I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…
Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.
Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.
The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.
Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.
Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.
Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.
Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.
The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).
If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.
On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.
Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.
Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).
If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.
What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.
In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.
A Thinking Reed 