modernist/liberal theology it all comes from within us- no point of contact
• Rahner avoided the two extremes and suggested Supernatural existentialism- It is God given- humans are also always supernaturally elevated by God in that transcendental openness so that such elevation becomes an actual experience of God in every human life.
• Just like Wesley’s Prevenient grace
• Anonymous Christian- one who freely cooperates with the grace of God in the supernatural existentialism can and will be saved- apart from any special revelation.
Categorical Revelation
• Categorical revelation discloses the inner reality of God that cannot be discovered through transcendental revelation alone.
• This Categorical revelation of God occurs throughout history and across cultures whenever and wherever people by God’s grace actualize their natural and supernatural transcendentality and break through
• Every religion is an attempt to such a break through, Rahner believed that in all religions there are successful mediation when the supernatural, transcendental relationship of man to God through God’s self communication becomes self reflexive.
• In such moments people of any religion or no religion become anonymous Christians – because of human depravity every such event of revelation remains partial and intermixed with error.
• Symbols, events- God is manifesting himself
Absolute revelation
• The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is simply the highest point of God’s self communication.
• Found in Jesus Christ
Critical Revelation
• He provided the gap btwn two extremes that threated the and still threaten the unity of the church. –modern though and rich heritage of Catholic theology.
• He provided the greatest impulse and path for faithful renewal of Catholic theology since Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.
• However, his overall theory of humanity as the cipher of God implies that God needs the world and esp humanity as the mode of his self expression. It implies as well that the creation is not truly good until the Incarnation unites it with God.
b. Hans Kung
Striking the Balance Between Immanence and Transcendence
Introduction
• Hans Kung was deposed from his teaching position while on vacation in 1979.
• Culmination of the long struggle between the world famous Tubingen theologian and Rome’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Kung’s life and Carreer
• Born in 1928 - Switzerland
• Began his studies at 20 in Rome- aim to become a priest
• Studied at the prestigious Gregorian University in Rome.
• While in School Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical entitled Humani generis that condemned certain supposedly humanistic trends in theology- there began a suppression of new ideas within Catholic theology, which lasted until Vatican II in the early 1960s.
• Several French Catholic theologians including Teilhard de Chardin and Henri de Lubac were silenced or deposed from their teaching positions.
• Kung was not impressed, he read non Catholic thinkers as the atheist existentialist Jean Paul Sartre and the Protestant Karl Barth.
• Ordained to the priesthood in 1954, and shortly moved to Paris to work on a doctorate in theology.
• There he came under the influence of moderate Catholics like Yves Congar and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
• His tenure in Paris set him on the basis course that he would follow as a Catholic theologian, a course marked by ecumenical openness, progressive, critical orthodoxy and positive dialog with secular science, philosophy and world religions.
• Doctoral dissertation: Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection was published with a brief letter to the author by Barth himself in 1957.
• His thesis Kung’s claim that ‘On the whole there is fundamental agreement between the theology of Barth and that of the Catholic Church.
• In 1960 Kung was invited to take a chair in fundamental theology at the university of Tubingen
• During the 1960s Kung was primarily concerned with challenging and reinterpreting Catholic teachings about the nature of the church. In Structures of the Church 1962 , The Church 1967, and Infallible 1970.
• His teachings were considered heretic
• In terms of exposure to the secular media, he has been without question the most visible theologian of the 20th Century.
His thought
• The reformer called for the recognition that only God is infallible.
• Two reasons for that-
1. eccesiological- it is impossible to reconcile this doctrine with actual mistakes and contradictions of Catholic history.
2. Theological- inistency on the absolute primacy and otherness of God.
• Kung has a problem with the church’s position on numerous practical matters of church order and ethics , such as birth control and priestly celibacy.
• Roman church saw the church as offices- if the pope is not there then there is no church
