Dogmatics after Babel

Beyond the Theologies of Word and Culture

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780664261658
• eBook ISBN: 9781611648836
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Rubén Rosario Rodríguez addresses the long-standing division between Christian theologies that take revelation as their starting point and focus and those that take human culture as theirs. After introducing these two theological streams that originate with Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, respectively, Rosario asserts that they both seek to respond to the Enlightenment's critique and rejection of Christianity. In so doing, they have bought into Enlightenment understandings of human reality and the transcendent.

Rosario argues that in order to get beyond the impasse between theologies of the Word and culture, we need a different starting point. He discovers that starting point in two sources: (1) through the work of liberation and contextual theologians on the role of the Holy Spirit, and (2) through a comparative analysis of the teachings on the hiddenness of God from the three "Abrahamic†religions â€"Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Rosario offers a strong argument for why this third theological starting point represents not just a marginal or niche position but a genuine alternative to the two traditional theological streams. His work will shift readers' understanding of the options in theological discourse beyond the false alternatives of theologies of the Word and culture.

1

Contextualizing the Conversation

“The Bible is a document both of the divine self-manifestation and of the way in which human beings have received it.”

–Paul Tillich¹

1.1 THE ENLIGHTENMENT’S BREAK WITH THE PAST

The breakdown of ecclesial and biblical authority leading to the current cacophony of competing theological voices occurred gradually over time as, brick by brick, Western Christianity built and ascended its very own Tower of Babel. The dissonance and diversity characterizing twenty-first-century academic theology traces its origins to an earlier age. Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation contributed to the erosion of the centuries-long dominance of premodern Biblical hermeneutics in Western thought, once embodied by St. Augustine’s seminal De doctrina christiana, “a mainstay of the theological curriculum for most of the thousand years after Augustine’s death,”² by fracturing the unity of Scripture and tradition through which the Magisterium of the church had long maintained “one right reading.”³ In light of the Protestant-Catholic polemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scripture and tradition became rival sources of knowledge of God, each vying for normative authority in cross-confessional theological battles. Yet, within Western theology, it was the rise of Enlightenment rationalism that most utterly and completely undermined biblical authority. During the Enlightenment ecclesial and biblical authority became targets of derision as new philosophical perspectives challenged traditional beliefs and sought to ground all knowledge—including knowledge of God—on an objectively verifiable rational foundation. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “wars of religion” that followed the Protestant Reformation flung Europe into a state of seemingly unending war, during which nearly a third of Germany’s population was killed.⁴ Though the political realities motivating these wars were varied and complex, it became commonplace to blame differences of religion for Europe’s troubles, despite the fact that Protestants and Catholics often fought on the same side, or that at one point Francis I of France even allied himself with the Ottoman Empire.⁵

Regardless, doctrinal disputes between Protestants and Catholics were blamed for the bloodletting that left Europe politically and religiously divided, with Germany partitioned into Roman Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran regions, England undergoing civil war, and Catholic France fighting the Hapsburg dynasty over control of the Holy Roman Empire (sometimes by allying itself with Protestants). In this setting, where matters of doctrine exacerbated political divides that became life-threatening international conflicts, people began to question the previously unchallenged teachings of revealed religion. French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a methodological skepticism that examined all beliefs and accepted as true only those that could be demonstrated with the same clear and certain knowledge attained by a mathematical proof. Though a devout Catholic, who included a critique of atheism in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes contributed to the erosion of biblical and ecclesial authority by subjecting all previously held beliefs to rational scrutiny. This method gave impetus to a growing cultural attitude that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment was an era of unmatched human progress, as evidenced by great scientific and technological advances (including Descartes’s own contributions to lens making and the science of optics),⁶ in which reason eclipsed religion as the basis for organizing human societies.

Inevitably, this enshrinement of reason over tradition had an impact on the discipline of theology, especially in nineteenth-century Germany, where a battle was fought over the role historical truths played in the process of coming to religious belief, further undermining the reliability of theological claims. In fact, the cultural tensions that gave rise to the neo-orthodox rejection of nineteenth century liberalism continue to dominate academic theology in the West well over one hundred years later. The leading figure of the German Enlightenment, philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), defined this age of reason as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. . . . ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”⁷ Within Kant’s epistemological critique, human rationality was categorized into pure, practical, and aesthetic reason, with religious belief lacking the self-evident clarity displayed by the necessary truths of mathematical logic therefore consigned to the realm of practical reason alongside political philosophy and ethics. As the Bible began to be read with critical acumen, with scholars no longer limited by the church’s one authoritative interpretation, doubt was cast upon those parts of the biblical narrative that seemed to contradict the discoveries of modern science (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton), such as the creation story in the opening chapters of Genesis. Furthermore, literary and historical analysis of the biblical texts raised questions of authorship (could Moses have written the first five books of the Hebrew Bible?), and eventually reduced the canon of Scriptures to a collection of ancient religious texts lacking any unique claim to divine authorship. In this context, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) defended Christianity against the assault of scientific reason and historical criticism by grounding the truths of theology within the believer’s subjective experience of divine reality:

Wherefore it is a life in the infinite nature of the Whole, in the One and in the All, in God, having and possessing all things in God, and God in all. Yet religion is not knowledge and science, either of the world or of God. Without being knowledge, it recognizes knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.⁸

This approach, itself a variant of the Kantian “turn to the subject” that placed limits on what can be known by appeals to reason alone, sidesteps the question of historical veracity by locating knowledge of God in the psychological awakening of a God-consciousness, turning Jesus into an exemplar of God-directed self-awareness whose life is the source of doctrine. However, this source can be “entirely traced back to inner experience and simply describes and clarifies this experience.”⁹ Accordingly, human religiousness replaces God as theology’s proper object of study, with doctrines becoming narratives about communally shared “religious” experiences rather than propositional claims about the nature of God, “because such teachings are simply an expression of inner experiences, the result being that one who has these experiences automatically belongs to that sphere, but one who does not have these experiences does not even enter into that sphere at all.”¹⁰ In other words, Schleiermacher’s treatment of Christian doctrine says very little about God while speaking volumes about the human experience of God. His impact on both the theologies of culture and the theologies of the Word cannot be overstated, and the fact that both approaches remain captive to Enlightenment modes of thought is in great part the result of his methodological “turn to the subject” in defending faith against its “cultured despisers.”

1.2 KIERKEGAARD’S DEFENSE OF SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY

Schleiermacher was not the only nineteenth-century Christian thinker to question the primacy of historically verifiable truths as a criterion for making doctrinal claims. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), in reaction to Hegelian views about historical truths serving as contingent expressions of Infinite Spirit, reduced the Christian gospel to its bare essence:

Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these words, “We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died”—this is more than enough. The contemporary generation would have done what is needful, for this little announcement, this world-historical nota bene, is enough to become an occasion for someone who comes later, and the most prolix report can never in all eternity become more for a person who comes later.¹¹

Kierkegaard’s point is that contemporaneity to the events of the Bible is no guarantee of faith, so whether one is an eyewitness to the miracles attributed to Jesus or one is two thousand years removed from those events, historical truths cannot provide the necessary foundation for belief. At most, historical truths can provide evidence in support of faith, establishing the reasonableness of certain beliefs, but Cartesian absolute certainty remains an unattainable standard for evaluating theological claims. Accordingly, the quality of available historical evidence is not the ultimate deciding factor in coming to faith; rather, the work of God’s Spirit in transforming the believer is the font of faith and the very means by which the Bible is accepted as a reliable source of knowledge of God by believers.

Still, Kierkegaard’s hyperbole notwithstanding, the generation of believers contemporary with Jesus left us much more than a mere fragment describing God’s salvific work in Jesus of Nazareth. Consequently, historical investigation remains a vital component of the modern subject’s coming to faith, as evidenced by the continuing interest in the Jesus of history. Despite its commitment to a persistently skeptical historical method, the current (or “third”) quest for the historical Jesus has succeeded in correcting some of the extremes of nineteenth century German historical criticism. For example, biblical scholars are now more willing to read canonical texts as historical sources, to consider the Pauline Epistles important source material for interpreting the Synoptic Gospels, and to apply the same level of hermeneutical suspicion toward non-Christian sources (Josephus, Tacitus, Celsus, Marcus Aurelius, etc.) previously reserved only for Christian canonical sources in their reconstructions of early Christian history.¹² This methodological openness to previously “suspect” canonical sources is attributable to the interdisciplinary character of the most recent quest for the historical Jesus: “It is no longer merely New Testament scholars and historians who are wading into the rushing waters of the quest, but an entire cadre of interdisciplinary explorers, each bringing their own distinctive disciplinary methods, tools and insights to the historical study of Jesus and the Gospels.”¹³ The conversation is no longer limited to historians, philologists, and biblical scholars but now includes theologians who interpret source texts as explicitly confessional narratives in their original historical context while also locating the contemporary hermeneutical task within living faith traditions that have arguably preserved a history of int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.   Contextualizing The Conversation
• 2.   Two Sides of the Same Coin
• 3.   Postmodern Babylon
• 4.   Dogmatic Claims in Pluralistic Context
• 5.   Pneumatology—Revelation as Sacramental Encounter
• Conclusion: From Babel to Pentecost
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects and Authors