The other day, a woman told me the following story. One evening she gave an address to a church congregation. After the talk, a stern-faced member of the congregation came up and said, "You're a liberal, aren't you – but with none of the doubt." It's a nice way of putting it. If I'd been there, I suppose I would have been told that I'm an evangelical, but with all of the doubts.
by Scott Stephens (Scott is a pastor and theological educator in the Uniting Church in Australia, one of the country’s largest mainline denominations. In this piece, Scott discusses the Church’s founding confessional document, the Basis of Union. A shorter version of this piece was published in the denominational magazine, Journey.)
Over thirty years ago, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) embarked on what could have been a remarkable journey, but it deviated from its original course with devastating consequences. It is now a shell of its former self, like so much Liberal Protestantism throughout the West, having gone whoring after the strange gods of impotent theology, liturgical gimmickry, inert bureaucracy and social respectability.
The past decade in particular has seen the UCA relinquish any prophetic vocation it might once have had — along with a considerable portion of its ecclesial and evangelistic vitality — and instead assume the inoffensive role of the religious division of a non-government provider of community and health services.
And so, in an extraordinary apostasy from its original calling, the UCA has decided to represent the ‘middle way’, the path of least resistance, a facile alternative to fundamentalism, evangelicalism and pentecostalism. In short, it has become the lowest common denomination. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine that, if God sees fit to grant it another thirty years, all that will be left of the Uniting Church itself is the logo on hospitals and Blue Care letterhead — and that for purely historical reasons.
But perhaps most troubling is that the fledgling church was warned against this very apostasy by Davis McCaughey, inaugural President of the Uniting Church. In his incendiary address to the 1979 Assembly of the UCA, McCaughey expressed his fear that the Church would be hijacked by bureaucrats and pedants, and that its clergy would be reduced to careerists and panderers:
“We no longer seem to expect our ministers to spend hours (literally hours) every week, thinking, reading, praying: so that when the hungry sheep look up they may be fed.... And I am not wholly convinced that our Constitution, Regulations and Procedures are sufficiently and rigorously controlled by [our eschatological hope]. I am not persuaded that they are not in danger ... of becoming ends in themselves.”He warned just as passionately against the tendency he perceived to adopt a form of incestuous Church patriotism, which would obscure and ultimately destroy the Church’s vocation to carry on the mission of Christ:
“At all events the cry for a sense of identity in the Uniting Church cannot be answered by the offer of a new kind of Church patriotism. In an important sense, we in the Uniting Church in Australia have no identity, no distinctive marks — other than belonging with the people of God brought into being by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on their way to the consummation of all things in him.… We have embarked on a course in which we ask men and women to forget who they are, and chiefly to remember whose they are.”Throughout his address, McCaughey pleaded for a return to the Basis of Union as a source of correction and renewal of the already deteriorating Church — a renewal, he emphasized, that must begin with the congregations themselves. Hence, for McCaughey, any suggestion that the Basis is merely an aspirational document or some transitional text that brought the uniting churches together (a ‘vanishing mediator’, as Max Weber would have put it) must be rejected out of hand.
“The plain truth is that Broadway survives as part of a larger church that is dying. Mainstream Protestantism in America is dying. Actually I prefer to put the matter in more positive terms: God is killing Protestantism and perhaps Christianity in America and we deserve it.”Is God is killing the Uniting Church? Perhaps. Either way, its only alternatives are to continue indulging in the gratuitous “Church patriotism” that has blinded it to its plight thus far, and go on erecting stop-gap measures to stave off the inevitable; or it can embrace the fact that the Basis of Union has already placed the Church under the judgment of the Word of God with joyful repentance.
In theology, Eastern Orthodoxy is the new black. These days it's harder and harder to find any serious Protestant commitment to the western confession of filioque. The denomination in which I'm teaching, for instance, omits the filioque from liturgical confessions of the Nicene Creed.
In recent Protestant theology, reluctance to confess the filioque seems to arise mainly from a general ecumenical sentiment on the one hand (as though such a confession would be impolite), and from an ill-informed and stereotyped criticism of Augustine on the other (as one finds everywhere in Colin Gunton's works, for example).
In one of my recent pneumatology classes, I tried to argue for the contemporary importance of the filioque. My argument was roughly as follows: In the preaching and worship of liberal Protestant churches, there is a good deal of emphasis on the autonomy of the Spirit. The Spirit is often invoked without reference to Christ, or to the biblical narrative, or to the events of salvation-history. We have hymns and prayers that celebrate "the Spirit" as a kind of generic Spirit of creation, a benevolent life-force that is universally active and available. The role of this Spirit, presumably, is to grant unmediated religious access to God – a kind of second saviour, an alternative to Christ. I once attended a particularly ghastly eucharist service, where the bread and wine were not once related to Christ, but simply to "the Spirit" who is at work in all the gifts of creation. Such a Spirit clearly could not be said to proceed "from the Son"!
It's precisely here that the filioque could function to safeguard the church's confession of the gospel. The role of the filioque is to tie the Spirit's work indissolubly to God's act in Christ; to confess that the action of the Spirit is part of the story of salvation-history, and not some independent avenue of God's presence in the world. A Spirit who proceeds simply "from the Father" can very easily be understood as a second way of salvation, operating remoto Christo and floating free of the events of salvation-history.
Karl Barth's defence of the filioque was partly motivated by this kind of concern. He wondered whether the Eastern church's refusal of the filioque is "a reflection of the very mystically oriented piety of the East, which, bypassing the revelation in the Son, would relate human beings directly to the original Revealer, 
the principium or fount of deity" (Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:129-30). (I look forward to learning much more about this when Ashgate releases David Guretzki's new book on Karl Barth and the Filioque – due out next month.)
This week I've also been immersed in Volumes 12 (Berlin, 1932-1933) and 13 (London, 1933-1935) of Bonhoeffer's Works. And I've been struck by the importance of the filioque in the struggle of the Confessing Church against the Deutsche Christen. The 1933 Bethel Confession (Bonhoeffer was one of its main writers) includes a section on the Holy Spirit which foregrounds the filioque:
"The church teaches that the Holy Spirit, true God for all eternity, is not created, not made, but proceeds from the Father and the Son.... We reject the false doctrine that the Holy Spirit can be recognized without Christ in the creation and its orders. For it is always as proceeding from the Son that the Holy Spirit judges this fallen world and establishes the new order, above all nations, of the church as the people of God. Only because the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son does the church receive its mission to all nations" (Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 1932-1933, p. 399).
In National Socialism, it is "first nature's grace, then Christ's grace. First creation, then redemption. This goes back to liberal theology. What is decisive is that the filioque is missing. The filioque means that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The German Christians want to introduce a nature spirit, a folk [Volk] spirit, into the church, which is not judged by Christ but rather justifies itself." This is "German paganism" (Bonhoeffer, London, 1933-1935, p. 48).
by Kim Fabricius (originally printed in this month's Reform magazine)
This is an ecclesiastical health warning for “divine flu”. There are two potentially fatal forms of this malady afflicting the church. One is caused by the Tweedledum virus, the other by the Tweedledee virus.
Theo-chemically, the viruses are mirror images of one another, and can only thrive in symbiotic relationship. The technical terms for the related illnesses they cause are “neo-liberalism” and “conservative evangelicalism”. Here is a list of ten symptoms associated with each pathology. Sufferers may not exhibit all of these symptoms, but if you experience some of the symptoms you should immediately seek medical attention.
Neo-Liberalism
Sufferers
• Feel the omission Old Testament readings from Sunday worship is a welcome relief rather than an egregious truncation. They regard the preacher as a reflector on experiences, or a community life-coach, rather than one called to confront the congregation with God’s living word of grace and judgement.
• Tell us the Creeds are old-fashioned, bang on about “relevance” and, with “chronological snobbery” (C. S. Lewis) masking historical ignorance – the idea that the Church Fathers or Reformers believed in a bearded celestial pensioner is risible – instruct us about what modern people can and cannot accept.
• Give Trinity Sunday, the climax of the Christian year, a miss. Or if that is not possible, delight in the crypto-unitarian images – the three lobed-leaves of the shamrock, or the three states of water – of the children’s address, as if the doctrine of the Trinity were a mathematical puzzle rather than a description of God’s very identity.
• Deny the divinity of Christ (while acknowledging him as great guru, right up there with the Buddha), speak of the resurrection as a “spiritual” reality (i.e. as something that happened to the disciples, not to Jesus), and so cannot worship or pray to Jesus; and, consequently, don’t know what to do with Paul.
• Think “Calvin and Barth” is the name of a comic strip, that orthodoxy is dull rather than dangerous, and that John Spong is a “progressive” theologian rather than a recycler of Enlightenment ideas.
• Mistake counselling for the cure of souls, clinical psychology for spirituality, and prefer the nostrums of Myers-Briggs and James Fowler to the wisdom of the Desert Fathers.
• Argue that Jesus’ silence on the subject of homosexuality is germane to the contemporary debate about same-sex relationships, presumably not realising that an argument from silence is a non-argument, i.e. a fallacious argument.
• Believe near-death experiences are relevant to our understanding of what St. John calls “eternal life”.
• Seem reluctant about declaring that “Christ died for our sins”, and shy, even embarrassed, about saying that they are “born-again”, or that they “love the Lord Jesus”.
• Are fans rather than followers of Jesus when it comes to his absolute rejection of violence; for example, they will kill other people if the state tells them to.
Conservative Evangelicalism
Sufferers
• Read the Bible only in the original version – the NIV, of course! – as if there were a neutral and stable position from which this library of a book could be translated, as if translations weren’t themselves interpretations, and as if our interpretations of these interpretations didn’t go all the way down and resist closure – they do.
• Hold tenaciously to the quite unbiblical, relatively newfangled, and deeply problematical doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
• Act like the doctrine of penal substitution is in the Creeds, find nothing at all sub-Christian in the idea that God “punished” Jesus on the cross, and deploy this model of the atonement as the litmus test for distinguishing “real” Christians.
• Argue that the Levitical and Pauline condemnations of homosexuality conclusively settle the contemporary discussion of same-sex relationships, insisting, however, that “while we hate the sin, we love the sinner.” (Gay/Lesbian Christians: “Yeah, right!”)
• Worship with “choruses” that are four lines long, a half-inch deep, and take 20 minutes to sing.
• Punctuate their prayers with the word “just” (“Father, we just pray this, and Father, we just pray that”) with mind-numbing repetition, and assume that the more people you have praying about something, the more likely you are to get a result.
• Despise Richard Dawkins while actually believing in the kind of God he rightly rejects, as if the existence of God were, in principle, demonstrable, as if the proposition “God exists” were a hypothesis to be affirmed or denied, as if God were simply the hugest of individuals.
• Treat the visions in the book of Revelation as if they were the prognostications of a Nostradamus rather than imaginative murals of encouragement for confessing churches and protest against militant empires.
• Believe, sometimes with quite unpleasant schadenfreude, that hell will be full rather than empty – and that they have access to the Inferno’s census.
• Are fans rather than followers of Jesus when it comes to his absolute rejection of violence; for example, they will kill other people if the state tells them to.
I repeat: both forms of divine flu are very serious and potentially terminal. However, if forced to choose, this theo-clinician would say that neo-liberalism rather than conservative evangelicalism is the greater danger to the life of the church itself. Why? Because (to rephrase the American Presbyterian Hugh T. Kerr) it is easier to cool down the feverish than to warm up the undead.
Neo-liberals, the problem is not that you are too critical, but rather not critical enough; and conservative evangelicals, the problem is not that you are too biblical, but not biblical enough. Let the healing begin!
In an interview, Richard Rorty has offered a very memorable assessment of liberal theology:
“I’m delighted that liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono said shouldn’t be done – try to accommodate Christianity to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were a fundamentalist Christian, I’d be appalled by the wishy-washiness of [the liberal] version of the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is frightened of the barbarity of many fundamentalist Christians (e.g. their homophobia), I welcome theological liberalism. Maybe liberal theologians will eventually produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian anymore. If so, something will have been lost, but probably more will have been gained.”
I can hardly imagine a more acute commentary on certain forms of contemporary Protestant theology. Is this not, in fact, the precise goal of many theologians (e.g. Cupitt, Spong) – “to produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian anymore”?
Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), 212 pp. (review copy courtesy of T&T Clark)
Lieven Boeve is professor of fundamental theology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. In his earlier book, Interrupting Tradition (Eerdmans, 2003), he analysed the relation between the Christian narrative and its postmodern context, and he argued for the openness of the Christian story to encounters with otherness. In this new work, Boeve continues to pursue this approach to contextual theology by developing a methodology of a contextual “theology of interruption.”
Boeve’s proposal is set against the backdrop of correlation methods in modern theology (e.g. Tillich, Schillebeeckx, Küng, Tracy). While theologians such as Barth and Milbank assume a discontinuity between Christian discourse and its secular context, the correlation method presupposes a fundamental continuity between faith and its context. But Boeve seeks to move beyond both these approaches by envisioning Christian faith as that which interrupts and reconfigures the context.
“Interruption” thus functions as an alternative to both continuity and discontinuity. On the one hand, interruption is opposed to correlationist understandings of continuity, since faith is a radical new intrusion into the existing context. And on the other hand, interruption is opposed to conceptions of sheer discontinuity, since the context which is interrupted is altered but does not cease to exist. Interruption is the event in which an existing narrative is sharply halted and problematised, in order then to be opened up and propelled in a new direction. There is thus both continuity (since the same narrative is reconfigured and redirected) and discontinuity (since the narrative is forever changed by this new incursion). Indeed, interruption occurs precisely “where discontinuity and continuity encounter one another” (p. 103).
So in contrast to any mere “correlation” between faith and its context, Boeve calls for a radical “recontextualisation” of faith’s context. This means that, although dialogue with the context can never be suspended, we must resist the correlationist longing “for harmony and synthesis between tradition and context,” and instead foreground the Christian faith’s own “particularity, contextuality, narrativity, historicity, contingency, and otherness” (p. 40). For Boeve, therefore, the fundamental datum for theological method is the fact that Christian faith is always one contingent possibility amidst a plurality of others. This confrontation of faith with plurality and otherness sets in motion the process of recontextualisation. Faith is neither a (discontinuous) “counter-culture” nor a (continuous) “partner” of secularised culture – instead, it is the irreducibly singular interruption which takes the cultural context and opens it anew towards the reality of God.
Boeve takes this model of “interruption” and uses it to rethink diverse themes such as religious experience, sacramental rites, the relation between faith and science, the apophaticism of contemporary spirituality (which he nicely describes as “something-ism”), and the place of christology in interfaith dialogue. But the richest and most valuable part of the book is his analysis of time and apocalyptic in the final chapter. Here, he rightly notes that the demythologising tendency to purge the Christian message of its apocalyptic dimension “introduce[s] a perception of time that makes it impossible in principle to authentically conceptualise the radicality of the Christian faith” (p. 188).
Following Johann-Baptist Metz, Boeve observes that the relation between God and time is structured apocalyptically: “God interrupts time” (p. 195). God is not part of the process of history, nor does God stand outside history. Rather, God is the boundary and crisis of history. Such a conception of time, Boeve argues, produces a “radical temporalisation” of the world, with “a radical awareness of the irreducible seriousness of what occurs in the here and now.” History thus becomes real history, and the future becomes a real future which cannot be reduced to a mere “seamless continuation” of progress, development or evolution (p. 197). The task of Christian theology is thus to submit to the interruptive judgment of God over history – and this is always a fundamentally political task, since the church must remind its cultural context that human history is also “a history of anxiety and the cry for justice.” In this way, Christian faith “disrupts the histories of conqueror and vanquished, interrupting the ideologies of the powerful” (pp. 201-4).
Although this book is shaped mainly by discussions in modern Dutch-language theology, I think Boeve’s methodological proposal is of much broader significance. The central argument is crisp and decisive, and Boeve’s thought is often fresh and energetic. Even though he mounts a compelling critique of correlationist approaches, his proposal might best be understood as an attempt to modify and nuance (and so to sustain) the liberal correlation method. After all, Boeve still perceives a fundamental correlation between faith and its context, but he adds the crucial qualification that this is a correlation between an interruptive faith and an interrupted context, a context which has already been radically altered and re-structured by the divine action.
Since one of my own interests is in developing an apocalyptic/interruptive model of divine agency from a Barthian direction, I often found myself wishing that Boeve would lean further in the direction of discontinuity, instead of returning rather hastily to a revised model of contextual correlation. But in spite of that, I’m very glad to have discovered this book. It presents a vigorous argument and provides valuable stimulus for contemporary work in theological method. In the end, I suppose my only complaint is that I would have liked to have seen even more interruption!
A joke by Kim Fabricius
A Barthian is standing on the top of a cliff with a liberal and a member of the Religious Right. Whom does he push off first?
Answer: the liberal. Business before pleasure.
John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 316 pp.
John Shelby Spong has been touring Australia to promote his new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. The Uniting Church (an Australian denomination) asked me to write something about this book for the September issue of their newspaper, Journey. Here’s a copy of my article:
Spong’s Jesus: Not Radical Enough
John Shelby Spong, the controversial Episcopal bishop, has always regarded himself as an iconoclast. Throughout his long career, he has vigorously attacked Christian doctrine, and has called for “a new reformation.” The main themes of his prolific writings have now been brought together in this new manifesto, Jesus for the Non-Religious – a book which Spong himself describes as the culmination of his life’s work. So what should we make of this book?
In the first place, we can appreciate Spong’s desire to communicate the findings of biblical criticism to a wider audience. A vast gulf still separates scholarly biblical research from everyday devotional Bible reading – and this is one of the great pastoral crises of our time. So Spong is on the right track when he tells his readers that there is a difference between the historically authentic elements in the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, and the later layers of liturgical and theological interpretation which have embellished the Gospel stories. And he’s right to point out that the Gospels give us not a straightforward historical account, but “a magnificent interpretive portrait” of Jesus (p. 115).
Admittedly, Spong’s interpretation of the Gospel texts often rests on outdated research and flawed interpretations of the scholarship. And he misses the mark when he insists on a rigid dichotomy between faith and history. He tells us, for instance, that the Gospel stories are sheer “make-believe” (p. 20), and that the texts “are not the chronicles of a remembered history, but the proclamations of a community of faith” (p. 84). But presumably the stories about Jesus were also attempts to make sense of something that actually happened. In any case, regardless of such shortcomings, Spong’s desire to promote a historically informed understanding of the Gospels is commendable.
Further, one can only admire the bishop’s sheer enthusiasm for his work. He regards his own interpretation of Jesus as a uniquely radical gesture, and he is remarkably optimistic about the impact of his book. He assures us that the book will free us from “the prison of religion” and will usher in “a renaissance and a reformation” (p. 290), unleashing “a new burst of energy and power that has not been seen for hundreds of years” (p. xiii).
Unfortunately, however, such rhetoric sets readers up for disappointment, since the book’s entire argument amounts to this: Jesus overcomes our prejudices and stereotypes, so that we can be inclusive and tolerant towards others. This, in a nutshell, is “the new reformation”; this is Bishop Spong’s Jesus.
And for all Spong’s iconoclastic claims, there is something strangely familiar about this Jesus. A Jesus who champions inclusiveness and tolerance is a Jesus who looks suspiciously like – well, like ourselves. Presumably Spong’s readers will already identify with the Western liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness. We did not learn those values from Jesus, but, thanks to Spong, we discover subsequently that Jesus himself is also committed to the same values.
The function of Spong’s Jesus is thus simply to maintain the social and political status quo. He takes our own most cherished and self-evident Western values, and he provides them with a theological justification. Thus our own values are made absolute and unimpeachable – they are elevated to the status of ideology. Simply put, Spong tells us that political correctness is correct, since even Jesus was politically correct.
This should give pause to any reader of the Gospels. After all, the Gospels consistently depict a Jesus who is radical and confronting and unsettling – a Jesus who challenges the status quo, who hangs out with the wrong people and antagonises the establishment, who resists every attempt to domesticate his message, refusing to allow his actions to be calmly assimilated into any existing religious framework. And for just this reason, the Jesus of the Gospels is finally executed. In contrast, however, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be offended by Bishop Spong’s politically correct Jesus. A Jesus whose sole commitment is to tolerant inclusiveness is simply not the kind of Jesus whom anyone would want to crucify.
So in spite of Spong’s characterisation of his own book as radical, “shocking” and “audacious” (pp. 10, 290), the real problem is that this book is not radical enough. The Jesus who emerges from these pages is ultimately indistinguishable from any other respectably innocuous, politically correct member of the Western middle classes.
Instead of provoking a challenging political or theological response, therefore, this Jesus serves to justify our own values and assumptions. To adopt such a Jesus is like the new tendency of consumers to purchase “carbon offsets” as compensation for their own greenhouse emissions: one makes a seemingly radical gesture precisely in order to ensure that nothing changes! Like purchasing a carbon offset, Spong’s Jesus – far from challenging us or provoking us to action – simply reassures us that all is well.
Bishop Spong’s Jesus may be useful and consoling, then, but he is not especially interesting, much less unique. He poses no threat, no challenge. He makes no demands. He tells us nothing that we didn’t know already. And for just that reason, it’s hard to see why “the non-religious” – or anyone else, for that matter – should have any special regard for this Jesus.
“Our theological discussion has ... been divided into a conservative insistence on the dogmatic tradition, and a liberal repudiation of dogmatic content in exchange for an ethic of shared humanity. We are thus falling back into the worst tradition of the nineteenth century, in which conservative theologians were wont to be conservative in politics also, and the liberals believed themselves obliged to discard dogma in exchange for humanism. But this means tearing asunder things that belong together. Every article of the confession of faith has explosive and aggressive significance for the status quo of the old world, and an article that leaves our relationship ... to society as it was, is not worthy to be an article of the Christian faith.”
—Helmut Gollwitzer, The Rich Christians and Poor Lazarus (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 3.
“To what shall I liken the basic principles of [liberal] theology? Is it not like a clock which is so cleverly constructed that the hands move from right to left instead of from left to right?”
—Letter from Barth to Thurneysen, 18 May 1924 (in Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925, p. 183).
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