Imperial conquest — or “national” unification by force, which is hardly so different — requires first that the army be restructured to be highly legible and loyal to the State, rather than organized according to local customs and loyal to their own localities; then that the government of the empire (or nation) be remade in the image of the army; then, finally, that local society be remade in the image of the government.

A catena of quotations from Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century:

If we ask ourselves how it was that Schleiermacher could become so much our—and perhaps really still our—man of destiny, we are once again faced by the mystery of the great man, which possibly consists in the indissoluble unity of his timeless individual power on the one hand, and on the other of the temporal, historical conditions into which he was placed. … [It] is impossible to consider Schleiermacher thoroughly without being very strongly impressed. Indeed one is more strongly impressed every time one does consider him—by the wealth and magnitude of the tasks he set himself, by the moral and intellectual equipment with which he approached them, by the manly steadfastness with which he trod the path he had once embarked upon right to the end as he had entered upon it, unheedful of the favour or disfavour of each passing decade and by the artistry which he displayed, playfully, and endowing it by this very playfulness with the ultimate gravity of all true art—an artistry he showed in all he did, almost down to his last Sunday sermon. We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendour this figure radiated and still does—I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it—may honourably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again, may not hate here either. [412–13]

Anyone who seeks to negotiate between faith and a cultural awareness which at first is assumed to be unbelieving, and then bring about a lasting covenant between them must, at all events while he is doing this, take up a position which is in principle beyond that of both parties, a superior position, from which he can understand both parties and be the just advocate of both. He must, even if he himself belongs to one side, at least carry a white flag in his hand when approaching the other for a parley; be cannot at that moment be engaged as a combatant. To put it unmetaphorically: as long as he is an apologist the theologian must renounce his theological function. In so far as the apologist approaches the educated among the despisers of religion from the standpoint of theology he must not desire to speak only from faith and with only the faith of his hearers in view. He must present himself to them in a part which is provided for in their categories, which really occurs or can occur there. … This white flag, which the theologian must carry as an apologist, means of course for the theologian himself that in so far as he is an apologist he must, as Schleiermacher once more expressly states, take his point of departure (standpoint) above Christianity (in the logical sense of the word) in the general concept of the community of pious people or believers. As an apologist he is not a Christian theologian but a moral philosopher and philosopher of religion. He suspends to that extent his attitude to Christianity, and his judgment of the truth or even absoluteness of the Christian revelation. Together with the other educated people he looks upon Christianity as being on the same level as the other ‘pious communities’, as being subject to the points of view from which ‘pious communities’ are to be regarded here. He therefore regards the Christian Church too as ‘a community which arises only as a result of free human actions, and can only continue to exist by the same means’. … As an apologist he must say the other things, he must regard the Church as a pious community which has arisen and lives from human freedom, and has to demonstrate its possibility and necessity as such a community. [428–29, 30]

He is as a modern man and therefore as a thinker and therefore as a moral philosopher and therefore as a philosopher of religion and therefore as a philosophical theologian and therefore as an apologist and therefore finally as a dogmatist determined on no account to interpret Christianity in such a way that his interpreted statements can come into conflict with the methods and principles of the philosophy and the historical and scientific research of his time. [431]

If we call to mind the entire situation of theology in the modern world then we shall find it understandable that it fastened upon the point which had come to the centre of the entire thought of modern man. This point was simply man himself. This shifting of interest did not necessarily have to mean man without God, man in his own world. It could also mean man in the presence of God, his action over against God’s action. A genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. We may ask the question whether it was a good thing that Schleiermacher adapted himself to the trend of the time in this way and took up his position at the spot where he was invited to do so by the prevalence of the Copernican world-picture, by its execution during the Enlightenment, by Kant, by Goethe, by Romanticism, and by Hegel. There was in fact no need for the Copernican conception of the universe to acquire the significance of a command that theology should in future be anthropocentric theology. It might perhaps have been both more spirited and wiser to take up and carry through the Reformed theology of the Word more than ever at this time, in instructive opposition to the trend of the age. For indeed this Reformed theology had not been founded upon and conditioned by the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and, as a pure theology of the Word, it offered opportunity enough to do justice to the tendency of the age by an honest doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of faith. There was ambiguity in the fact that theology took the trend of the times as a command which must be followed as a matter of course, and in its inability to do justice to the tendency of the age other than by becoming anthropocentric in accordance with the changed picture of the universe. The suspicion arises whether this does not betray the fact that theology forgot its own theme over against all world-views. But this reversal of theology’s way of looking at things was not necessarily bound to mean that theology was now no longer theology, or had even become the enemy of true theology. Again, a genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. Theology could remain true to its own theme while it went with the times and thus completed this reversal. What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the centre which for the Reformers had been a subsidiary centre, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace. If it was this, then as a theology it was just as much justified as the theology which was orientated in the opposite direction, the theocentric, Reformed theology. The fact that Schleiermacher intended it as such (even if he did not perhaps execute it in this way) is revealed by the fact that he is very much aware of a second centre beside his original one, and seeks to grant it its full validity. [445–46]

There is no doubt that Schleiermacher sought to assert something like the absoluteness of Christianity, and continually asserted it. Strangely enough it was in the pulpit particularly that the problem again and again crossed his path: why Christ in particular? Why can we not manage without him? Why can we not manage with someone else? Perhaps with someone else who is yet to come? The answer consists in the constantly repeated protestation that everything we have of higher life we have from him. There can be no doubt about the personal sincerity of this assertion. But it is just this which is in question—whether this assertion can be considered as objectively valid, whether the strength of this assertion can be some other strength beside that of the asserting believer himself, or of the composite life of the community of the Christian Church, from out of whose heritage the preaching believer speaks. Schleiermacher does not seem to be able to say that there is an eternal significance of Christ, an absoluteness of Christianity. At the back of even his most forceful protestations, unrevoked, and irrevocable, unless he is to abandon his basic premise, there stands the fact he established in the Addresses that the basic outlook of every religion is in itself eternal, since it forms a supplementary part of the infinite whole of religion in general in which all things must be eternal. The sincerity and strength of the distinction which pious feeling is inclined and determined until futher notice to accord to Christ in relation to itself stands and falls with the sincerity and strength of pious feeling itself. The original fact of Christ and the fact of my Christianity are links in a chain, and the relationship of mutual determination which links in a chain necessarily have makes it plainly impossible to assume that the effect they have on one another cannot in principle be reversed. [456–57]

In turning away from Hegel the [nineteenth century] acknowledged that, having reached the summit of its desires and achievements, it was dissatisfied with itself, that this was after all not what it had intended. It set Hegel aside and tried again, but did not even reach such a peak a second time, and thus manifestly it was bound to be even less satisfied than it was before, although it pretended to be. Where does the fault lie? In Hegel? Those who study him will not receive this impression. If it is a question of doing what the entire nineteenth century evidently wanted to do, then Hegel apparently did it as well as it could possibly be done. Or is the reason that afterwards the age of the great men was past, that there was no genius present in the second half of the century to carry out the better things which the century it seems had in mind in turning away from Hegel? But it is always a bad sign when people can find nothing to say but that unfortunately the right people were lacking. This should be said either always or never. Every age, perhaps, has the great men it deserves, and does not have those it does not deserve. The question only remains, whether it was a hidden flaw in the will of the age itself, perfect as the expression was that it had found in Hegel, which was the reason why it could not find any satisfaction in Hegel and therefore not in itself, and yet could not find any way of improving upon and surpassing Hegel, and therefore itself. It might of course be possible that Hegelianism indeed represented in classic form the concern of the nineteenth century, but precisely as such came to reveal the limited nature of this concern, and the fact that it was impossible to proceed from it to the settlement of every other question of truth. And that for that reason it was, curiously, condemned.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 374. The whole lecture is an absolute tour de force: elucidating both what, for both philosophers and theologians, makes Hegel such an immensely attractive option — and why Hegel, taken on his own terms (like nineteenth-century thought as a whole), ultimately represents a cul de sac for those disciplines.

[Both] sides in the Reformation and post-Reformation controversies seemed to conceive of tradition as something comparable with Scripture, either complementing it or a rival to it. Both Scripture and tradition are objectified: they are that which we seek to understand, there is a distance between them and us who seek to understand them. There are a good many hidden assumptions behind all this: the idea, for instance, that what is revealed is a collection of truths, so that if tradition supplements Scripture, what we mean is that in addition to the apostolic witness that was written down in the Scriptures, there are other truths which have, as it were, been whispered down the ages, and not written down [n.b.: this suggests a parallel to the concept of the “Oral Torah” in rabbinic Judaism]. These truths are objective, independent truths, which we who seek them will, if we go about it the right way, come across and recognize. The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God’s revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology, ch. 4. One perhaps tangential question regarding this immensely perspicuous point, which perhaps Louth will go on to address: is this hypothesized “deposit of unwritten truth” not exactly the sort of thing that advocates of “Sacred Tradition” (whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) often appeal to today in their (anti-Protestant) apologetics — a deposit, to be specific, left unwritten by the apostles but codified within just a few generations (unlike the rabbinic notion of Oral Torah, transmitted unwritten for over a thousand years!) in the writings of various Fathers? Sacred Tradition is presented as filling the temporal gap between what can be found in the New Testament writings and the full emergence/documentation of Christian culture and doctrine, in such a way that its acceptance is quite on par with the acceptance of the New Testament itself (e.g., the names of St. Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome, the continuity of the papal office, and the essential nature of the doctrine of the papacy to salvation). Not to put too fine a point on it, but is this not how (say) St. Irenaeus speaks about the “rule of the truth” which he firmly accepts as apostolic in a sense precisely complementary to Scripture? I take Louth’s main point to be correct, both substantively and as a matter of the history he is discussing: but if so it has, shall we say, rather broad ramifications.

Addenda: Well, perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, at least in the period of the Fathers, Louth does go on to address my question.

Whereas tradition understood in a human sense is perhaps the continuity of man’s search for the truth, and whatever progress there is in such a search, tradition in the sense of the tradition of the Church is the continuity of the divine sending, the divine mission, which the Church has received from her Lord and which she pursues in the world. … The Church’s sending is in the power of the Spirit: the heart of the Church’s tradition, Holy Tradition, is the life of the Holy Trinity, in which the Church participates through the Holy Spirit.

Well and good. What about the content of the tradition? Louth goes on to quote a number of passages from St. Irenaeus, precisely on the point I questioned above, to this effect:

Irenaeus speaks of the character of the Church which is preserved through the succession of bishops… not just the articles of faith handed down by the apostolic succession of bishops, but the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life. … [For] Irenaeus the tradition of the Church is not, like the traditions to which the gnostics appealed, simply some message, truth, or ideology, but a life, something lived. … The rule of truth, then, is the faith, the fundamentals of Christian belief… This is the tradition which has been handed down from the apostles and is received in baptism: the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received — tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept.

To inhabit and appropriate “Sacred Tradition”, then, is to be part of the Church that transmits the tradition that is Christianity — the “tradition” of the whole of Christian life. Finally Louth comes to St. Basil the Great, and returns to the question of the “unwritten traditions”:

The examples Basil gives of such unwritten traditions are all liturgical practices: the sign of the cross, prayer toward the East, the epiclesis at the Eucharist and indeed most of the rest of the Eucharistic prayer, the blessing of water in baptism, of oil, and so on. The secret tradition is not a message, but a practice, and the significance of such practice. We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian[.] … What this seems to suggest is that ultimately the tradition of the Church is the Spirit, that what is passed on from age to age in the bosom of the Church is the Spirit, making us sons in the Son, enabling us to call on the Father, and thus share in the communion of the Trinity.

That’s a pretty effective rejoinder to my question. This is what it means that the Christian tradition is “living:” that it is, perhaps, the outward expression of the presence in the Church of the Spirit, who is Lord and Giver of Life.

Understood like this, tradition is not another source of doctrine, or whatever, alongside Scripture, but another way of speaking of the inner life of the Church, that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created. Speaking of it as tradition brings out the fact that it is received, that it is participated in, that it is more than the grasp that the individual has of his faith.

I remain curious to see how Louth deals with more contemporary advocates of Tradition who, presumably, remain trapped within the post-medieval object-subject division.

Evangelical theology is trapped in a perpetual struggle between its two uneasily coexisting traditions: biblical theology and systematic theology. The dispute is always the same. It never ceases, never disappears, never makes real progress on genuinely reconciling the traditions, but continues forever. The players come and go, the ostensible matter of controversy shifts, but the arguments never change. This is happening, in one form, right now with John Mark Comer and the New Calvinists; it happened in the last decade with the debate over the Gospel between “Team King Jesus” and “Team Gospel Coalition”; it happened in the decade before that with N. T. Wright and John Piper on justification (funny how the New Calvinists keep popping up here!); and so forth ad infinitum. Squint a bit, and even the early stages of the Reformation outline the same form of controversy: Luther the doctor of Old Testament, Zwingli the advocate of expository preaching, and so forth for the “Bible” side, and Eck, Cajetan, various Popes, et al for the “theology” side. (My personal favorite example of this is the pair of books published by IVP Academic a few years ago, authored respectively by Hans Boersma and Scot McKnight: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew and Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew.)

Here is the general form of the controversy. Note that whenever it wells up and spills over, it can do so under the impulse of either tradition, but really identifying such responsibility is difficult; it is just one perpetual-motion controversy, and so the whole thing (at least when viewed as neutrally as possible) is a chicken and egg problem. However, let us suppose it is (re)triggered by the Bible side:

1. A theologian specializing in Biblical interpretation (which is all that a “biblical scholar” really is) publishes some argument, taking as his (and it is, as we know, usually a he) point of polemical departure some commonly taken-for-granted bit of doctrina, especially as it is popularly preached rather than scholastically described: for example (to pick, almost at random, from N. T. Wright), the gospel is about you “getting saved” so that you will “go to heaven when you die.” This bit of (again, popularly expressed) teaching is then found to be a remarkably inadequate representation of the biblical texts usually adduced to support it: so John 3, Romans 3–8, Revelation 21–22, and so forth actually testify that “salvation” and “eternal life” have a present dimension and reference, and the future hope is primarily for heaven “coming down to earth,” not us escaping earth and going “up to heaven”: not “life after death” so much as, in Wright’s (brilliant) phrase, “life after life after death.” Often the popular misrepresentation is straightforwardly taken to be the responsibility of some major, and beloved, historical-theological figure in the tradition: Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are popular choices here. (Sometimes it is not the (re)originator of the controversy who does this, but some less-cautious disciple.)
2. These warning shots arouse the systematic theologians from their dogmatic slumbers (noodling away over the finer points of Jonathan Edwards' doctrine of the beatific vision, or Kuyper’s theology of church offices, or whatever), and they determine to return fire. The more historically minded pursue lines of historical critique: the representation of Augustine (or whomever) is in fact a misrepresentation, and Augustine was far more careful than he is generally criticized as being. What we most need today, in fact, is not less Augustinianism, but more Augustinian Augustinianism! Or: the biblical theologian is simply and naïvely repristinating a historical error (e.g., the Hellenization thesis) which has been weighed, measured, and found wanting. The more philosophically minded, similarly, take the concepts deployed (again, simply and naïvely) by the biblical theologian and subject them to philosophical-theological critique: this is (or depends upon) univocity repristinated, or Social Trinitarianism uncritically retrieved, or Socinianism resurgent. Sometimes this sort of thing has the genuinely salutary effect of bringing the various parties' philosophical and theological presuppositions directly into view. Often it reads more like an attempt to overwhelm the opponent with force of Weighty Words.
3. Now the biblical theologians sharpen their exegetical tools to reply. There are a number of forking paths here, but they mostly consist of the same basic move: Sure, they say, you may be right about what Augustine said: but was Augustine right about what the Bible said? The systematicians are far too concerned with the neatness of their systems, far too quick to find dogmatic concepts — which took centuries to develop — in the text of the Bible itself. Or they are far too quick to occlude (here enters a historical-theological presupposition) what was imaginable, and therefore mean-able, to the author of a particular book in favor of the Church’s later consensus about what that book must really have meant: the conceptual equivalent of “illegitimate totality transfer” in semantics. This is typically where, in New Testament, references to “Second Temple Jewish” and, in Old Testament, references to “Bronze Age Israelite” thought occur: no Second Temple Jewish reader had such and such a conceptual category as to have been able to comprehend what Augustine later argued, and likewise Augustine had lost some key conceptual categories possessed by a Second Temple Jew. You know, the Hellenization thesis may be discredited in certain areas, but come on, you’re really telling me that by transposing the Biblical subject matter into the language of neo-Platonism there was not an iota, not a jot that passed from the Law’s original meaning? Are we even evangelicals anymore (rather than — horror of horrors! — Roman Catholics) if we are willing to prioritize a later theological development over what the Bible says?
4. The systematicians, of course, cannot abide this sort of suggestion. Naïve (you keep using that word) historicism! is the charge flung at the biblical theologians. You are operating from theological presuppositions just as much as we are, but the difference is a) you don’t know what yours are, whereas we do, and b) yours are wrong. Sometimes there is a historical doubling down, a sort of fighting the historicizing fire with fire: Don’t you know that your same argument about this same text was made in, say, the third century by [checks notes] Paul of Samosata? To reject Paulianist heresy, we must also reject your argument. Or: You have, damningly, overlooked a most critical distinction made in the 17th century by Francis Turretin — which convincingly vindicates our interpretation, and demolishes yours. The more thoughtful and careful systematicians, at this point, are actually usually willing to own that yes, they are willing to prioritize a later theological development (though of course for evangelicals it is that of, say, Martin Luther and not the Council of Trent, for… reasons!) because they believe it more effectively preserves some essential truth taught in the Bible — or which itself must be preserved to in turn preserve some essential truth taught in the Bible.
5. And so on, and so forth, unto the ages of ages. Eventually an individual controversy will run out of steam and settle back down under the surface. But never for long. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

This process — which I describe above with great love for both sides, and with tongue firmly in cheek — is a kind of dialectical expression of the basic aporia of the evangelical tradition. Belonging myself, however uneasily, to a stream of that tradition, I believe and affirm unhesitatingly every word of what follows in this paragraph, and thus belong to the realm and feel the force of the aporia. The Bible possesses a unique and singular authority, an authority distinct from and superior to any human tradition. What it speaks to us shares fully in the eternal authority of the Triune God, of Whom it testifies singularly and authoritatively and Who is singularly and authoritatively God (the Shema means more, but not less, than this). It is therefore of supreme importance to understand and obey what it is speaking. However, there is no non-traditioned, perfectly rational position from which any human can interpret the totality of what it is speaking. Add to this that the content and message of the tradition, as we now express it, is derivative from but not identical to the content and message of the Bible: it is, unavoidably, at a minimum that content and message — which was originally imparted in one moment of history — interpreted and therefore translated into a new moment of history. This renders its traditioned re-presentation remarkably contingent when viewed historically, even as such tradition is simultaneously inescapable and necessary. It is only the (theological) confession of Divine Providence which guards for us this sheer contingency from tipping into simple invalidity.

Thus, the Bible’s authority seems to be not just an article of faith but the greatest article of faith, the article of faith on which all other articles of faith depend — but simultaneously the more it becomes an article of faith, the less contact it seems to have with not only reality as historically experienced but also its own text and matter. Thence the divide between biblical and systematic theologians. The biblical theologians protest when the systematicians take the text of the Bible beyond what it presents itself to us as being; the systematic theologians protest when the biblicists set the Bible over against the articles of faith which depend upon it, which it has generated, and are in turn what we live. This dynamic is constantly re-presenting itself at the level of the matter under controversy. Take the doctrine of God. The more that, for instance, under the influence of philosophical criticism, God becomes absolutely transcendent, unqualifiedly impassible, and so forth, the less contact this God-concept seems to have with the God represented in the narratives of Scripture, which naturally invites rebuke — but equally a God-concept simply transposed out of the narratives of Scripture invites this philosophical criticism: if God were not absolutely transcendent and unqualifiedly impassible, could the sorts of exalted things Scripture says (and we are invited to say) about His faithfulness and justice and so on really be maintained?

“As ministers,” Barth remarks in one of his great early essays, “we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God.” Put differently: we must re-present the Bible, but can we — and may we? Everyone wants to live “the religion of the Bible,” but nobody can live “the religion of the Bible” in the strictest sense of the word, because the Bible does not so much present as generate a “religion” which is both greater and lesser than itself. Nobody wants to “go beyond what is written” — but nobody can truly “not go beyond what is written,” because as soon as one asks the question “what is written?” it inevitably comes coupled with the question “how do you read it?” Both parties in the debates are permanently trapped in this dialectic. Everyone involved knows all this, at a more or less tacit level. The debates are almost entered into with a sigh of dismayed recognition, as a performance that must be undertaken yet whose non-outcome is fully known and expected. At times they seem to be an exercise in deflecting our attention from this basic aporia: like the head of Medusa, it cannot be looked at directly, hence it turn us to stone (or, yet worse, to Rome). No new Aquinas or Calvin or Barth has come along, someone who can embody both traditions so persuasively and definitively as to reconcile them and generate a new synthetic tradition of evangelical theology. Is such a reconciliation possible? Where could such a figure come from? Who is sufficient for these things?

And how, then, shall we live? For we must, we cannot but, go on with living even as we theologize, and if our theology — in all its detail and in its grand sweep — has nothing really to do with our living (if, that is, such a thing is even possible) then it is a grand experiment in foolishness, in “wise words taught by mere human wisdom.” The controversy wells up again, and again, and again because all parties recognize that in it the form of our life before God is somehow at stake. There is a way (that is, The Way) and it must be walked in. I am tempted to conclude here on a note of despair for the insolubility of this problem, and yet I cannot despair entirely. For, low and gentle, yet firm, I hear again the voice of The Way, cutting through the noise of the controversies and of my own mind, speaking the simplest words of all, inviting, beckoning, pleading: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

For this reason I do not and cannot ultimately choose a “side” in these theological controversies. Rather, wherever I encounter them — on either side — I will tend to throw in my lot with those who seek to speak and live the words of The Way after Him. I will trust in His words — His Word — to me, because there is no deeper metaphysical or ontological substrate than this trust. That is why any of us have ended up in these controversies to begin with, after all: Before we ever wrestled with the concept of history, or the hermeneutics of Biblical narrative, or the concept of God, we heard the Voice of the Way and found ourselves irresistibly drawn towards Him, found ourselves convinced that He is the Truth and the Life, came to know Him as the pearl of great value to have which it is worth selling all. And that is where we will still be after the controversies cease, when we will see no longer as in a mirror dimly but face to face.

Eighteenth-century man was the man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all the greater for this, man is in the centre of all things, in a quite different sense, too, for he was able to discover this revolutionary truth by his own resources and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity—and without anything else having changed, without his having to pay for it in any [24] way: clearly now the world was even more and properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, 23–24

A truly stunning passage — nay, demolition job — on the whole historical-critical project from Albert Schweitzer, which deserves and demands to be quoted in full:

For the last ten years [i.e., the first decade of the 1900s] modern historical theology has more and more adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head-lines as a means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses. Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world’s salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own “assured” results broad-cast among the people. It is time that it should begin to doubt itself, to doubt its “historical” Jesus, to doubt the confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however Germanic they may make him.

It was no accident that the chief priest of “German art for German people” found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his alliance. Since the ‘sixties [i.e., the 1860s] the critical study of the Life of Jesus in Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern-religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. It was concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until he bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer [311] for the question, “Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!” But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers.

But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both religion and history. [Note: !!!!!!!!!] A time will come when our theology, with its pride in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time, the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning. The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race.

Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.

— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 310–11.

Despite the many errors and evils wrought by modern-ism in theology, I suspect that modern-ity† has in many ways, and perhaps on balance, been good for the discipline of theology. If I were trying to make this case, it would include at least some of the following reasons:

1. There are more theologians writing and reflecting from the different Christian perspectives than ever before. This is of course a mixed blessing at scale — but close to an unalloyed good for any given aspiring theologian. Some of the gatekeeping imposed on the discipline by the combination of medieval technology and institutions was good, and some was bad, or at least counter-productive, for the discipline’s health. Broadly speaking, before the technological and institutional revolutions of modernity, only the bishops (or those in their favor) could produce works of theology, which unavoidably limited the scope of theological writing (ruling out many heresies) and put any aspiring theological writer more or less at the mercy of his or her bishop’s opinions (on whether a certain heresy might or might not be latent in their work). Without in any way wishing to disavow the Church’s proper role as convener and authorizer of theologians, a certain freedom from scrutiny is of course necessary for really creative thought to come to full flower, and it seems to me hard to dispute that the Church’s bishops have not always scrutinized correctly or had sufficient patience with budding theological minds. (To take the most extreme example: one can only imagine how the early years of Reformation might have proceeded differently had the already hot-headed Luther been met by less intransigent bishops and papal emissaries.) There is no past golden era of free-flowing thought in theological education, not even when an Albertus Magnus taught in the University of Paris; that golden era in a way really is now, for some of the reasons that follow.
2. Along with this goes the possibility of a better, richer mutual understanding of those different Christian perspectives. It really is remarkable, when reading pre-modern theological writers, not just the degree of vitriol they often exhibit against their opponents (especially in Reformation-era polemics) but how frequently they misrepresent or indeed misunderstand them as well. This, like most of my other observations, applies less often to the genuinely top echelon of theologians — Sts. Augustine, Thomas, Gregory, et al. — as to those closer to the middle of the bell curve; compare Richard Hooker’s generally temperate and perceptive (even, occasionally, sympathetic) approach to the arguments of his presbyterian opponents, to his forerunner John Jewel’s rather more vehement approach to the arguments of his Romanist opponents! But those in the middle of the bell curve are still often influential in their own days, even if they are later remembered only as foils to the greater thinkers who moved beyond and reacted against them; think of the way that Gabriel Biel is now utterly forgotten as a theologian in his own right and his thought is only taught as the background (for good or ill) to Martin Luther’s theology. It is better if those generationally, if not millennially, influential theologians have a more rigorous and a more charitable understanding of their opponents' positions. One of the great accomplishments of the ecumenical movement has been the reversal of sweeping anathemata against those Christians outside one’s own tradition, and the recognition that, say, Roman Catholics and Lutherans genuinely have much to learn from one another about justification (aside from not being as far apart in the first place as the rhetoric suggested).
3. This has partly resulted in, and partly been begotten by, the modern revolution in hermeneutics: hermeneutics considered not in its pre-modern sense as the set of rules for reading and interpretation, but in its contemporary philosophical sense as deep reflection on the act of reading, the problem of historical understanding, and the construction of meaning. To be sure, “revolution” really might overrate the degree of discontinuity; much of what is apparently new in Schleiermacher and Gadamer can also be found, in at least inchoate form, in, say, St. Augustine. Nevertheless, we have now in the contemporary world these significant hermeneutical possibilities: a chastened understanding of the “literal sense” that admits the unfixedness and unparaphraseability of textual meaning while simultaneously accepting its reality and its real effects; an appropriately moderated view of what can and cannot be established about a text on the basis of allegorical readings (as well as the fluidity of what constitutes “allegorical reading”); a proper admission of the inescapability of personal prejudices in interpretation and the indissoluble role of trust in knowledge; a fuller, if never full, perception of how a text’s “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) influences how it is read by me today; a recognition of the dialectic structure of thought and the complexity of acceptance. It has taken several centuries, but modernity has provided us with this methodological foundation — a methodological foundation which, ironically, should free us from too great a concern for closely observing properly “historical” methodology.
4. To the hermeneutical — if not “revolution” at least “evolution” — may be added what should fairly be called the text-critical revolution. We have more widespread and straightforward access to more theological works, from more perspectives and periods of Christian history, in ever more accurate texts, than at any previous point in Christian history. This has opened up genuinely new frontiers for theological interactions that would have faced exceedingly greater obstacles, or simply did not exist, hundreds of years ago. (One wonders, for example, how Calvin’s theology might have differed had he read St. Thomas without mediation, or for that matter St. John of Damascus at all.) You really can bring Karl Barth and Pseudo-Dionysius into conversation, and you might find that you want to — and when you do, you have the benefit of the most accurate texts of the Areopagite, freed through long scholarly labor from the corruptions that unavoidably creep in as texts are manually copied and recopied over centuries. Not to mention that we have an enormous text-critical apparatus for that Book which is the fountainhead and norma normans of all theology, that is, the Bible; though much of the value of that apparatus is found in recognizing (cf. Brevard Childs) the theological judgments that accompanied the Bible’s transmission, beyond questions about its most accurate or probably original text (we should, of course, have an appropriately chastened view of such historical judgment calls).
5. My last reason — for now! — may seem a curious one. In displacing Christendom, the secularity of modern civilization re-awakens the urgency of many crucial theological questions which could be taken for granted in an era of greater assumed cultural consensus. Today there is a critical need for a thick theological anthropology and doctrine of creation (almost the same thing) precisely because what it means to be a human creature is so contested in the secular world. Similarly there is a great need for a theological reckoning with the fact and reality of cultural and theological plurality. Or — take issues where the Church’s historical record is more lamentable. One of the only good effects from the unmitigated disaster that was the Shoah has been the long-overdue Christian reckoning with the degree to which reflexive anti-Judaism and its racialized descendant anti-Semitism had infiltrated our civilization and thinking; hardly any Christian preacher would today be willing to deploy the invective which a St. John Chrysostom or a Martin Luther hurled at the Jews. Similarly, the crisis of “gender roles” brought on by first industrialization and then feminism has, for all its enormous fallout, helped to illumine how remarkably sloppy has been much historic Christian reflection on what it means to be, and what is possible/permissible for, a woman — that is, when it has been reflected upon at all, rather than simply taking up unbaptized and unconverted notions from pagan culture or philosophy. For the Church to consider more deeply than before what is really true about God, the world, and herself is always an unalloyed good, even when this consideration is (as it usually is) for reasons of controversy and tragedy. Secularity is in countless ways a great (and occasionally self-inflicted) tragedy, but the Church’s business is discovering the redemptive effects of tragedy — just as it is her God’s business.

For all these reasons, and no doubt more I have not articulated here, I am grateful to live in modernity, despite wishing I could do away with the bad fruit of modernism in myself and in others. The correct answer to “When in history would you like to live?” should always be “Right now.” This is in part a simple matter of the honor that is due to Providence. But it is also a matter of recognizing the particular gifts of Providence in and for this time: as long as it is called “today.”

† At least, modernity in its “first watershed,” to crib Ivan Illich’s opening gambit in Tools for Conviviality.

This column / book review by N. S. Lyons is worthwhile — as much for its ultimate affirmation that this may be “neither the best nor the worst of times, but simply the time we have been given” as anything else. There is one feature I find odd. Toward the end of the piece, Lyons cites Jordan Peterson’s recent proclamation that we are living on the cusp of (or indeed in the early moments of) the Counter-Enlightenment. He then goes on to cite Oswald Spengler’s suggestion in The Decline of the West that the collapse of the “age of theory” might give way to a “sweeping re-Christianization” (Lyons’s term, not Spengler’s). The effect is to suggest that “the Counter-Enlightenment” and the “sweeping re-Christianization” will be, if not perfectly co-constitutive, at least a 90% overlapping Venn diagram.

But, as Lyons (and Peterson) surely know, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments before, and likely will be again before Enlightened modernity has run its course. Probably a majority of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers active since 1800 have been, in some sense, Counter-Enlightenment figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler (!), Scheler, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault are the first ten names that come to my mind, and obviously there are others — Wittgenstein, anyone? (Crack open the bibliography of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things for many more!) The interwar German philosophical coterie of which Heidegger was the most prominent figure even seems to have self-consciously identified as a new Counter-Enlightenment school. None of these figures, whatever their individual religious beliefs, can really be said to have contributed to any sort of sweeping re-Christianization, though in my estimation some are more readily appropriated for the tasks of Christian philosophy and theology (Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and — in a roundabout way — Nietzsche) than others (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Foucault, and probably Derrida too, whatever Jamie Smith says).

And — to turn the screw further — what could be more quintessentially Enlightenment in its underlying attitude than, say, a project to refound all of metaphysics from first principles? Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it. That is because the Enlightenment is not a philosophical school — Wolffian deductive rationalism, Kantian transcendental idealism, Benthamite utilitarianism, or whatever it is that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have in common — so much as a set of postures, habits, and — for lack of a better word — vibes. An extremely persistent and evolutionarily successful set of postures, habits, and vibes, no less, which has spent the better part of three hundred years displaying an extraordinary capacity to adapt and co-opt opposition. The Enlightenment mold, it seems, cannot be shattered from within: now that Kant’s “sapere aude!" has become conventional wisdom, anyone who self-consciously tries to break with it is still, by definition, daring (in some measure) to use their own understanding. Once one has grown up and been educated under the plausibility structures of post-Enlightenment modernity, it is extremely difficult to shake them off and abandon them entirely. (See also: theologically educated Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism.) Neither can the dialectic of Enlightenment be simply ignored; its embodiment in modern technologies and technological society shows it is almost no use deciding you are simply uninterested in the dialectic, since the dialectic remains just as rapaciously interested in you. The rise of a purportedly Counter-Enlightenment movement in Western public life neither guarantees a sweeping re-Christianization of society nor promises a breaking out of the Enlightenment mold.

This essay was originally written for Professor Kavin Rowe’s Spring 2023 seminar on New Testament Theology. I am posting it without edits or revisions other than reformatting; while I do not see the substance as needing any significant revision, there are no doubt minor word choices I would make differently if writing today. No doubt, also, I would expand on some topics more — particularly the Christian understanding of history — if I were writing to a less restrictive page count than Professor Rowe imposed upon us! But such a restriction was an immensely useful exercise, and I am a sharper thinker and writer for it. — TBC

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New Testament Theology is the synthetic, canonical interpretation of the New Testament according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith. Without the perspective and purpose of faith there is no canonical collection to be called “the New Testament” in the first place — to say nothing of the writings in that collection — and without the principle of faith there is no defending the concept of “theology” (or “canon”). A definition of the discipline without faith is implausible — perhaps even impossible.

Obviously, all three of these prepositional phrases — according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith — must be elucidated, as must be the terms “synthetic” and “canonical” along the way. Accordingly, that task will occupy the bulk of this essay. In the concluding pages I will outline the shape of the constructive proposal implicit in the above definition.

I.

Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith is the most important element and depends on making the movement of faith or trust. Every act of interpretation presupposes an act of trust. Trust can never be reduced to an abstract affirmation of “the facts” but is always, inescapably, trust in a person. The question is therefore never “what do you believe?” so much as “whom do you trust?” — and New Testament Theology consists essentially in interpreting the New Testament according to its own answer to this question.

In a sense the great achievement of twentieth-century science and philosophy is to demonstrate the inescapability of trust in all knowledge. What Ernst Troeltsch identified in historiography as the principle of criticism — the necessity of making probabilistic rather than binarily definitive judgments about past events — was shown within decades of Troeltsch’s death in 1923 to go, like Bertrand Russell’s turtles, all the way down. Starting in 1927, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” showed the limit to precision and completeness in observation to be unavoidable — part of the quantum mechanics revolution demonstrating an inescapable randomness and indeterminacy at the deepest layer of physical reality. By 1931 Kurt Gödel had definitively proved his “incompleteness” theorems demonstrating that no mathematical-logical system could be constructed so perfectly as to not require at least one axiom underivable from within that system. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, articulated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), that the meanings of words depend substantially on their function within certain “language-games” spelled the death of a logical-symbolic understanding of language. Karl Barth spoke more rightly than he could have known in 1921 when he insisted on being more critical than the critics.

Postwar philosophical and sociological developments extended the scope of this fundamental principial uncertainty to all of daily life and thought. The hermeneutic tradition in philosophy extending back to Schleiermacher through Dilthey and Heidegger reached its apex in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), which definitively exposed the Enlightenment’s scientistic “prejudice against prejudices” as a methodological fantasy in the humanities. No interpretation is possible without the interpreter bringing him or herself into the “fusion of horizons” which constitutes the act of interpretation. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) similarly upended the notion of linear “scientific progress” as a modernist myth: “settled” science does not evolve like the Ship of Theseus, seamlessly replaced bit by bit until it is entirely updated and overhauled, but rather occasionally finds itself shipwrecked on new kinds of data and in need of total reconstruction using new materials. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) described the extent to which the first-person experience of reality is influenced by “society” even as that same society is acted on by persons — a line of reasoning startlingly confirmed in subsequent decades by experiments in neuroscience demonstrating “intersubjectivity”: I really am something like the sum of the five people with whom I spend the most time.

All these insights, of course, can be and have been horrendously misapplied, particularly in the Nietzschean-Freudian style of certain postmodernists, who took them as license to unleash a sweeping relativism of values and adopt a suspicious posture toward all claims of truth. This application, however, is exactly wrong. What they really represent — particularly germane, and suggestive, for questions of theology — is the indissolubility of trust within knowledge. If no text can be “objectively” interpreted, if no interpreter can avoid being influenced by persons and social constructs, if the experience of reality is itself in a way dependent on how one seeks to observe it — then it becomes supremely important whom one chooses to trust or take to be reliable. I cannot choose by fiat how I construe reality, nor can I verify every point of my construal by direct experience; my life is too fragile and potentially short for that. Accepting that there is no singularly, objectively “right” way to construe reality does not guarantee that I cannot hit on a wrong way to construe reality, with potentially tragic results. I have never been hit by a car, nor seen anyone else hit by a car; my construal of reality is lacking (a radical empiricist, or someone wishing for my death, might say) key data; I must nevertheless trust my parents, my friends, and my fiancée who implore me to heed the danger of vehicular homicide and stay attentive while out on my road bike, rather than performing an experiment (on) myself with potentially deadly results. To wrong ways of construing reality, reality itself responds with cold, hard, frequently painful resistance.

There is therefore finally no alternative between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust — and while the hermeneutic of trust may still get me killed if I trust foolishly, the hermeneutic of suspicion is all but guaranteed to lead to my destruction. So why should I not admit to myself whether or not I trust the New Testament and — if yes — embrace a comprehensive hermeneutic of trust for it? Trust “the New Testament,” I say, but I am really trusting a whole array of persons. Some of them translated and edited the Bibles and Greek New Testaments in which I read the text. The trustworthiness of their product depends in turn on a long history of ecclesiastics and caretakers who recognized these books as texts in and through which God speaks, and who collected them together as the definitive, normative textual corpus of the word of God. Those churchmen (and women) trusted both that the apostles, or their trusted assistants and associates, had written these books, and trusted the authors themselves to have written faithfully — to have been trustworthy witnesses to what they had seen and heard, to what God wanted them to write. Text-critical history can with real confidence establish the most probably original form of the text, for errors do creep in and persist even among persons of good faith; it can tell us all sorts of interesting and potentially useful things about the history of those texts’ transmission; it can even provide good evidence that certain persons are not trustworthy tradents — but it cannot finally determine whether an author is positively trustworthy.

At bottom — as at the top — is the person of Jesus. Deciding whether I trust the apostles’ portrayal of Jesus presses inexorably the question of whether I trust Jesus himself: for the Jesus of apostolic history demands to be received as the Christ of faith. A Jesus of suspicious, critical historical reconstructions may make less-sweeping claims — or no claims at all. The Jesus who emerges from a hermeneutic of trust does not and cannot make less than the absolute claim of faithful allegiance. “Choose this day whom you will serve…”

Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith means that I first accept the absolute claim of this Jesus on my faith and trust, and then accept the claims of the apostolic writers about the immediate material implications of my faith in Jesus. It means that I interpret their writings on the presumption of coherence and sensibility, rejecting interpretations that assume they did not know what they were talking about or failed to communicate their meaning effectively. It means also that I interpret them synthetically, not seeking to make points of different emphasis or expression between writers (e.g., Galatians 2 and James 2) into principles in ultimate and irreconcilable tension — adherence to one of which must become the real badge of faith — but rather to discover a capacious, inter-canonical coherence between their writings. It similarly means that when seemingly intractable problems of history emerge from the text, I seek the maximally charitable and trusting interpretation. It means that I accept the possibility of divine causality as the simplest explanation for the miraculous, rather than bracketing it because, like Lessing, I (alas) no longer experience such miracles in daily life. Most of all it means that I accept, as a presumption of my exegesis, the whole chain of reasoning that runs from “he is not here; he is risen, just as he said!” through “God has made him both Lord and Christ” to “I am the first and the last, and the living one” — an inescapably theological chain of reasoning; which is to say that in doing New Testament interpretation I should and will always find myself at least embroidering a corner of the glorious garment of New Testament Theology.

II.

Interpreting the New Testament according to the perspective of faith, therefore, means situating myself in the community of interpretation that is formed by faith in Jesus: the church. This is true in two dimensions (if not more). For one thing, if I adopt a hermeneutic of trust toward the Jesus who speaks to me in the pages of the New Testament, I will discover that his proclamation of the kingdom (Matt. 4:17) led immediately to gathering a band of disciples around him (Matt. 4:18ff) to listen to his teaching (Matt. 5:1ff) and live according to it (Matt. 7:24ff). There is no individualistic response to “repent and believe the good news” that satisfies how Jesus expects my faithful allegiance to be expressed. For another thing, if I understand myself to be interpreting “the New Testament,” I am immediately under the rule — the κάνων — of the church. The community of Jesus’ followers has selected — or better, recognized — in advance for me that set of writings which enjoy authoritative status in it, and given it the name “the New Testament.” They did so according to the principle of faith: on the basis of trust in Jesus and the apostles who wrote about him. The enduring existence of this community, formed by faith and operating according to the principle of faith, is the only reason to interpret the New Testament as a “New Testament” rather than as the (no doubt very interesting) “early Christian literature” which William Wrede preferred to interpret. In combination, the Christian community and the New Testament canon in which it functions authoritatively form the perspective of faith.

At this point, some — paradigmatically Wrede — might object that the Christian community is far too much of a mess, historically and contemporarily, for the ecclesiastical judgment of canonicity to have any enduring value. The so-called “process of canonization” was a polemical and exclusivist exercise from the beginning, meant to draw sharp boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that are historically unjustifiable. Furthermore, the “canonical” literature itself underwent a process of development and alteration as the post-apostolic communities sought (and created) authoritative guidance on issues that could not have been foreseen by Jesus or his apostles. How can such a self-evidently flawed rule remain not only valuable but indeed authoritative?

These standard objections are in part answered — or at least responded to — by the principle of faith. A posture of suspicion will always be inclined to interpret any evidence of the church’s messiness as warrant for the church’s invalidation, as much when it comes to the first as in the twenty-first century. Many of the scholarly judgments about the development and alteration of the canonized writings rest — at some level in their own genealogies — on maximally suspicious interpretation of odd details in the texts, presuming that the various redactors and editors were simultaneously so brilliant as to hide their work from subsequent generations and so incompetent as to leave self-evidently contradictory and messy texts for nineteenth-century historical critics to discover. (The notion that pre-Enlightenment exegesis was wholly “pre-critical” and naïve is undermined by reading Origen, Jerome, or Augustine and seeing them employ — sometimes advance upon — the critical tools of their days. The difference is in the first place a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust.)

But equally important is the institutional analogy to the principle of faith: the perspective of faith. Any community that orients itself around reading has judgments about what texts are central to its life and thought, as well as what kinds of readings are acceptable and appropriate. The question is how implicit or explicit those are. And though the history of the canon is as messy as that of the church, the judgments about central texts and acceptable readings appear to emerge quite early and straightforwardly. The “rule of the truth” identified by Irenaeus at the end of the second century was not a criterion for canonizing the New Testament writings; rather it was a kind of aural lens through which the church focused its habits of listening to divine truth, and through which it listened to “early Christian literature” to discern the voice of God instructing them in a living and active way. Here is the place for the crucial insight of Brevard Childs that the canonical process included the transmission, even editing, of the canonical writings, precisely because those who transmitted them did so in response to hearing the living voice of God speaking in them. The rule of the truth and the canonical writings formed a hermeneutical spiral that invited deeper recognition and better comprehension of both as true and canonical. The church is the community that lives in — lives out — that hermeneutical spiral.

Of course, in the present situation there is not one “church.” The prayer of Christ in John 17 that all his followers would be one has so far been answered only in a mystical sense if at all. Which church am I to trust to provide the perspective of faith from which I interpret? While no answer seems likely to be truly satisfactory this side of the eschaton (one thinks of Robert Jenson’s remark about the “impossibility” of doing theology in the situation of a divided church), a few principles seem to flow from the above. Trust the providence of God placing one in a particular tradition. Trust a church that seeks basic doctrinal and ethical conformity with the generations that recognized the canon of Scripture: orthodox Trinitarianism, Chalcedonian Christology, the basic pattern of New Testament ethics. Trust a church that seeks to submit itself to the New Testament and live out what it hears the voice of God speaking. Most of all, trust a church that preaches Christ, the crucified and risen One.

Interpreting the New Testament from the perspective of faith means that I am freed to begin my investigation of the canonical writings with the deposit of theological teaching laid down in the rule of the truth. It means that I accept the church’s historic judgment about ruling out — and ruling in — certain categories of readings on explicitly theological grounds; Marcion’s read of Paul is right out. It means joyfully identifying my scholarship as from (and for) the church, rather than some other, less cosmically significant community of interpretation. The beginnings of New Testament Theology are in the basics of Christian theology, not in some other discourse; and the basics of Christian theology are found in the Christ’s church.

III.

The third phrase flows directly out of the second. Interpreting the New Testament according to the purpose of faith means not only situating my interpretation in the church but for the church. What is the church’s task in interpreting the New Testament? It is listening to the voice of God in order to be given life and governed by it. It is the unfolding of the sacred text for the upbuilding of the members of the body in faith.

The Kantian ideal of the disinterested scholar, excising her own interests when coming to a text in bold pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead, was in its best form a noble fiction. Even a valuable fiction, perhaps; there can be no doubt that the historical-critical posture uncovered real insights into the text and history of Scripture, with which all who seek to be intellectually honest must reckon. Yet far more often the fiction was exposed within a generation or two as a vicious lie. The “life of Jesus” research of the nineteenth century produced (in the memorable image of Albert Schweitzer) a succession of scholars staring down deep wells, seeing their own faces dimly reflected, and triumphantly declaring that they had discovered the real Jesus — Who looked, after all that labor, just like them. The enormous philological and linguistic scholarship that produced Kittel’s Dictionary turned out to be not only based on disastrously misguided semantic theory (memorably skewered in James Barr’s 1961 The Semantics of Biblical Language) but also shot through at numerous points with the pernicious strain of racialized anti-Judaism that infected German biblical scholarship from at least the late nineteenth century right up to 1945. Because it is done by human beings and not by God, scholarship usually turns out to have an “interest” — especially when it is declared most energetically, as in the classic historical-critical mode, that all interests have been put aside.

What use then for the historical-critical method in Christian scholarship, or indeed in New Testament Theology? The proper analogy is the one St. Augustine recommended with respect to pagan philosophy: the Egyptian goods asked of Israel’s neighbors on the night of the Exodus. Carried — baptized, even — through the Red Sea, the precious metals and beautiful things can be righteously put to the task of building and beautifying the Tabernacle. The Bezalels and Oholiabs of the Christian academy are free to use whatever materials and tools they find God commanding them to use in their work; God even promises that His Spirit of wisdom and understanding will guide them. But the Egyptian gold can also be molded into a deadly idol. Wrede and Troeltsch were merely being honest: if Moses delays in coming down from the mountaintop, Aaron is ready to submit to a very different spirit and replace New Testament Theology with the history of religious ideas found in early Christian literature. “Look, I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf!” is the time-worn protest of scholars affecting shock that their deliberately faithless investigations of the New Testament have produced the dissolution of faith in the pews. That idolatry is nonsensical and self-defeating is, historically speaking, no proof against its indulgence.

Interpreting the New Testament for the purpose of faith means that I pursue biblical scholarship that serves the people of God — and God Himself. It means that I seek interpretations and angles on the text that glorify God and are, to use the patristic language, “fitting” of God’s character and attributes. It also means that I avoid tearing down and plucking up the faith of my brothers and sisters in the church by my scholarship, seeking rather to build up and to plant — understanding myself as at best God’s worker and craftsman; they are God’s field and building. Likewise, it means that I interpret with an eye to the practical effects of similar interpretations that have come before — which necessitates knowing the history of interpretation and accepting that it is possible that earlier, churchly interpreters may have understood the text better than me despite my being “up to date.” It means, I submit, that I accept something like the medieval understanding of multiple senses of Scripture, rather than restricting my investigations to a probably nonexistent singular sense — even as I seek to keep myself and my interpretations more rooted in the “plain sense” than at least some medieval exegetes were willing to do. New Testament Theology necessitates an expansive understanding of the interpreter’s task along some lines; historical and grammatical exposition will not be sufficient, and no scholar has the self-control necessary to stick exclusively to those tasks anyway. Better to expand the task along such lines, then, that explicitly seek to serve and strengthen the church.

IV.

All this has so far resulted in only principles of interpretation. What would a work of New Testament Theology produced according to this proposal, functioning on the principles we have outlined, actually look like?

It would first of all be shaped canonically: not seeking to track a theological idea’s development from historically earlier to later sources, but from canonically earlier to later texts. Start with the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Look from the differing angle of the Gospel of John. See how the Spirit-empowered followers of the Way apply and teach about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Watch how the apostles and their friends — Paul, James, Peter, Jude, John, the writer of Hebrews — discuss it in their letters. Observe finally how it is transfigured in the Apocalypse. To be sure, there is (as Childs recognized) a necessary place for discussing the historical development of the ideas, but let it be done within the context of each text, rather than as a control on which texts are discussed and in which order. Leave the “history of religious ideas” to the departments of religious studies, which are better-versed in that sort of thing anyways; let scholars — theologians — of the New Testament be unapologetically theological.

Then, with the differing canonical perspectives on that theological idea expounded, they should be synthesized. Let coherence emerge between the differing perspectives; not a root coherence that best explains the historical development of the various perspectives, but an apex coherence that best draws their gaze up to a single focus. Such a coherence may not be explicitly found in any of the New Testament texts, nor be plausibly identifiable as what any of the New Testament writers might have specifically thought they meant. Its discernment may require the Scriptural imagination of the theologian or the application of insights from the history of interpretation and theology. (It may even take prayer to discern.) None of this should be cause for theological concern: “For now we see in part and we prophesy in part…”

As the Pauline dictum suggests, New Testament Theology may ultimately be an eschatological discipline. The promise of the historical-critical method was originally that the one true meaning of the text and an accurate, coherent history of development could be arrived at and universally agreed upon, so that a more solid foundation might be laid for Christian reading of the New Testament than was supplied by the New Testament itself. That turned out to be a pipe dream which eroded its own foundations. Turning away from this dream in pursuit of the above vision of New Testament Theology may be better-founded — upon divine promises rather than human self-assurance — but the kind of apex theological coherence described above will certainly be impossible to achieve in a manner that satisfies everyone. This should be no counsel of despair, but rather a spur to perpetual, eager investigation of the canon’s theological import: “For when the perfect comes, the partial shall pass away… Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of an inherited language helps to provide the range of associations and meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever completely encompass the purposes and lifeways, both present and future, that animate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a Brasília, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 143–44

The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations' self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.

The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs'. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.

And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.

For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.

I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.

Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.

William Baird’s three-volume History of New Testament Research is enormously helpful as a description of the, well, history of New Testament research; he gives short summaries of key figures' careers and works, followed by descriptions of their key contributions to the history of scholarship. I am less enthused by his evaluations. Commenting, in the first volume, on the “Pietists” Francke, Bengel, and Wesley, he writes: “When they conclude… that the Bible is not to be interpreted like any other book, the Pietists align themselves with the past and not the future” (90). It is hard to know what to make of a judgment like this, which contextually it is clear Baird intends as a criticism. Obviously, as a matter of the progress of history (within the horizon of the 16th to 19th centuries), this is true; these writers would have been horrified by the dictum of Jowett’s which Baird quotes (strangely without quotation marks!). But whether the progression of that history, within that 400-year horizon, was good is another matter entirely; and indeed the third volume of the work opens with a discussion of the work and influence of Karl Barth, whose career derived its initial impetus from forcibly rejecting many of the evaluative assumptions that had evolved during that historical progression. Surely there are valid hermeneutical critiques, even criticisms, of Francke, Bengel, and Wesley to be made — but is a vague appeal to the past and the future the best that can be done?

Historical researchers always have before them the temptation of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” It is in their best interest never to take it.

Brevard Childs:

The church’s continual struggle in understanding the literal sense of the text as providing the biblical grounds for its testimony arises in large measure from its canonical consciousness. On the one hand, it recognizes that textual meaning is controlled by the grammatical, syntactical, and literary function of the language. On the other hand, these formal criteria are continually complemented by the actual content of the biblical texts which are being interpreted by communities of faith and practice. The productive epochs in the church’s use of the Bible have occurred when these two dimensions of scripture constructively enrich and balance each other as establishing an acknowledged literal sense.

— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 724

A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.

Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).

So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a refreshingly ambitious, generally idiosyncratic, and colossally erudite work, but its brief (ten out of 462 pages) treatment of the Reformation is not one of its high points. This is, I think, signaled by his citing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comparison of Reformation and Enlightenment as sharing the animating principle “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed” (315) — a very Enlightenment perspective on the Reformation, always seeking to ally the Reformers to a cause which the Reformers would not have recognized! McGilchrist is selective, as he must be in a book of this length, and focuses on the change in hermeneutics of image vs. word (and the accompanying spasms of iconoclasm); but here I think the simplicity of that heuristic betrays his reading of the period as a whole. It’s a phenomenological reading which is straightforwardly read up into the theological frameworks of the Reformers, rather than engaging the right-to-left-to-right intellectual motion that would actually incorporate (aufgehoben?) the animating theological concerns of the period. The only substantive discussion of Reformation theological concerns is a paragraph which makes Luther sound almost like a proto-Heidegger in his concern for the outer authentically presenting the inner (needless to say, this is not how Luther conceived of his theological revolution).

In general, the Reformation is blamed for all that is left-hemispherical in this period, when it is far from clear that the “real” culprit (if such can actually be identified) in accelerating left hemisphere dominance during the sixteenth century is not in fact the habits of mind and scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism. Erasmus was as fond of the sensus literalis as Luther or Zwingli, and before the century was up Richard Hooker was retrieving “participation” as the essential doctrinal category. (Frankly, I think the preceding twenty pages on the Renaissance, which are often uncritically laudatory, would probably have benefited from interacting with C.S. Lewis’s hilarious excoriation of so-called Renaissance humanism in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) Somewhat bizarrely, the doctrine of transubstantiation is conscripted to his Reformation narrative as a left-hemisphere rationalization and hyperspecification of the right-hemisphere Eucharistic mystery; but this, being a creature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he cannot possibly blame on the Reformers or the Reformation, and thus he is forced to say that “At the Reformation this problem re-emerged” (316). That it did, and yes, the memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper looks awfully like left-hemisphere rationalization; but it is, crucially, an equal and opposite reaction against an existing and well-established of left-hemisphere rationalization. The replacement of presentation with re-presentation in Christian theology significantly antedates 1517, which suggests that “Reformation” as popularly understood is the wrong category. The most significant omission from McGilchrist’s description (does such an omission rise to the level of an outright error?) is the whole phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation, which radicalized the standardization and schematization of scholastic theology in Rome no less than took place in Geneva, for all that the Roman church hung onto images.

To be clear: many of McGilchrist’s critiques of the Reformation churches and theology are worth pondering. I find the Reformed iconoclasm of the period profoundly distasteful (St. John of Damascus was right about images, people! it’s time to admit it!), and the schematizing, diagrammatizing tendency in second-generation Calvinist theology (Perkins, Beza, etc.) is an undoubtedly striking exemplum of left hemisphere thinking! But I am unconvinced by McGilchrist’s sweeping diagnosis that the Reformation “reversed” the “cardinal tenet of Christianity:” that “the Word is made Flesh” became “the Flesh is made Word.” As Athanasius teaches in the evergreen On the Incarnation, the Logos became sinless flesh so that our sinful flesh might be restored to its original glory as logikos. Flesh and Word are, ultimately, made for one another. The truly “cardinal” tenet of Christianity is not, after all, the Incarnation of the Word (which runs it a close second) — it is the resurrection of the Word’s crucified Flesh, and the promise of resurrection to all flesh that is infused with the Word’s power.