Mapping Modern Theology

A Thematic and Historical Introduction

Kapic, Kelly M., McCormack, Bruce L.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441236371
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

This textbook offers a fresh approach to modern theology by approaching the field thematically, covering classic topics in Christian theology over the last two hundred years. The editors, leading authorities on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology, have assembled a respected team of international scholars to offer substantive treatment of important doctrines and key debates in modern theology. Contributors include Kevin Vanhoozer, John Webster, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Michael Horton. The volume enables readers to trace how key doctrinal questions were discussed, where the main debates lie, and how ideas developed. Topics covered include the Trinity, divine attributes, creation, the atonement, ethics, practical theology, and ecclesiology.

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Introduction

On “Modernity” as a Theological Concept

Bruce L. McCormack

The present work intends a new approach to organizing the study of the Christian theology of the last two hundred years or so. There are a number of very fine histories of doctrinal development that set forth the pivotal moments in which Christian theology in the West is understood as a whole.[1] There are also works that take as their focus leading theologians and/or spheres of influence.[2] Our idea is to organize modern theology along the lines of classical doctrinal topics or themes so that more complete coverage of significant developments in each area of doctrinal construction might be achieved. In this way, students might be introduced to the problems that have been basic to reflection on all the major doctrines treated by modern theologians.

The purpose of this introduction is to address the basic question of the meaning of a term central to this project, namely, “modernity.” To do so will help to establish a rationale not only for the temporal limits of our inquiry but also for what it includes and excludes. Not everything that has happened in the last two hundred years is “modern.” There have always been some who are quite willing to defend “premodern” trains of thought more or less unchanged (though the ways in which they have gone about this often say more about their historical location—within modernity—than they would care to admit). And the last fifteen years or so have seen the emergence of trends of thought that can only be described as “anti-modern” (“paleo-orthodoxy” is the new neo-orthodoxy). And yet, establishing what it means to be “modern” in the realm of theology is no easy task. The theologies rightly covered by the term are diverse, and what unites them is not easily captured. No definitive definition can be offered here—that would be the proper subject of a book-length treatment. What I can do is simply point out certain defining moments in which those commitments emerge that will help us in identifying “modern” theologies.[3]

The Meaning of “Modernity”

To ask after the meaning of “modernity” as a strictly theological concept is already to distinguish its use among theologians and historians of Christian doctrines from its use by, say, sociologists, political scientists, natural scientists, or even philosophers. Sociologists typically point to the shift in the West from largely agrarian economies to capitalism, industrialization, and secularization. Political scientists discuss the importance of political theorists going back to Machiavelli and of epochal events like the French Revolution. Natural scientists speak of the destruction of the biblical-Aristotelian cosmology that took place between Copernicus and Newton. Philosophers quite rightly begin their story with Cartesian rationalism and the internal development of their discipline through great thinkers like Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. “Modernity” as a cultural concept is all of these things. As a theological concept, however, the meaning of “modernity” is not finally reducible to any of these elements (though some have more to do with our subject than others).

The origins of what historians of theology refer to as “modern” theology are to be found in Germany—a country to which industrialization came quite late in comparison with England especially; a country in which secularization of the kind that took place in France was resisted with a measure of success; a country which only became a democracy in 1918 (and even then, in a tragically flawed form).[4] The truth is that these social and political developments took root only after the advent of modern theology; they conditioned its further development but not its creation. We come closer to the truth when we look for the preconditions that helped pave the way for modern German theology in the scientific revolution, in the growth in knowledge of non-European cultures and their histories as a consequence of the voyages of discovery, in Hume’s devastating critique of natural religion and Kant’s limitation of knowledge to the realm of phenomenal appearances—in other words, in the intellectual rather than the material conditions of life.[5] These are, however, preconditions only; they are not yet the thing itself.

“Modern” theology emerged, in my view, at the point at which (on the one hand) church-based theologians ceased trying to defend and protect the received orthodoxies of the past against erosion and took up the more fundamental challenge of asking how the theological values resident in those orthodoxies might be given an altogether new expression, dressed out in new categories for reflection. It was the transition, then, from a strategy of “accommodation” to the task of “mediation” that was fundamental in the ecclesial sphere.[6] In philosophy, as it relates to the theological enterprise (on the other hand), the defining moment that effected a transition entailed a shift from a cosmologically based to an anthropologically based metaphysics of divine being.

The transitions I have in mind, insofar as they registered a decisive impact on Christian theology, were effected by means of a few very basic decisions in particular. Every period in the history of theology has had its basic questions and concerns that shaped the formulation of doctrines in all areas of reflection. In the early church, it was Trinity and Christology that captured the attention of the greatest minds. In the transition to the early Middle Ages, Augustinian anthropology played a large role—which would eventually effect a shift in attention from theories of redemption to the need to understand how God is reconciled with sinful human beings. The high Middle Ages were the heyday of sacramental development, in which definitions of sacraments were worked out with great care, the number of sacraments established, and so on. The Reformation period found its center of gravity in the doctrine of justification. In the modern period, the question of questions became the nature of God and his relation to the world. Basic decisions were thus made in the areas of creation, the being of God and his relation to the world, and revelation, which were to become foundational for further development in other areas of doctrinal concern. It is to a consideration of these basic decisions that we must now turn in our efforts to understand what it means to be “modern” in Christian theology.

The Doctrine of Creation: From Accommodation to Mediation

Rumors of the ideas set forth in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium were in circulation for some years before its publication in 1543. That is why Martin Luther was able to adopt a tentative position as early as 1539. He did not see how it could possibly be that the earth moves through the heavens since Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth (Josh. 10:12–14).[7] And, in any case, the “fit” between what could be known of the physical universe with the help of Aristotle and the biblical cosmology set forth in the early chapters of Genesis especially would continue to make the synthesis of the two compelling to theologians for a good while yet. In the interim, it fell to Andreas Osiander to create the conditions that made possible a certain peaceful coexistence between the churchly theology and free scientific inquiry. In an unsigned preface attached to Copernicus’s great work, Osiander asserted that astronomers cannot discover the true causes of the movements of heavenly bodies. That being the case, their observations help only in understanding how such movements have appeared to one firmly planted on the earth, and they lay the foundations for calculating how they must appear in the future. Their work is “hypothetical” only; it does not correspond to the way things truly are.[8]

As unhappy as these claims made later astronomers like Kepler (since they believed their hypotheses to be true and not merely an exercise in artistic construction), Osiander had done natural science a favor of sorts. Until Galileo laid claim to having seen the movements described by Copernicus and Kepler with his own eyes (with the aid of a telescope), church officials in both of the great communions (Catholic and Protestant) were content to regard the work of astronomers as merely “hypothetical” and, therefore, as posing no threat to received orthodoxies. The consequence was that scientists could pursue their investigations in relative freedom, unhindered by the churches.

Kepler unintentionally returned the favor. He was not happy to have his work characterized as “hypothetical,” so he pointed to a rather different basis for a negotiated peace between the churches and natural science, a basis lying in the nature of revelation itself. A one-time member of the famous Tübingen Stift, Kepler was well trained in theology. He understood that the worry among theologians was that we make the Holy Spirit, the ultimate author of Holy Scripture, to be a liar if we say that the earth moves around the sun. Kepler solved the problem this way: “the Holy Scriptures already speak with men of ordinary things (about which it is not their intention to teach them) in a human way so that they may be understood by men; they use what is indubitable among them in order to communicate higher and divine things.”[9] The Holy Spirit did not intend to teach us how things really are with regard to the movements of bodies in space when he inspired Joshua to command the sun to stand still; he was accommodating revelation to the level of what could be comprehended at the time. Since it was not his intention to teach Joshua anything where natural science is concerned, the Holy Spirit made himself guilty of no falsehood.

Now the idea of “accommodation” is a rather old one, as Kepler was undoubtedly aware. Both Augustine and Calvin had made use of the notion in interpreting the six days of creation in Gen. 1—with strikingly different results![10] In fact, Calvin made it central to his understanding of divine revelation.[11] Kepler’s use of it was not intended, however, simply to resolve “difficulties” in biblical texts; it was intended to purchase the space needed for free scientific inquiry. But he unintentionally had also shown conservative exegetes how to avoid conflicts with the natural sciences once the results of specific inquiries had been rendered indisputable. One simply took the truth of science for granted and insisted that no passage of Scripture could possibly bear a meaning that conflicted with such truth. Given that the sun is the center of the solar system, the real problem posed by Josh. 10 has to do (now) with the movement of the earth, not the sun (as a literal reading might imply). Thus, the passage itself is “accommodated” to what is known from another source—which means that exegesis is controlled to a greater or lesser degree by science.[12] This is not yet modern theology, but it is a significant concession to the intellectual conditions that finally gave birth to modern theology.

The biblical-Aristotelian cosmology was finally laid to rest by Newton’s demonstration that phenomena throughout the universe can be explained by a single law, that is, gravity. In the century that followed the publication of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, no great step forward in theological engagement of the natural sciences took place. Theologians sought to find “gaps” in scientific explanation, places in which God might be thought necessary if a more complete explanation was to be had. But this was hardly an adequate engagement, and the “gaps” were steadily being reduced in number.

What finally moved things forward was Kant’s work in the field of philosophical epistemology. For Kant, there can be no knowledge in the strict sense without empirical data. It is the senses that provide the content of our knowledge; the human mind provides its forms. What then are we to make of Gen. 1, a passage that bears witness to things for which there was no observer, no one to receive sense data? That fact alone was sufficient to call into question the scientific value of this narrative for many. But if Gen. 1 was lacking in scientific value, it might still have theological value in a doctrine of creation—if seen in the right light. For churchly minded Christian theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher, to see Gen. 1 in the right light meant this: to interpret it with the help of a tool that was devised not in order to address this specific problem (which must surely seem an arbitrary proceeding) but in order to aid the theologian in thinking through the content of all Christian doctrines. Such a “material principle” (if use of later terminology may be permitted) must itself belong to that movement of mind and heart that Christians understand as the experience of redemption; it is not an a priori principle from which the contents of other doctrines are deduced, but rather is an a posteriori description of how all doctrines (including redemption) ought to be generated and organized. Schleiermacher himself found this principle in “the feeling of absolute dependence” as modified by the redemption accomplished in and by Jesus of Nazareth.[13]

We touch here upon something that is basic to at least one major strand of “modern” theology, namely, the use of a material norm as both a heuristic device and a critical principle. As heuristic device, this norm functioned to give the theologian access to the material treated in a particular doctrine that is disciplined and consistent with his/her approach to other doctrines. As critical principle, it functioned to bracket off speculation, to establish the limits of what properly belongs to dogmatics. Taken together, these two functions contributed to a “mediation” of traditional teaching under the conditions of modernity.

It is the step from “accommodation” to “mediation,” I want to suggest, that helps us to catch sight of the emergence of a fully “modern” theology. That it happened first in the area of creation theology is an accident of history. But once it happened, it became basic to the construction of Christian dogmatics. Even Karl Barth, who frequently protested against the use of a “material principle” in Christian theology, made use of a material norm in the sense I have just described—and in doing so, testified to the fact that he is rightly viewed as belonging (loosely at the very least) to the mediating tradition in Christian theology. In the first phase of his dogmatic activity, his critical norm was to be found in his concept of revelation. And so his guiding question in elaborating his doctrine of creation was, What must creation be if revelation is as I have described it? Expressed another way, Given that in revelation God both is and is not given to us objectively in a medium of revelation (let us say, the flesh of Jesus), that he is able to make himself objective without ceasing to be the divine Subject he is, what light does this shed on the question of God’s relation to the world in creating?[14] After his revision of his doctrine of election, Barth’s critical norm was to be found in a largely “historicized” Christology (which signals the emergence of the “christocentrism” with which he is frequently associated). But throughout his dogmatic activity, he did what Schleiermacher had done before him. He made use of a heuristic and critical (a posteriori) principle.

At the dawn of the modern period in theology, Schleiermacher was concerned that the day might come when the natural scientists would be in a position to provide a complete explanation not only of the movements of heavenly bodies but even of the origins of the physical universe. He writes,

I can only anticipate that we must learn to do without what many are still accustomed to regard as inseparably bound to the essence of Christianity. I am not referring to the six-day creation, but to the concept of creation itself, as it is usually understood, apart from any reference to the Mosaic chronology and despite all those rather precarious rationalizations that interpreters have devised. How long will the concept of creation hold out against the power of a world view constructed from undeniable scientific conclusions that no one can avoid?[15]

By means of his heuristic and critical norm, he found a way to limit a theology of creation so as to obviate a conflict with the exact sciences[16] but also to make a reasoned use of the creation story found in Gen. 1.

This is not the place for a comprehensive exposition of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of creation. It will suffice here to allow Schleiermacher to describe his approach in his own words and to briefly sketch its results. “The doctrine of creation is to be elucidated preeminently with a view to the exclusion of every alien element, lest from the way in which the question of Origin is answered elsewhere anything steal into our province which stands in contradiction to the pure expression of the feeling of absolute dependence.”[17] Since everything that exists must be absolutely dependent upon God, a Christian doctrine of creation must oppose “every representation of the origin of the world which excludes anything whatever from origination by God,” and it must oppose all conceptions of the origin of the world...