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:
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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 catena of quotations from Schweitzer’s elegant concluding chapter — whatever one makes of his own historical portrait of Jesus, which is the complementary strand in his thought to the below (indeed the number of ellipses etc. indicates that the two are twisted together in this chapter like a double helix), it is very hard to deny the force and incision of this polemic against the projection-as-historicization of Jesus:
Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognized and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the [397] religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. …
The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. …
[398] We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.
There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels, and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus. There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus written since the ‘sixties [1860s], and notice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative world-contemning [sic] demands upon individuals, that He might not come into conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time from that which He really held.
In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts—even to its beggarly pseudo-[399]metaphysic with which it has banished genuine speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion—in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them. …
[400] Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself! This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can be communicated to our time. There [401] was a danger that modern theology, for the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus, with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force. There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it could not do otherwise. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon earth, not peace, but a sword.
— 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), 396–401.
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.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.”) There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
… I suggest that an ecclesiology of brokenness is the only “right” ecclesiology for our pluralistic time, when the strengths of other Christian communions and the weaknesses of our own no longer can be ignored. The way toward Christian unity, then, may be, not through defending the uniqueness of our own particular strands of the Christian tapestry, but rather through admitting their limitations and seeking theological solutions from threads other than our own.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
There is currently a discussion going on about the supposed contrast, and transition, between the “gospel-centered” “third wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Piper and the late Timothy Keller) and the “spiritual formation” “fourth wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Mark Comer and the late Dallas Willard). I am suspicious of over-relying on this periodization, partly because like all periodizations it conceals as much as it reveals about its subject matter; from my acquaintance with Piper’s and Keller’s works, they are by no means soft on the need for spiritual transformation as not only a result of coming to know the gospel but as a means of more deeply apprehending the gospel itself, and from my acquaintance with Willard’s and Comer’s works they are by no means soft on articulating the substance of the gospel or the importance of recognizing it as a gift of pure grace. (Do not take anything I say below as a judgment for, against, or even particularly about any of these particular teachers.)
But if there is any use in this periodization for general heuristic value — as describing “normative moods” or “characteristic emphases” and not classifying individual teachers or intellectuals — my sympathies generally lie with the normative moods and characteristic emphases of the spiritual formation wave. This is for a very straightforward reason. We do not come to “know” anything at all without already holding and giving at least tacit commitment to it, and we do not acquire more than a tacit commitment to anything we “know” without purposely apprenticing ourselves to it — a kind of apprenticeship that entails our trust in the Master of our apprenticeship, which is to say a submission to His purposes in our learning and training and a corresponding abandonment (at least in principle) of our own purposes. (Lewis’s remarks about this in “The Weight of Glory” are unsurpassed for clarity, even if there are more philosophically sophisticated treatments available in print — hello, Polanyi!) In other words, the gospel has to be lived to be understood, just as it has to be understood to be lived.
The spiritual formation wave recognizes and receives this core phenomenological insight as its basic impulse. Squabbles about how precisely articulated certain doctrinal commitments of the spiritual formation movement and its leaders are (or are not) miss the basic point. Yes, faithfulness to the teaching of Holy Scripture is of utmost importance; but how will they know how to faithfully rearticulate what Holy Scripture says if they have not understood it, and how can they understand it without living it, and how can they live it without obediently imitating the One Who speaks its words in the first place? An accurate, if of course not maximally precise, summary of the Gospel really is “Jesus loves you and wants you to be like him.” Absent a real emphasis on spiritual formation as discipleship — as apprenticeship to Jesus — there is a real danger of “gospel-centrality” morphing into a Tillich-style “accept the fact that you are accepted!” gospel proclamation accompanied by what can only be experienced as disconnected legalism in the realm of, you know, actual lived behavior (the very thing that, after allegiance to Him, the Jesus who meets us in the New Testament makes it eminently clear He cares about).
Of course there are characteristic and formally similar dangers inherent to the spiritual formation movement — “it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s all about how you live!” readily slips into an equally legalistic “if you don’t live this exact way / practice this specific discipline / have this precise emotional experience you are No True Christian.” (It was, of course, necessary for John Piper to write a book entitled When I Don’t Desire God.) I know of no paradigm that lacks such dangers. No approach to Christian faith is guaranteed proof against misunderstanding or hypocrisy. But the spiritual formation emphasis begins with the premise that, as St. Augustine taught, the human being is homo amans precisely before she is, and in order to be, homo cognens. It is not merely that faith seeks understanding; it is that understanding depends on faith.
Aim, truly aim, for spiritual formation into the image of Christ, and the whole knowledge of the gospel — which is Christ Himself — will be added unto you; even as indeed in this life you struggle to imitate Him and will never finally reach the fullness of His likeness (yet, perhaps, much more than you think!). Aim for the knowledge of Christ without expressly seeking the power that kindles that knowledge into love, and you may well find that you get Christ anyways — He is, after all, notoriously gracious like that; or you may, more tragically and horrifyingly, ultimately find that you have not gotten Him after all, and that His words to you and your ilk are not “Enter now into the joy of your Master” but “I never knew ye; depart from me.” Both waves may get you where you want to go; but I know which I would prefer to ride.