A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Thinking about the nature of religion with Schleiermacher

    Although I don’t agree with Schleiermacher on everything, I do think his overall approach to religion is a fruitful one. To get clear on what this is, it’s helpful to think of his position as occupying a middle ground between two unpalatable extremes. On the one hand, it’s possible to think of religion as a purely theoretical undertaking: “God” is a hypothesis that is purported to explain various features of the world or human experience, or is the conclusion of an abstract argument. On the other hand, it can be thought of as a purely practical endeavor whose purpose is to guide human life but which makes no truth-claims or ontological commitments. (Such “non-cognitivist” views of religion were popular during the heyday of logical positivism in the early 20th century.)

    Schleiermacher rejects both these extremes. In insisting that the essence of religion is a “sense and taste for the Infiinte” (in his speeches on religion) or a “feeling of absolute dependence” (in The Christian Faith), he’s clearly at odds with a purely theoretical understanding of religion. He allows that “speculative” theology may be a valid enterprise, but it’s distinct from dogmatic theology. Christian theology is a reflection on religious experience, particularly the experience of redemption in Jesus. But contrary to how he’s sometimes interpreted, Schleiermacher is also not an non-cognitivist–that is, religious language has more than just a pragmatic purpose. Religious experience has an implicit referent–the Infinite, or God–and the propositions of theology are reflections on the nature of that reality to the extent that it’s disclosed in experience. The propositions of dogmatic theology set out what the experience of redemption in Christ implies about God, the world, and humanity.

    So for Schleiermacher, the goal of religion is to evoke and strengthen the experience of redemption. But this experience is rooted in a Reality that transcends the finite, created world–and this Reality is the object of religious devotion. Unlike “pure” philosophy or science, the goal of religion is not disinterested theoretical understanding of the world, but it does bring us into contact with a reality that exists independently of us. Theology describes this reality insofar as it is discernible by its effects on us, particularly in being the source of our redemption. Religion is a practical, existential undertaking, but it also makes claims about the nature of the world.

    There are a couple of things to be said for this broad view. First, it seems to me to home in on what most religious traditions consider to be the essence of religious life: namely, redemption, or salvation, or liberation. That is, religion is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical but is fundamentally about bringing human beings into a correct orientation toward an independently existing ultimate reality (or a right relationship with God, to put it in more explicitly Christian terms). This captures both the subjective and objective aspects, or poles, that seem essential to religion.

    Second, a broadly “Schleiermacherian” account of religion can potentially make sense of religious pluralism: the experience of redemption/salvation/liberation never occurs “neat,” but is always conditioned by its social and historical context. Thus, theological reflection will be conditioned by these historical and cultural factors, resulting in a legitimate (and possibly unavoidable) epistemic pluralism. (Schleiermacher himself, it should be noted, clearly thought Christianity was the “highest” religion, but at the same time he was clear that this judgment was made from within a commitment to the Christian community.)

    Finally, this view helps explain why our theology needs to be open to re-thinking and revision. Since it constitutes reflection on the experience of redemption, theology itself shouldn’t be considered “revealed” or infallible. It has to be tested and refined in light of ongoing experience and new knowledge about the world (e.g., scientific discoveries), while remaining faithful to its original source. (The Christian Faith itself is a model of this approach, even if, like me, you sometimes disagree with Schleiermacher’s particular conclusions.)

  • Schleiermacher on the authority of the Bible – 2

    The New Testament writings, Schleiermacher says, are the first in the ongoing series of presentations of the Christian faith, but they are also normative for all succeeding presentations. He writes, “all that has approved itself in the way of oral presentation of Christian piety in later ages of the Church has kept within the lines of these original forms, or is attached to them as an explanatory accompaniment” (§129.1). But, he asks, if redemption is being “ever more completely realized in time,” then how can these first writings retain their normative status? Might they not be replaced by newer, fuller insights? This is true in a limited sense: when we compare the apostolic age as a whole with later ages. For during the apostolic age there was a variety of Christian writings that possessed uneven quality in terms of how clearly they expressed the essence of Christian piety. However, those testimonies that “stood near[est] to Christ”–for instance, narratives of his words and deeds–exerted a “purifying” influence on the church, allowing it gradually to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus the writings existing at the time were later divided into the apocryphal and canonical. So, in that sense, later ages may have an advantage over the apostolic.

    The influence of apocryphal elements was bound to diminish, Schleiermacher says, precisely because of the purifying influence of what later came to be recognized as the canonical witness. These writings were the ones that contained memories of those who actually knew Jesus. And those testimonies constitute an irreplaceable source and norm of Christian faith. The Church “could never again reproduce the canonical, for the living intuition of Christ was never again able to ward off all debasing influences in the same direct fashion, but only derivatively through the Scriptures and hence in dependence on them” (§129.2). The New Testament is authoritative because it contains memories of the historical Jesus and the testimonies of those who first came to have faith in him. So, later ages may have the advantage over the apostolic in having been purged of certain competing influences; but they can never side-step the authority of the canonical scriptures.

    He goes on to say that not every part of the New Testament enjoys this authority–only what pertains to the central message and not “side-thoughts.” Nor is all later Christian thought to be confined to simply repeating what’s in the New Testament. “For since the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, no age can be without its own originality in Christian thinking” (§129.2). Yet all Christian thought has to be tested for its harmony with the canonical writings, and no later writing can provide the same kind of yardstick.

  • Schleiermacher on the authority of the Bible

    According to Schleiermacher, the authority of the Bible cannot be the foundation of Christian faith. The notion that it is, he says, is more often implied than asserted, for instance by how books of doctrine and confessional documents present the doctrine of Scripture. Nevertheless, we need to get this misconception out of the way. So, he asks, if faith in Christ is to be established on the basis of the Bible’s authority, how is the authority of the Bible itself to be established? It can’t be by rational demonstration, for two reasons. First, such an approach would introduce an inequality in how Christians come to faith: there would be a class of Christians who are themselves capable of following the chain of reasoning that demonstrates the authority of the Bible, and there would be those who have to accept its authority on trust. But this would be “incongruous with that equality of all Christians which the Evangelical [i.e., Protestant] Church proclaims, and would, as in the Church of Rome, demand from the laity an unqualified and submissive trust in those who alone have access to the grounds of faith” (The Christian Faith, §128.1). Second, even if a proof of Scripture’s authority was forthcoming, the resulting faith would “not be a genuine, living faith at all” because someone could possess it without feeling the need for redemption or being in “living fellowship” with Christ.

    Furthermore, if there can be no distinctions between classes of Christians in terms of how they arrive at their faith (in order for it to be the same faith), this principle applies across time too. In other words, the way that contemporary Christians come to faith can be no different, in principle, from how the first Christians came to have faith in Christ. And, clearly, their faith was not based on the authority of Scripture since the New Testament didn’t exist. (S. considers and rejects the possibility that the first Christians’ faith was based on the authority of the Old Testament in that they perceived Christ to be the fulfillment of the OT prophecies. Rather, he says, they came to believe in Christ first and then went back to the Scriptures and found that they foretold him.) The first disciples’ faith originated in the personal encounter with Jesus himself. It “sprang from Christ’s preaching of Himself, [and] so in the case of others faith sprang from the preaching of Christ by the Apostles and many more” (§128.2). Therefore, Christian faith is not of necessity bound up with the belief that the books of the Bible posses a special status; this faith “may rest on any other sort of witness that is accomplished by real perception of Christ’s spiritual power–may rest, that is, simply on oral tradition” (§128.1).

    “Thus,” he says, “in order to attain to faith, we need no such doctrine of Scripture, and the attempt to force unbelievers into faith by means of it has had no success” (128.2). It is only when we already have faith in the message about Jesus that we properly come to ascribe a special status to the New Testament witness.

  • The Bible as fallen and redeemed

    Kenton Sparks’ Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture cuts to the heart of how Christians understand revelation and the truth of the Bible. This is a more popularly pitched version of an argument that Sparks, a professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, made in his book God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. The issue is: How can the Bible be a revelation from God and normative for Christian faith and practice when it contains passages that depict God in morally horrifying ways and ethical commands that seem downright evil, not only by modern standards, but by standards embedded in the Christian tradition itself?

    Sparks argues, correctly I think, that this presents a more difficult issue than biblical “errancy” regarding history or science. It’s relatively easy to make peace with the idea that the Bible did not adhere to modern standards of historical accuracy and that it was not meant to teach scientific cosmology or biology. However, the “texts of terror” threaten to undermine what Christians claim is the central message of the Bible: a revelation of God’s gracious character, will, and purposes for humanity and the world.

    The touchstone example Sparks uses is the story of the Canaanite genocide recorded in the book of Joshua. How can the God who commands Joshua to slaughter men, women, and children be the God of limitless compassion that Christians claim to believe in? Some of the church fathers dealt with these passages by adverting to allegorical interpretations: they should be interpreted as referring to our internal spiritual warfare against our sins, for example. Sparks argues (again, correctly, I think) that such readings will seem strained to modern readers. Instead, he says we should frankly admit that such passages are not part of God’s word, at least not directly.

    To articulate his position, Sparks draws an analogy between the “problem” of the Bible and the problem of evil as it’s usually discussed in the Christian tradition. Briefly, theologians–however much their specific approaches may differ–have generally maintained that creation is good but fallen and that the source of sin and disorder is in humanity not God. The Bible, Sparks says, is part of the fallen creation–it is not perfect or inerrant but reflects human sinfulness. “Scripture is a casualty of the fallen cosmos” (p. 66). But just as God uses fallen human beings to advance God’s purposes, God uses the Bible–taken as a canonical whole–as a medium for revelation. The Bible is both human and divine discourse.

    The inevitable question, though, is how we are supposed to distinguish the divine message from those parts of Scripture that reflect human error or sin. Sparks offers several responses to this: first, Scripture sometimes corrects itself, as in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where he relativized certain parts of the Mosaic law; second, we should read individual passages in the context of the whole sweep of the biblical narrative and message; and third, we need to read the Bible in light of the ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit, the revelation of God in the natural world, the Christian tradition, and our own experience. Sparks emphasizes that most passages of the Bible admit of a surplus of meaning and we should be cautious in thinking we’ve arrived at the one true interpretation. He also points out that a key test of Christians’ Bible-reading is whether it leads to Christ-shaped lives.

    Sparks identifies, at least to some extent, as an evangelical, and much of what he says may not seem particularly controversial to mainline Christians, who generally admit that the Bible is a humanly conditioned document. But mainliners have not always been clear on what their positive doctrine of Scripture is; Sparks’ book clearly articulates a position that is honest about the text while also maintaining a “high” view of the Bible’s authority. Such a position should in principle be acceptable to a fairly broad swath of Christians, from fairly conservative to fairly liberal. My one complaint is that Sparks is vague (as he himself admits) on how he understands the Bible’s inspiration, as well as the closely related concept of revelation. For example, is the medium of revelation the text itself, an overall message or regula fidei derived from the text, or the events that the texts witness to? But on the whole, I’d recommend this book as a sane and balanced approach to a difficult topic.

  • Sympathy for the damned

    Most interesting of Schleiermacher’s arguments against hell is his deeply felt conviction that the blessedness of the redeemed would be severely marred by their sympathy for the damned. This is precisely the opposite of the conviction of many earlier theologians that the blessedness of the redeemed would be actually enhanced by their contemplation of the torments of the damned. The latter view has a kind of reason on its side: Those who are wholly at one with God’s will should rejoice to see His justice done. But it has largely disappeared from the doctrine of hell since the seventeenth century, and the modern Christian’s instinctive sympathy with Schleiermacher’s contrary view places him on Schleiermacher’s side of a great transition in the history of attitudes to suffering. With Schleiermacher we now feel that even the justly inflicted suffering of other men roust be pitied, not enjoyed. Schleiermacher’s argument is typically modern in its appeal and is one element in the increasing popularity of universalism since his day.

    –Richard Bauckham, “Universalism: A Historical Survey“

  • Literalism vs. inerrancy

    I’ve been reading The Scope and Authority of the Bible by biblical scholar James Barr, and in it he clarifies something I’ve been thinking for a while. Barr wrote a well-known book on fundamentalism, and one of the essays in Scope… deals with fundamentalism.

    The point Barr makes is that, contrary to what is often said, fundamentalism doesn’t mean reading the Bible “literally.” Rather, its distinguishing mark is a doctrine of inerrancy that is frequently at odds with a literal reading:

    It is often said that fundamentalists are ‘people who take the Bible literally’. This however is a mistake. Fundamentalist interpretation concentrates not on taking the Bible literally, but on taking it so that it will appear to have been inerrant, without error in point of fact. Far from insisting that interpretation should be literal, it veers back and forward between the literal sense and a non-literal sense, in order to preserve the impression that the Bible is, especially in historical regards, always ‘right’. . . . It is the inerrancy of the Bible, especially its truth in historical regards, that is the fundamentalist position, and not the notion that it must always be interpreted literally. (pp. 77-8)

    We might think, for instance, of the strained attempts to “harmonize” the four gospels or to assemble the eschatological passages of the Bible into a coherent “end times” narrative.

    By contrast, Barr says,

    It is the critical interpretation of the Bible that has noticed, and given full value to, the literal sense. In this sense, as Ebeling and others have noticed, the critical movement is the true heir of the Reformation with its emphasis on the plain sense of scripture. It is precisely because of its respect for the literal sense that critical scholarship has concluded that different sources in (say) the Pentateuch, or the gospels, must be identified. . . . Characteristic conservative treatments, as I have shown, depart from the natural meaning of the texts in order to force upon them an apologetically-motivated harmonization which will evade the fact of the contradiction. (p. 78)

    In short, fundamentalism, Barr says, refuses to take the Bible as it is, but instead presents a homogenized version that fits safely into a preexisting theological scheme. (The appeal to the “original autographs” is another example of rejecting the Bible we have for an idealized one.) It’s noteworthy that the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t arise directly from anything the Bible claims for itself, but has usually been imposed on the it as a conclusion from a theological argument about the kind of Bible God must have produced.

  • Was Jesus married? Does it matter?

    It looks like there’s some skepticism among scholars about the authenticity of the already much-discussed “Jesus’ wife” papyrus–said to be a fragment from a non-canonical Coptic gospel that has Jesus referring to “my wife” and saying that she will be a “disciple.” Much of yesterday’s breathless reporting on the papyrus centered around its potential to “shake up” debates about women’s role in the church. So if the fragment is spurious, does that mean no such re-thinking is necessary?

    To start with, we should be clear that, even if it’s authentic, all the papyrus would seem to show–at most–is that there was an early tradition that Jesus was married. (Curiously, few people seem to have considered the possibility that the wife “Jesus” refers to might be the church–an image that goes back to the NT itself.) It wouldn’t, as even the professor who discovered it acknowledges, show that Jesus was in fact married.

    Second, even though Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried and celibate, it’s not clear to me that anything of theological significance stands or falls on this. How would the central Christological doctrines–the Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Ascension, etc.–be affected by the discovery that Jesus was married? It’s true, as one Twitter-friend pointed out, that it may call into question the reliability of the gospels since you’d think they might mention such a significant fact about Jesus. But against this we should remember (1) the gospels don’t provide “biography” in our modern sense; they are theological-confessional documents intended to witness to faith in Christ, and (2) historical criticism has already called the reliability of the gospels into question in many respects, and yet they still function as the Word of God for people in the church.

    All of this aside, I think it’s wrong to suggest that we need certain facts about the historical Jesus to be true in order to authorize things like the full equality of women in the church. As theologian Clark Williamson has written,

    The problem with feminist theology is that in its constitutive assertions it is right. Women are fully human, clearly the equal of men, and need liberation from sexist oppression. But if the only way to warrant being a Christian feminist is by appeal to the empirical-historical Jesus as a norm, then Jesus will turn out to have been a feminist. . . . [But i]f Jesus was not a feminist, am I still not free to be one? Is it the role of Jesus . . . to authorize our conformity to him or to author our freedom and creativity, our right to reform the church? Dare we allow the historical Jesus to be himself, a first-century Jew, different from us, or must he reflect our concerns and ideals back to us? If so, how can he ever correct us? (Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel, p. 190).

    Williamson is concerned to correct the tendency in some feminist theology to portray Jesus as the egalitarian, feminist liberator from an oppressive, patriarchal Judaism, an opposition that in effect “de-Judaizes” Jesus and reinforces the long history of Christian anti-Judaism. But his point has broader application, I think. If modern Christians want to be feminists (and they should!), they don’t need to justify it by appealing to a shaky historical reconstruction of a “feminist Jesus.” Many churches, drawing on the resources of the canonical scriptures and Christian tradition, have come to see sexual equality as a gospel issue–and that provides a much stronger foundation. Christians shouldn’t be threatened by historical research, but neither should they build their faith on it.

  • Schleiermacher’s twist on predestination

    At Experimental Theology, Richard Beck argues that all forms of predestination, no matter how their proponents try to nuance them, ultimately boil down to double predestination. “You’re either an Arminian or you believe in double predestination,” he concludes.

    But Beck has missed an important possibility here, it seems to me. What if God predestines everyone to salvation?

    This is, in fact, the position that Schleiermacher more-or-less comes to in The Christian Faith. According to Schleiermacher, God does not make specific determinations about each individual’s salvation, rather all humanity is elected in Christ. The “toal efficacy” of Christ’s work can only be demonstrated by the inclusion of all in “the divine fore-ordination to blessedness.” God “regards all men in Christ.” God may temporarily “pass over” some, leaving them in unbelief, but ultimately everyone will be restored. So Schleiermacher at least didn’t think you had to choose between double predestination and Arminianism.

  • Wesley on religious experience

    Theodore Runyon is a theologian, now retired, from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Among other things, he’s published a book on John Wesley’s theology (which I blogged about a bit a while back) as well as several articles on Wesley.

    In his book Exploring the Range of Theology, which collects articles he’s written over several decades, Runyon uses Wesley to retrieve the idea of “religious experience.” For much 20th-century theology, particularly that which was influenced by Barth, religious experience was disdained. This was largely because of the fear that it would lead to spiritual flights of fancy and subjectivism. After all, since everyone’s experience is different, how do you evaluate its validity?

    Runyon argues that, while Barth et al. may have been justified in their distrust of experience, particularly in light of the “German Christians” who supported the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany, they may have gone overboard in disparaging it. Following Wesley, he maintains that a religion without an experiential aspect will eventually dry up–neither right doctrine (orthodoxy) nor right practice (orthopraxy) are enough to sustain it. We also need “right feeling”–or what he calls “orthopathy.”

    Wesley, he points out, strongly affirmed the importance of actually experiencing the assurance of God’s love and of being empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works and grow in love for one’s neighbor. Neither a rote orthodoxy nor a determined adherence to the moral law, he believed, could generate a such a living faith. And it was the birthright of every Christian to tangibly experience the Holy Spirit in her life.

    However, Wesley was no subjectivist and at many points had to defend the early Methodist movement against charges of “enthusiasm.” Religious truth isn’t produced by the feelings or experiences of the self. Rather, those feelings are the testimony of the Holy Spirit acting in response to the proclaimed Word, which, in good Lutheran fashion, Wesley insisted comes from outside the self. Wesley was an empiricist in the Lockean tradition, and he believed that everything we know comes from without. But he was also a bit of a Platonist in that he thought that human beings had “spiritual senses” that allowed them to perceive spiritual realities. But because of the Fall, these senses were dormant and had to be “activated” by God’s gracious activity. When we respond to the preaching of God’s love in Christ, the Spirit is that power within us that allows us to assent to it and which sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. It is a personal, experiential response to a reality outside the self. “Genuine experience of God is therefore not my experience alone, it is the experience of the Other into whose life I am taken by grace” (Runyon, “Orthopathy: Wesleyan Criteria for Religious Experience”).

    Runyon also discusses other criteria that Wesley used to test religious experience. These experiences should transform us–Wesley believed, with Luther, that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, but he also believed with the Catholic and Eastern traditions that it is to be imparted to us. They should have a social effect–the goal of Christianity is not to create holy solitaries; the Gospel should propel us to share the God’s love and minister to the needs of others. They should be reasonable, measured by the norms of the Bible and the experience of the believing community. They should be sacramental in that the feelings associated with religious experience convey, or point to, a reality beyond themselves rather than being made into ends-in-themselves.And finally, they should be teleological–that is, they put us on a path toward the goal of the Christian life, or what Wesley called “Christian perfection.”

    These criteria, Runyon concludes, “assist in evaluating the legitimacy of claims to religious experience, while at the same time recognizing the importance of the experiential dimension for genuine faith and discipleship.” Borrowing from Kant, we might say that faith and discipleship without experience is empty, but experience without faith and discipleship is blind.

  • Schleiermacher on the dispensability of the cross and resurrectoin

    In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it.

    For Schleiermacher, redemption means being brought into “living fellowship” with the Redeemer. This is because, according to him, Jesus had a perfect “God-consciousness”–that is, he was fully aware of his absolute dependence on God, and this gave shape to his life in the world. The rest of us, by contrast, have a more partial or fragmented experience of God-consciousness, and so we fall into sin. However, by entering into the church–the community that was founded by Jesus and takes its bearings from the portrait of Jesus contained in the New Testament, we can come to share that perfect God-consciousness. When we enter into this “living fellowship,” the God-consciousness of Jesus becomes the core of our selves and, gradually, it comes to predominate–overcoming our sinful tendencies.

    In Schleiermacher’s account, the cross is not necessary because salvation doesn’t require some act of atonement, either on our part or on God’s. Instead, our guilt is removed when we come to have the Redeemer’s perfect God-consciousness. In effect, our identity “in Christ” becomes our primary identity, so we are no longer defined by the “old Adam” and its sins. No guilt-atonement is necessary.

    The resurrection isn’t necessary, he argues, because our situation has to be essentially the same as that of the first disciples who knew Jesus when he walked the earth. But they were able to be saved by entering into fellowship with Christ before his death. While we enter into that fellowship by means of the image of Jesus presented in the New Testament and mediated by the church, it is the same kind of relationship that the first disciples had. Otherwise, ours would be a wholly different faith. But this implies that the resurrection can’t be essential to our redemption. l think Schleiermacher is a bit ambiguous at this point (or possibly I’m misreading him), because I don’t see how we can enter into a “living fellowship” with Christ now, unless he’s alive in some sense. And that would seem to make the resurrection essential at least as a means by which fellowship with the Redeemer is made possible for succeeding generations.

    More fundamentally, though, Schleiermacher’s account shows how focused his overall theology is on the interior life of the individual. For him, redemption is not a public, historical event, but one that takes place in the subjective consciousness of each person. By contrast, the New Testament seems to portray the cross and resurrection of Jesus as epochal events that objectively changed not only our situation before God, but also constitute a turning-point in the cosmic story. Not just human beings’ self-consciousnesses, but their bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, are to be redeemed from bondage to sin and decay.

    You could argue that Schleiermacher’s account is a defensible “demythologization” of the language and imagery of the Bible and that it provides a more “existential” understanding of the Christian faith by dispensing with supernatural and/or metaphysical beliefs that many people no longer find plausible. But many Christians would protest that the public, embodied nature of our salvation is an essential aspect of the Christian message.