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. 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 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 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.