SCM Studyguide: Theology in the Contemporary World

SCM STUDYGUIDE TO THEOLOGY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Ben Pugh

© Ben Pugh 2017

Published in 2017 by SCM Press

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Scripture taken from the New King James Version (NKJV). Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 7 is a revised and expanded version of Part Four, Chapter One of my 2014, Atonement Theories: A Way Through the Maze, Eugene, OR: Cascade. Used by permission.

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978 0 334 05574 7

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Contents

Introduction

1. The Quests for the Historical Jesus

2. The Holy Spirit: Theologies of the Third Article and Third Article Theology

3. The Missional Church

4. Liberation Theology

5. Feminist Theology

6. Theology and Sexuality: LGBT Issues and Queer Approaches

7. Postmodern Faith

8. Nonviolent Atonement

Conclusion

Select Bibliography

To successive students who took ‘Theology in the Contemporary World’ as a core module on the BA Theology at Cliff College, a partner college of the University of Manchester. Your feedback knocked it into shape so well that it has now become a book from which others can benefit.

Introduction

This study guide seeks to answer the question: ‘What are the key conversations in theology today, and why are they happening?’ In trying to answer these questions I have focused on historical trajectories that, regardless of how recent or old their point of origin, seem today still to be trying to take us somewhere. The quests for the historical Jesus, for instance, began over 200 years ago but have not lost their impetus. I freely admit that identifying trajectories has been more of an art than a science. It has been partly about predicting likely trends, given the cultural and philosophical changes taking place all around us, and partly about keeping my ear to the ground. My own research has inevitably given me an awareness of the current state of theological research across a range of areas. Further, my membership of such affiliations as the rapidly growing Society for the Study of Theology, which can make a justifiable claim to represent university theology at least within Britain, has allowed me to take careful note of the kinds of topics that are regarded as the most urgent and hence become the themes of the conferences. I have also done a little statistical work just to help confirm my hunches. This has involved entering themes already suspected of being hot topics into ATLA Serials and noting the number of peer-reviewed articles appearing on given theological themes. I have also made use of the new statistical tool called Ngram Viewer, as well as simply recording the number of titles that Amazon throws up in response to keywords.

One very clear and striking fact that became immediately obvious was that theological writing in English today is ecclesiocentric, and has been for some time. There seems to have been a steady rise of interest in ecclesiology dating back at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century but most sharply increasing during the 1950s and 1960s. The Church, what it is in today’s world and what it is supposed to be achieving, is of prime concern among all Christian thinkers today. It has become the heart and centre of theology in the contemporary world. However, in recent decades, issues to do with sexuality have started to look as though they will overtake ecclesiological issues as the subject theologians are most likely to write about at peer-review level.

One thing statistical volume is not likely to pick up on is the most recent trends. Nonviolent atonement theory, for instance, is less than 20 years old. It is brand new theology: theology in the making. I have covered it here because it is highly indicative of certain trends and trajectories that we would be foolish to ignore. It also happens to be a subject that overflows into Christology, Salvation and the Doctrine of God, which have also continued to be subjects attracting a lot of expert attention.

My decision to include the quests for the historical Jesus, likewise, cannot be defended solely from statistics but is a highly symbolic debate, capturing the way trends in philosophy and culture have been responded to by theologians and the Church – and it is the oldest continuous debate in theological history. Lastly, despite the fact that Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement are not news any more, there is clearly still a very high level of interest in the Holy Spirit both at an academic and a practitioner level.

Conversely, while no one would deny that the Trinity and eschatology were of enormous interest to twentieth-century theology, I would contend that they are a much diminished area of research today. This is largely because of the sheer success of the twentieth-century endeavours to reinstate and clarify in new ways the doctrine of the Trinity and the kingdom of God. Such a great deal of consensus was reached that the fruits of those debates have now been fully integrated into wider theological and missiological discourse. The missiological usage of Trinitarian and kingdom language is perhaps an especially good indicator that systematic theologians have been doing their job well, so that missiologists have been able to take their ideas and create such concepts as the missio Dei.

So I eventually settled for, in chronological order: Historical Jesus, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, Liberation Theology, Feminism, LGBT and Queer Approaches, Postmodern Faith and Nonviolent Atonement: eight chapters in all. These subjects are all currently attracting a sustained or increasing level of interest.

You will also notice that I’m close to making a number of category mistakes here. Pneumatology and ecclesiology are time-honoured doctrines within the discipline of systematic theology. Historical Jesus research is properly a topic of biblical studies, while liberation theology and feminist theology aren’t so much topics as traditions, albeit quite recent traditions: they are a lens through which to look at the various topics of theology, rather than a topic within it. Nonviolent atonement, on the other hand, is precisely that: it is a new piece of subject matter within systematic theology; and sexuality is a trending piece of subject matter within all branches of theology. My hope is that this jumbled-up mixture of disciplines, traditions and subjects will be helpful. The guiding principle has been ‘contemporary’. This is a study guide that will equip you to deal with contemporary issues within a considerable range of areas likely to be covered in an undergraduate degree in theology. It sheds contemporary light on the latest and most important goings-on within your field.

1. The Quests for the Historical Jesus

1 Introduction

The relationship of Jesus Christ to history became an issue almost from the dawn of modernity. It was during the early modern period that Europe saw the beginnings of what we would later look back on as the collapse of Christendom: the slow decay of a religious and uneasy peace held in place by the pope. Christendom was a Europe-wide project that had, for over a millennium, successfully filled the power vacuum created by the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a kind of a proto-EU but based on religion instead of economics. The steady collapse of it was precipitated by the Reformation, which was like Brexit but with Germany splitting away first: a Gerparture, a Gergone. This resulted in the subsequent splitting off of countless Protestant groups from each other, as well as from the Catholics. This helped to produce a crisis over how we are to be certain of anyone’s definition of reality. Just how are we to be sure that anyone is right any more? Very soon the free thinkers of Europe were on a quest for more certain, epistemological¹ foundations. They were seeking a view of life that did not depend on revelation or religious authority at all, but on natural philosophy: what we would later call science.

A highly influential religious response to the new mood was deism, as espoused by John Locke, Matthew Tindal and Thomas Chubb. Deism was born out of a desire to articulate what faith in God might look like devoid of any particular religious commitment and imbued with the emerging verities of the scientific age. It was an easy-going, all-embracing kind of monotheism. Its God was what is sometimes referred to as the Watchmaker: he winds up the universe and leaves it ticking all by itself, not intervening at all unless he absolutely must. He is the Absentee Landlord. Emerging from deism came the beginnings of the historical-critical interpretation of the Bible. This was a way of scientifically interpreting the Bible free from any prior religious commitments, and the use of this method to explain away the supernatural elements in the Gospel narratives. This new style of interpretation was practised with the implicit purpose of undermining the specifically Christian way of being religious in favour of the deistic, non-specific kind that was conformable with the rational temper of educated Europeans. The First Quest for the historical Jesus was born.

This First Quest, then, was actually quite theologically loaded. It was a quest that set out to sever the historical links that made present-day faith in Christ plausible. It was informed by the growing assumption that nature operates according to laws that exclude the possibility of miracle and that history is homogenous: nothing can happen that doesn’t happen now. However, this quest ran into difficulties owing to the fact that, once you have emptied the Jesus of the Gospels of all theological and supernatural content, you tend to end up with someone who happens to look remarkably like the kinds of scholars who were interested in doing this to him: a rationalistic moral teacher. Thankfully, by the mid twentieth century a new quest was underway. This too was theologically loaded but in an apparently more positive way. It was driven by the desire to avoid docetism: belief in a Christ who has been strangely severed from his real earthly historical life in the flesh. Lingering scepticism about our ability to reconstruct with accuracy the real historical Jesus made the results of this new quest disappointingly small. The present quest, which is called the Third Quest, is the one that lays the most defensible claim to theological disinterestedness, yet this is also the quest that has been giving us a filled-out – rather than slimmed-down – picture of Jesus. At its best, the Third Quest is interested in what we may include by way of a context for the life of Jesus rather than constrained by what a given method compels us to exclude. There is also, thankfully, much more willingness among scholars today to disclose their particular confessional positions and motive for research. Nowadays, if historical Jesus researchers have an agenda that is likely to be unhelpful to faith, they often tell us about it rather than pretending to have a view from nowhere.

So then, we have moved from loading the quest with our cultural baggage to loading it with his,² and have passed many interesting places along the way. We will shortly take a closer look.

Reflection

In your church tradition, what do you think is the kind of cultural baggage that tends to get loaded on to the historical Jesus?

2 The First Quest and the ‘No Quest’ for the Historical Jesus

Here we take our cue from Albert Schweitzer and his famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus of 1906. This was a critique of a quest that had been going on within nineteenth-century liberalism, and that had begun in the eighteenth century. It consisted of trying to look past the Christ of religious faith to the original historical figure of Jesus, on the assumption that faith had distorted our understanding of the original Jesus.

The Beginnings of the First Quest

If a beginning point were to be identified it would be 1774–78,³ when some highly controversial fragments of Hermann Reimarus’ (1694–1768) work were published bit by bit,⁴ some years after his death, courtesy of his friend and playwright Gotthold Lessing. Lessing is himself famous for his assertion that Christian faith cannot be based on historically uncertain miracles, stating: ‘That, then, is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap.’⁵ Many of the comments made in the Reimarus fragments have set the agenda of Jesus research down to the present day, especially with the return now of the Jewish emphasis favoured so much by Reimarus. And this desire to retrieve the original Jesus from the doctrine of the apostles was the main factor that gave rise to an emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus, Christianity being felt by Reimarus to have severed itself from its parent religion to become an entirely new thing created by the apostles.

Among his pithiest comments are these:

Jesus left us nothing in writing; everything we know of his teaching and deeds is contained in the writings of his disciples … I find great cause to separate completely what the apostles say in their own writings from that which Jesus himself actually said and taught … he was born a Jew and intended to remain one … there is no other way for us to find out what Jesus’ intention was concerning the kingdom of heaven than to concern ourselves with the usual meaning of this phrase among the Jews of the time.⁶

On the basis of this last assertion, Reimarus gave a portrayal of Jesus that was of someone trying to be exactly the kind of political Messiah the Jews were looking for. When he failed, his disciples concocted a resurrection story in order to prolong his glory and bask in a little of it themselves. The predictions of a resurrection were apparently inserted into the mouth of Jesus by later tradition, since it seems so surprising that every one of the disciples was completely taken aback by the resurrection and seemed completely unaware of any predicted resurrection. Christianity, it seemed, was founded on ‘apostolic fraud rather than divine revelation’.⁷

The three main ways the Reimarus Fragments set the tone for the future quests for the historical Jesus are summarized by Beilby and Eddy as follows:

The Jesus of history and the Christ of the Gospels are clearly differentiated.

The relationship between the Jesus of history and present-day Christian faith was queried.

Jesus was placed within first-century Jewish apocalyptic expectations.⁸

Ever since Reimarus, a preoccupation with these three lines of inquiry has coloured much historical Jesus research, determining the questions to be answered before research even begins. We could even say that questions around New Testament faith versus history, present-day faith versus history, and the apocalyptic-sounding prediction in Mark 9.1 (that there would be some standing there who would not face death till they see the kingdom come), have become fetishes within Jesus research that have pulled the efforts of the greatest minds in the direction of the least resolvable and, it could be said, least useful questions.

The ‘Life of Jesus’ Movement and the Mythological Turn

Inspired by Reimarus came the ‘Life of Jesus’ movement. This aspect of the First Quest consisted of the proliferation of historical biographies, some of which were fictitious,⁹ all bearing the name ‘The Life of Christ’ or similar. They were mostly based on the Gospel of Mark as this was understood to be the oldest and therefore most historically reliable source, on which the other Synoptic Gospels were based. These Lives of Jesus often shared the hope for ‘An emancipation from the traditional church picture of Jesus’.¹⁰ Those who wrote them were greatly interested in the inner life of Jesus and could discuss his religious feelings with great confidence, as well as waxing very sentimental about the sorrowful thoughts that Jesus supposedly had in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he apparently thinks back with regret about all the women he could have loved.¹¹ A slightly new twist came with David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) and his The Life of Jesus Critically Examined of 1835. It was one of the most controversial studies of Jesus ever written. However, Strauss’ strategy was, on the face of it, somewhat less offensive than Reimarus’. While Reimarus did not shrink from impugning the disciples with intent to deceive, Strauss made it clear that there were no such intentions. Indeed, the whole canonical Gospel account as we now have it should be accepted in its entirety but with one important proviso: we are to see it all as a myth. In using this word he did not mean ‘lies’ or ‘untruthful’ but simply not factual. Strauss was writing during the Romantic period, which meant that while he seemed to retain much of the anti-supernatural rationalism of his Enlightenment forebears, he had imbibed an absorbing interest in mythology. This fascination with all things mythological was, at that time, a commonplace in the Germany of the Cornucopia and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. There was a significant interest in collecting ancient folk stories, with all their fantastical, non-rational content.

In the realm of biblical study, the Old Testament had already been studied as a myth: as a document filled with fantastical oral legends. Strauss relates how Walter Bauer had already begun to see traces of legend in the infancy narratives of Christ. Strauss agreed that, after Jesus’ death, the memory of his life would have been glorified by the ‘many and wondrous amplifications’ of ‘a wonder-loving people’.¹² Sometimes, on this reckoning, legendary elements were added to historical events, such as the voice at Christ’s baptism, and sometimes entire events were fictitious, such as the Transfiguration. This approach did not go away. In fact it eventually developed into the twentieth-century notion of Form Criticism, the attempt to uncover the original, oral form of a unit of the Jesus tradition. This would eventually be developed by Rudolf Bultmann as part of his ‘demythologizing’ agenda. According to Bultmann, the highly legendary form that a Gospel story now has is indicative not of the original event but of what the Gospel writer was trying to say, the message he was trying to bring. Bultmann, as we shall see, went as far as to say that the original historical event or oral tradition behind a Gospel story or saying can no longer be recovered and that it is not necessary to do so. Only the message of the Gospel writer can be recovered, not what lay behind it originally, and that message is steeped in a mythological world view that knows nothing of our modern ways of sharply differentiating between fact and fiction.

Besides Bultmann’s demythologizing, another response to Strauss came in the form of Christ-Myth theory, which actually had originally been pioneered by Bauer. This theory applies Strauss’ model so ruthlessly as to leave nothing that is not myth, and therefore no historical figure of Jesus at all. This approach was highly influential on Karl Marx and was later advanced by Arthur Drews. It is a position held today by Robert M. Price¹³ but not many others. There are few who would go so far as to reject the very existence of the Jesus of history. Before we leave the First Quest and its legacy it is worth noting that it was not an entirely liberal exercise. There were also some conservative Lives of Jesus that repay a close reading today and that, sadly, tend not to have attracted anything like the same attention as the liberal Lives. They are notable for their combination of meticulous scholarly care, some remarkable aesthetic scene-setting based on actual visits to the Holy Land, and unstinting devotional warmth. Understandably enough, they do often show all the sentimental verbosity that is so characteristic of their era, but outstanding examples in English are Frederic Farrar’s The Life of Christ, which came from the pen of Queen Victoria’s spiritual adviser, and Alfred Edersheim’s classic work, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah.

By the time of Martin Kähler’s work, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ of 1892, the First Quest had been apparently very successful at teasing out a historical Jesus who was a non-miracle-working moral teacher, who made no theological claims about himself and whose only mistake was that unfortunate occasion when he predicted the imminent end of the world. The main result of the First Quest was that we now had a ‘reasonable, manageable Jesus’.¹⁴ All this was about to change.

The Foundering of the First Quest

The assured