Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 3.2 -- Theology Old and New

Continued from the previous post.
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1. My final year at Asbury was filled with theology. I had contemporary continental theology in the fall with Larry Wood. I had Wesleyan Theology Today with Steve Harper in the spring. I had biblical theology in the spring with Harold Kuhn (theology of the church). I feel privileged to say so.

I loved Harold Kuhn's biblical theology class. We used Hans Kung's The Church. as a text. Kung, a Roman Catholic scholar, was a brilliant scholar and orthodox in belief. Kuhn would never have used him otherwise. Kung was of course stripped of his right to teach by the RCC in 1979. Too many uncatholic elements.

I wouldn't learn until decades later that Kuhn had been instrumental in the scandal that led to resignation of Claude Thompson in 1950. I would like to think that he later had regrets about that incident. Misguided youthful zeal.

2. Steve Harper's class on Wesleyan theology was, in some respects, my first deep encounter with John Wesley's thought. This is an interesting fact. The Wesleyan Church is not Wesley-an. He was our great grandfather, but who knows what their great grandfather was like?

The Wesleyan Church is as much Baptist as Wesley-an. We were born of the nineteenth century holiness movement, a child of our grandmother Phoebe Palmer, who was only a shadow of Wesley. I don't think I ever heard a word about Wesley in all the holiness preaching of my youth. 

I learned Wesleyan theology from H. Orton Wiley's theology book, a twentieth century Nazarene scholar, with James Bross as professor (Bross didn't actually use Wiley). And of course, Bob Black gave us insights into Wesley in church history class. It was at Central that I learned that Wesley was not particularly gifted in his relationships with women.

I would say Chris Bounds had as much to do as anyone with a revival of interest in Wesley among Wesleyans during his years at IWU. That layer of Wesleyan pastors and thinkers have a love of Wesley that frankly was completely foreign to my youth. While I value Wesley, his foreigness to my formative years bequeathed me a complete freedom to critique him. I was always more of a "constructivist" Maddox type than a devotee like Ken Collins.

I remember then GS Earl Wilson saying at the first Wesleyan theological symposium that he had never heard of Bounds' breakdown of views of sanctification into longer, shorter, and a middle way. As holiness folk, we only knew Palmer's shorter way.

I always felt like Harper had a heart of gold. He would later direct the Asbury Orlando campus, which unfortunately has more or less been closed. I personally think that was a foolish mistake. But, then again, I don't know many academic institutions that know how to thrive. They seem wired for self-destruction.

Asbury's board would take away Harper's emeritus status in retirement because he published a book that was LGBTQ affirming.

3. Larry Wood was exactly the kind of quirky professor you love to have and tell stories about later. He would sit in front of the class and talk seemingly without ever actually looking at us. I wondered if it would matter if anyone was even sitting there. I seem to remember one day when he got confused about what class he was lecturing to and gave us a lecture for a different class.

For me, Larry's greatest bequeathing was his argument that Wesley knew John Fletcher's sense of Acts as baptisms in the Spirit and that Wesley assented to it. Wesley did not formulate Christian perfection in terms of Acts. That was the thinking of John Fletcher. So, it has been possible to say--and I have even said it--that you can believe in entire sanctification without thinking that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were such. After all, that's not how John Wesley preached it.

Wood has argued (in part in damage control for Bob Lyon's biblical argument against the Spirit-fillings of Acts being entire sanctification) that Wesley knew of Fletcher's approach and was ok with it. To me, that is a noble effort and probably true. However, it doesn't change the fact that Acts was not the way that Wesley preached it. To me, it is an example of an obscure argument to try to preserve a tradition.  

I am not trying to be hard on Wood at all. He has made a good argument, one very worthy of being made.

4. We used Paul Tillich's History of Christian Thought as a text for Contemporary Continental Theology. Of course Tillich was not an evangelical theologian in the slightest. But Asbury might be allowed to use his book to discuss theologians. Tillich saw God as the "ground of all being," which sounds great until you know what he meant by it. It's more existentialist language that sounds perfectly normal but means something else.

I'm sure we touched on Barth and Bultmann in that class, although I confess I don't remember all the details. I'm sure somewhere in here I learned about Emil Brunner, who was more to my liking than Barth. Brunner still believed in natural theology.

I know we touched on Jürgen Moltmann in this class. Moltmann never gelled with me. He probably sounded too social activist for my taste then, although he was more theoretical than activist. He saw Christian ethics in the present as a function of our hope for the future ("theology of hope"). Of course, I would have mocked things like social activism and liberation theology at that time. 

He also wrote a book called The Crucified God. In part to process the things that had happened during Nazism, he wrote about God identifying with human suffering on the cross. I'm not much into "patripassianism," which is what this sounded like--God the Father suffering. But I don't think Moltmann meant that God the Father literally suffered. I think he meant that God identified with our suffering.

One thing I learned is that my existing categories usually misinterpreted these theologians. I very much came with a foundationalist, even fundamentalist view of the world. I learned that these thinkers almost never meant what their words said to me. They were like poets to me who never meant what they said.

I would later joke that philosophers (and theologians) invent their own language and then call you stupid for not understanding them.

I would later find out that, while Moltmann was all the rage in America, he was hardly talked about in Germany.

5. Wolfhart Pannenberg was closer to my frequency. He was concerned about history. He was more evidentiary and modernist. For him, Christianity stands or falls on the historicity of its central claims--especially that of the resurrection. (Take that, Barth)

What seemed somewhat out of place to me at the time was that Pannenberg did not consider the virgin birth essential to Christian faith. This was very curious to me. Most of us consider the virgin birth essential to Jesus being divine. 

Of course, Jesus is not half-man, half-God. He is not a demigod. He is fully God and fully human. His DNA was not a splicing of Mary's chromosomes and Holy Spirit chromosomes. In other words, the virgin birth is not part of the mechanics of his divinity. N. T. Wright calls it a gift to us.

I believe in the virgin birth for sure, but in retrospect I think I get Pannenberg a little better now.

6. On a side note, I adjuncted some classes for Midway College (now university) while I was a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. Intriguingly, I was asked by Robert Miller to teach New Testament Survey to some nursing students. Bob was a member of the famous Jesus Seminar, so I was surprised he would ask someone from Asbury to teach for him.

The Jesus Seminar was the group started by Robert Funk that aimed to come up with a "true" red letter version of the Gospels. I used to make a lot of fun of this group, which voted with colored beads to decide what to print in their Bible (red, pink, grey, black). Perhaps I'll come back to the quest for the historical Jesus later.

Along with Harris' New Testament Survey text, they had a source book on literary parallels with the New Testament. It was interesting since I hadn't really come across some of the Greco-Roman (supposed) parallels.

But the reason I thought of this was because of an argument I used in class for the virgin birth. My argument went like this: "Paul believed in the virgin birth, and he would have known." As I looked back, I realized that Paul never really mentions the virgin birth one way or another. For all my studying, I was still to some extent a pre-modern interpreter. I saw the Bible as one book rather than 66 books written by dozens of authors over 1000 year period.

Seminary PL29: Tillich's Protestant Principle

This is the fiftteenth post on church management in my "Seminary in a Nutshell" series. In this series, I first did a section on the Person and Calling of a Minister. Now this is the twenty-eighth post in a section on the Pastor as a Leader (see at the bottom).

The previous post in this series looked Zwingli as an example of a leader who didn't compromise on a number of issues that he might very well have. This week now shifts to think about church splits and their causes. Today, we look at one of the Protestant causes of church split--having a text as the medium of final authority.
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1. There were relatively few church splits prior to the Reformation of the 1500s, when Martin Luther inadvertently caused the separation of the Lutheran church from Catholicism. Until the 300s, Christianity was not legal and so did not have any real chance to centralize its organization. It was more of a network for the first two centuries.

But it would largely be one church for over a thousand years after that point. If you were a western Christian in the year 1000, you were part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. 1054 was the first really big organizational split, when the Orthodox East split officially from the Roman Catholic West. But for the next 500 years after that you were either one or the other.

2. That all changed after the year 1517. The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) of that moment was both spiritually empty and politically weak. It did not have the power to burn Luther at the stake as it had Jan Hus a hundred years earlier in 1415. He had political protectors who were strong enough to protect him.

One of Luther's key battle cries was "Scripture only." If you could not prove it from Scripture, he could not be compelled to believe it.

Of course he was fooling himself. He continued to believe a number of legitimate theological positions that come as much from tradition as Scripture. The Bible might support infant baptism, but you cannot prove it from Scripture any more than you can prove from the Bible that you should only baptize those who are old enough to confess faith consciously. But Luther continued to believe in infant baptism. For communion, he believed in "consubstantiation," that Jesus was truly present in the bread and wine of communion. But where is that clearly stated in the Bible?

You probably cannot prove the Trinity from the New Testament, although the seeds of Trinitarian belief came from the Bible. The church answered questions like the relationship between Jesus' human and divine natures in the centuries following the New Testament, because the NT did not have explicit statements on questions of this sort. We are seeing a hint of the problem of Protestantism here.

3. The problem of Protestantism is this. Of course we would say that our final authority is God and Christ. But Protestants often operate as if the only access we have to that authority is through the words of the Bible. At the same time, we have no "magisterium" like the RCC--no authoritative teacher to give us the authoritative interpretation of the Bible. Therefore, Protestantism has as many de facto ("by the nature of the situation") authorities as it has interpreters of the biblical text.

So we have a final authority, as it were, that is inevitably co-opted by individual interpreters, individual churches, and by Christian denominations. We subtly substitute ourselves for the Bible and God without realizing it. We think we are simply reading the Bible and doing what it says, but we are as often as not bringing our own traditions, personalities, and situations to the text and reading it as a mirror of our own thoughts and desires.

4. An individual who wrestled with some of these issues was Paul Tillich (1886-1965). A German who struggled with the authoritarian context of his childhood and then Nazi Germany, he formulated what he called the Protestant Principle. In his mind, it was the extension of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith to all realms of human thought. "Justification by faith" is the idea that we cannot earn a right status with God. Rather, God accepts us on the basis of our trust in him.

Tillich applied this principle to our certainty of knowledge. We cannot know the truth with absolute certainty. Rather, as good protesters, we are justified by our doubt in any human authority that tries to establish itself as absolute, thus showing our faith in the transcendent beyond the human. We show our faith by our "ultimate concern" and our rejection of any human absolute.

He strongly resisted any attempt to set up an absolute authority over knowledge. He saw this dynamic as the problem with the Catholic system with the Pope as absolute authority, and he saw this problem with fundamentalism that sets up the Bible as an absolute authority. The heart of Protestantism for Tillich was an ongoing protest against such absolutes, including treating the Bible as an absolute.

The denominational landscape that has resulted from the Protestant Reformation is thus predictable. Tillich sees this fragmentation as a result of failed attempts to arrive at absolutes in the human realm, even in the Bible.  

5. Much of Tillich's thought seems dated now. Like all of us, he was a product of his time. But we can reformulate his insight in order to shed some light on the never-ending splits that Protestantism has experienced over the years. According to Martin Marty, there are well over 20,000 Protestant denominations or collections of churches in the world. The overwhelming majority of these claim to get their beliefs from the Bible as their absolute authority. What is going on here?

Church splits tend to feed on two key factors. The fundamental cause is of course fallen human nature. We are prone to peacock. We are prone to beat our chests and to fight to see who is the stronger or to back-stab to remove a rival. We say we are fighting for the truth. We say we are fighting for God. More often than not we are fighting for ourselves, our own needs and drives.

In Protestant churches, we often play out these fallen human games as if we are fighting over interpretations of the Bible. We say the Bible is clear and our opponents say the Bible is clear. But the Bible is really just the playing field for our fallen human urge to defeat anyone who does not submit to us or who stands in our way.

6. The "polyvalence" of words enables these cock-fights. Polyvalence is the potential of words to take on more than one meaning. Words can take on many different meanings and nuances, and the Bible has many, many words. So it is not only possible, it is virtually certain that there will be never-ending disagreements over what the Bible really means at multiple points.

Protestant church splits have often played themselves out on this playing field. First, there is the ambiguity of the words themselves. Then there is the fact that the Bible is made up of dozens of books written at different times and places. These books do not say exactly the same thing, so there is plenty of room for fitting them together differently. Lastly, they were written for audiences that lived thousands of years ago, so there is the matter of bridging the gap from their time to our time.

All these factors make the interpretation of the Bible a many-splendored wonder. It is no wonder at all that we have tens of thousands of groups who all disagree with each other. Do you baptize infants or only people old enough to know what they are doing? Do you baptize by immersion, sprinkling, or pouring? Is baptism necessary or only a symbolic ritual? Does it actually change you somehow? Can you be rebaptized? Whose baptism really counts? How soon after faith should you be baptized?

Welcome to dozens of denominations, all of whom think they are simply following the Bible.

7. Whether we admit it or not, tradition is also in play here. A non-denominational church is simply a church that isn't telling you what tradition it draws on. A few questions and you will quickly be able to tell whether it is basically Baptist, basically Pentecostal, or basically whatever. It's probably Baptist. There is no church that really only follows the Bible alone.

So one way to stop church splits is for us to become aware of ourselves, not only as fallen human beings but also as interpreters of the Bible. Not every hill is one to die on. We have been handed a historical situation in which we have countless little Christian groups. We start where we are.

There are times for Christians to agree to disagree and to go their separate ways. If we stop thinking of our denominations as the final answer on all matters of theology and practice and rather as communities who are in the same tradition and walking in the same direction, we will make great progress. We do not need to split even when we disagree on matters that are not essential to our identity--and we should not consider too much beyond common Christian faith in that bucket. [1]

The Anglican Church has found a way to exist together despite a wide range of differing beliefs. [2] Baptists of course are congregational in form, so find their unity in association rather than organization. In my tradition, the Wesleyan tradition, there are several sub-groups that could "easily" unite to form a common organization ideologically (Wesleyan, Nazarene, Free Methodist, etc). But it is just as well for us to walk together in unity as different denominations, since that is the hand history has dealt us. What we do not need is more Wesleyan denominations. [3]

So we would do well to know that we stand in Christian traditions. We are not simply reading the Bible unfiltered or without many, many influences at work on us. Much of what we think is essential Christian faith is really a matter of specific communities of faith who see faith and practice the same basic way. We can agree to disagree without dechristianizing each other. Our attitudes toward each other are more important to God than dotting our theological i's and crossing our theological t's.

Next Week: Avoiding Church Splits and Exits

[1] There are broad traditions that exist--Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed, Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal. Each of them have general distinctives that locate a church in that tradition. Beyond these distinctives, belonging to a specific subgroup is surely more a matter of finding a community we feel at home with than a fight over absolute truth. A Christian would ideally be able to worship in any of these churches.

[2] The Anglican Church has everything from evangelical Anglicans to Anglo-Catholics to charismatic Anglicans to non-realist Anglicans. The liturgy and geography provides the unity.

[3] Although it is quite possible we will get a "Wesleyan" split if the United Methodist church splits in the next two years. The fight here is over homosexual practice, a key ethical question of the church in general these days and a key historical issue given the virtually unanimous position of the past that is under debate. It is certainly an issue that seems more worthy of "agreeing to disagree" than what color to paint the inside of the church.

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead
• Leadership Pitfalls

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths
• Identifying Core Values
• Setting Goals
• Leading Change
• Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals

Church Management

• Managing the Church
• Leadership in the Early Church
• Leadership Structures in Church History
• Church Position Descriptions
• Leading Healthy Teams
• Good Communication
• Hiring, Recruiting, and Firing

Conflict Management

• Causes of Conflict
• The Third Mark of the Church
• Basic Conflict Resolution
• Leadership and the Gentile Mission
• Navigating Disputable Issues
• Athanasius: No Compromise!
• Zwingli: No Compromise?

Theories of Western Decline

I've been exploring what happened when Rome became Christian and asked when Europe became Christian. Today I want to begin exploring several theories of Western decline.

1. The Story of Progress
Before I mention several stories of decline, I might mention the story of progress. There are many who view the last five hundred years as something like a non-stop evolution to a better and better understanding. They would view the Middle Ages as something like the "dark" ages and the Renaissance as a rebirth of culture.

The Enlightenment was thus truly about becoming more reasonable, about shedding religious superstition, and so forth. The rise of science is seen as parallel to this trajectory toward reason and truth. We expect science to make the world a better and better place. At one point, we thought humanity would become more and more virtuous.

2. The Modernist Dead End
I don't know how many people still really subscribe to any strong form of the story of progress I just mentioned. Star Trek in the 80s still looked to a future where humanity was more civilized, more evolved than it is now. But the movies of the last 25 years have been much more apocalyptic. There are more zombies, more world-ending catastrophes, more post-apocalyptic reversions.

Nietzsche in the late 1800s was a herald of where modernism ended, namely, with no basis for morality other than the creation of ingenious Superman who could convince the rest of the world. Alistair MacIntyre depicted a moral world where we had fragments of a picture from the past that we could not remember. Louis Pojman's ethics text deliberately mimicked J. L. Mackie with the subtitle Discovering Right and Wrong rather than Mackie's, "inventing" right and wrong.

In Nietzsche's theory of Western decline, Socrates himself was the culprit. It was he who taught the West to ask questions, that the "unexamined life is not worth living." While Nietzsche agreed with the end of that train of thought in his own writings, he warned that it would not be good for most people to play out the train of thought. They might think that it was good for God to be dead, but it would not turn out as well as they thought. In that sense, Nietzsche is sometimes considered a prophet of the twentieth century.

3. The Story of the Protestant Principle
According to Paul Tillich, it was inevitable that Protestantism would splinter into tens of thousands of little groups once it made a text the center of authority. Texts are polyvalent. They are susceptible to multiple interpretations. So each little group, reading the Bible "alone," becomes confident that it knows exactly what God thinks... and it splinters off from its parent body. And it then goes on to hereticize everyone who disagrees... until the next group splits from it.

Brad Gregory, in Unintended Reformation, more or less sees the turn away from the external authority of the Church as the culprit. Left without some third party to arbitrate the meaning of Scripture, each interprets as is right in his own eyes. Most crucially, secular authority becomes the highest authority rather than religious authority. Completely unintended, Christianity hands its ultimate authority over to worldly powers. Gregory is, of course, Roman Catholic.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of almost Catholics around. There are plenty of people in Wesleyan circles who are on some version of the Canterbury Trail, although many of them stop at Episcopalian. You often get the feeling, though, that they think the Reformation was at least in part a mistake, certainly that modernism was a mistake. All we need to do is go back to some version of catholicism, even if it is the catholicism of the 400s.

In another scenario, Protestant Liberalism was a predictable trajectory for a "Bible only" approach. For once the historical consciousness of modernism comes into play, the premodern, unified text suddenly falls apart into 66 distinct books with distinct contexts addressing distinct audiences. Thus, even most evangelical biblical theologies are not divided up by theological topic, but by Paul, Matthew, and so forth.

4. Nominalist Ideas Have Consequences.
Richard Weaver, in 1948, argued that America was in a state of degradation because of a trajectory first set by the nominalists just before the Reformation. In rhetoric now very familiar, he blamed a turn to relativism and away from absolutes. I've recently written on how fallacy-ridden most of this rhetoric is. Weaver's ideal world was the Roman Catholic society of the Middle Ages (even though he was a "nominal" Protestant).

Nominalism was a rejection of the reality of universals in the late Middle Ages. It is, in my opinion, an extension of Aquinas' version of absolutes, where absolutes are not distinct from the things in which they occur. The nominalists took this concept one step further, namely, that there are just individual things. Weaver, unsurprisingly, was somewhat Platonic in orientation.

Luther's theology is often thought to have been influenced by nominalism. God deems a person righteous without a person being righteous.

5. Aquinas and the triumph of reason
Francis Schaeffer taught that Aquinas had started the decline of the West by rejecting that the human mind was fallen. No serious scholar of history or Aquinas agrees. Schaeffer was a presuppositionalist thinker who more or less held that unless God gave you the right presuppositions out of thin air, you couldn't possibly arrive at the truth.

So the introduction of reason into the equation, in his view, inevitably resulted in humanity thinking it was the authority on what was true, with a resultant decline in the West climaxing with the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.

6. James Sire and declining worldviews
In The Universe Next Door, James Sire describes the changing worldviews since the Reformation as a logical unraveling from theism to deism to naturalism to nihilism to existentialism to neo-spiritualism. In the 1500s, God was thought to exist and to be active in the world. In the 1600s and 1700s, we saw the rise of deism, which sees the world more or less as a machine that doesn't require God's intervention.

In the 1800s with evolution, we see the rise of naturalism, where God is not even thought to be needed as creator. This inevitably results in a Nietzschean nihilism. In the 1950s, existentialism rose to try to reintroduce meaning into the universe. But as it is ultimately unsatisfying, an attempt to recapture a spiritual dimension to life is seen in the new age movement and neo-spiritualism.

On Monday, I may try to evaluate these in some sort of synthetic way. What seems true about these somewhat conflicting theories?