The precariousness of Christian truth

I am beginning to realize that my initial attraction to the thought of Rudolf Bultmann was almost exclusively spurred on by my radical skepticism about the historical reliability of the Bible. Bultmann’s insistence on the existential contemporaneity of Christ made real in the proclamation of the gospel is, I think, a tempting way out of dealing with the historical precariousness of the gospel accounts.

No matter how attractive it is to turn Christianity into a system of belief independent of historical events, I have come to believe that this is a profoundly problematic route to go in. Indeed it is far safer to seek a way to “ground” Christian truth independently of contingent and empirical propositions. However, the truth of the Christian faith is unavoidably tied up with the historical actuality of certain contingent, empirical events. And so, it makes perfect sense why conservative biblical scholars exist and why people like Bart Ehrman scare so many Christians. Frankly, I think most of conservative biblical scholarship is both remarkably fearful and usually rather delusional. But one can at least understand that what motivates these scholars, in part, is the conviction that history actually matters and has some bearing on the truth of the Christian faith. On this point, I think they are quite right. It is much safer for us to maintain the image of an eternal changeless God and avoid the reality that the truth of Christian convictions is dependent on certain historical events that, as Donald MacKinnon once put it, “could have been otherwise.”

The Character of God’s Freedom: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Barth

In his second dissertation Act and Being Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenges Barth’s concept that God’s being is in God’s act. Bonhoeffer identifies an impasse in theology between those who interpret revelation as “act” and those who interpret revelation as “being.” In Bonhoeffer’s view, on the “act” side stands Barth who appropriates the transcendental thesis so that God is understood as infinitely different and transcendent of any object. God is in his act, yet remains transcendent of any and every effort to grasp him in reflection. On the “being” side Bonhoeffer identifies strands of Roman Catholic thought (revelation is in the church as doctrine and institution) and Protestant orthodoxy (particularly, those who hold to verbal inspiration of the Bible). The “being”-oriented camp, or the ontological-idealists, represent a position that is basically antithetical to the transcendental or “act”-oriented position.

Bonhoeffer rightly argues that Barth’s primary concern is maintaining the freedom of God. Neither God nor revelation can be extracted from an account of existence or being as such; rather, revelation is radically contingent on God’s absolute freedom to reveal God’s self. Bonhoeffer puts Barth’s position this way: “Revelation is an event that has its basis in the freedom of God, positively as the self-giving or, negatively, as the self-withholding of God” (82). In Barth’s theology, God remains utterly free and unconditioned, which is to say that God is not at the disposal of humanity. As Bonhoeffer notes, for Barth “revelation is interpreted purely in terms of act. It is an event that happens to someone who listens, free to suspend the relation at any moment” (82). God’s Word “is” not independent of the revelation event, which is something that happens to human beings in discontinuous instances. Because God’s being is only in “act,” God’s being is only “in” human beings as “act.” As a result, all reflection on God is always secondary to this act and therefore “takes place at a distance” (84). Bonhoeffer argues that even though Barth employs temporal language (e.g., instant, now, before, after) his conception of act should not be understood as temporal, but “supratemporal.” Yet, Barth does want his concept of act to be historical, for God’s self-revelation “happens” in history, but every act remains free and discontinuous. Bonhoeffer, however, thinks this approach ultimately fails on Barth’s own terms, because for Barth “no historical moment is capax infiniti,” that is, the finite is not capable of bearing the infinite. Barth holds to this, according to Bonhoeffer, because he is committed to the notion that human activity, whether it be faith or obedience, is “at best reference to God’s activity and in its historicity can never be faith and obedience itself” (84).

In a way, Bonhoeffer’s entire book can be seen as response to Barth’s theological actualism. Bonhoeffer’s fundamental concern is that if we commit ourselves to understanding revelation purely as act we will drive a wedge between God and humanity. Although Barth’s actualism is a powerful critique of idealism and the human attempt to “grasp” God, it has the obverse effect of breaking the continuity of human being.

I will explore Bonhoeffer’s critique and counterproposal more fully in another post, but for now I should note that Bonhoeffer’s counterproposal is grounded in his critique of Barth’s account of God’s freedom. For Bonhoeffer, the problem with Barth’s understanding of God’s freedom is that God remains eternally within God’s self always as the one who acts. However, the content of revelation is that God gives his Word–God establishes a covenant in which “God is bound by God’s own action” (90). The freedom of God is revealed not in his remaining absolutely free from humanity, but in his freedom to choose to be “bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings” (90). Bonhoeffer’s point then is that “God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God’s freedom” (91).

Contingency and Truth: on the universality of the singular Jesus

The most substantial challenge for theology posed by the Enlightenment is perhaps best summed up in Gotthold Lessing’s (1729-1781) famous dictum, “the accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” What Lessing and the rest of the Enlightenment project challenges is the specifically Christian confession that universal truth is to be found nowhere else than in the particular, historically contingent, person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Enlightenment project insists on the need for “historical consciousness”—that is, the knowledge that all events and perspectives are historically contingent, unrepeatable, and rooted in particular historical contexts. The Enlightenment insight of “historical consciousness” is, however, taken a step farther in Lessing. For Lessing and other thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition, if every event is necessarily contingent, then the “truth” of a particular event is barred from being universally valid, much less efficacious for the salvation of humanity. Thus, historical events, by their very contingency, are always doomed to relativity against universality.

The Christian claim, however, is that the “truth” of history, indeed, the truth of the world, is to be found in a historically contingent event, or sequence of events, God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The Christian confession that Christ is the “Lord of history” means that every historical event must be seen in light of him and with reference to him. Thus, one thing is certain: a proper Christian response to this Enlightenment challenge should never be a denial of the contingency of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ for the sake of some universally “reasonable” discourse.

Jesus and the Trinity

The appearance of Jesus requires that a specifically Christian construal of God be Trinitarian. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the triune persons are revealed. Further, the nature and character of the eternal relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit is actualized in the concrete (i.e. historical) ‘appearance,’ that is to say, the incarnation of Jesus in history. At the same time, we must also emphasize that the person and work of Jesus stands in essential continuity with God’s work with and in Israel. Hence, as the New Testament writers tirelessly insist, Jesus is the fulfillment of the scriptures, the hopes, and dreams of Israel.

A clarification is, perhaps, in order: the significance of the historical appearance of Jesus for the Christian construal of God as triune, importantly, resists all abstraction. The incarnation radically calls into question all efforts to reach for a God behind God’s self-revelation in Jesus, for the historical relationship between Jesus and the Father is nothing other than the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father. Likewise, the historical outpouring of the Spirit in the story of Jesus is the eternal outpouring of the Spirit between the Father and the Son. In the words of Hebert McCabe, “the story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).  Hence, as Robert Jenson puts it, “‘God’ is whoever raised Jesus from the dead.” The reason why this story appears to us as fundamentally gruesome—a story about rejection, murder, and even state torture—is precisely because this is God’s life “projected on, lived out on, our rubbish tip” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).

Huebnerian Explorations on “reliable criterion” and God-talk

I was asked to write a one page response to the question “What constitutes the most reliable criterion for evaluating the adequacy of our use of the symbol, God?”

Initially I thought I’d write something about Israel, Jesus, the church, etc., but I couldn’t help but be struck by the language of “the most reliable criterion” in relation to talk about God. What I ended up writing obviously reflects what I’ve been reading, particularly the work of Chris K. Huebner and Rowan Williams, in some pretty fundamental ways. I’m really not sure if I completed the assignment at all, and I do think that there is a lot more to be said as a response to this question, but I was limited to one page.

To begin to speak of any “reliable criterion” by which to evaluate the adequacy of Christian speech about God already presupposes that Christian “knowledge” about God is something that can be secured or possessed. This admittedly enigmatic and provocative statement is not an attempt to dodge the initial question posed nor is it just another way of saying that all speech about God is always and entirely subjective and therefore utterly relative to “context.” Although there is a great deal of truth to the latter suggestion, it is not the point I wish to dwell on here. Instead, I want to suggest that questions about the adequacy of Christian speech about God, which is to say the truthfulness of a Christian account of God does not finally rest or depend on any “reliable criterion” that can be formally or rationally secured. Christian truth confronts its hearers as a gratuitous gift—and as such it is not some object over which we can claim ownership. Nor does this gift give us access to what Rowan Williams calls a “total perspective.” The point of these remarks is to remind us that all questions of knowledge and particularly questions of how we know and speak of God are always and already bound up with violence and peace.

Christian speech about God, if it is to be truthful and peaceable, is paradoxically both precarious and certain: it is precarious in that it does not rest on “reliable criteria” but on a gift that is received with open hands, and it is certain in that it receives its very being, as gift, from God. The character of this certainty is perhaps best exemplified by the Christian martyr, for the martyr non-possessively witnesses to the certainty of God’s truth. Admittedly, perhaps we have avoided the question altogether—but are we not always working with some conception of what constitutes right speech about God?