After Barth, the question of the relation of Christianity to modern culture remained as vexing as ever, though Christian thinkers tended to be more forceful in claiming Christian-as opposed to modernist universal -- justifications for religion and Christianity. At one end of the Protestant spectrum of post-Barthian theology, theologians sought to correlate the questions that arise from human experience with the Christian revelation. In its concern with human experience in general, “correlational theology” offered a revision of the liberal apologetics of the 19th century by relating revelation to modernity without assuming their convergence. On the other end of the spectrum, evangelical theologians of the middle of the 2Oth century continued to stress a propositional view of revelation as offering “fixed truths” and “moral absolutes” for all times. But by the end of the century, some evangelicals were coming to view revelation more along Barthian lines.
Outline
I. Barth’s theology set the agenda for much of the 20th century: It became impossible to accept without reservation either Schleiermacher’s starting point in experience or the theologically liberal connection between Christianity and culture.
A. But criticisms of his project did emerge. The most important criticism was that Barth does not show enough appreciation for modem culture’s decisive shaping of the way in which Christians understand the word of God.
B. In this lecture, we’ll explore two very different Protestant efforts to address these issues-the work of Paul Tillich and that of the fundamentalist theologian Carl Henry.
II. Criticisms of Barth were most directly addressed in theologies of “correlation,” which focused on the relationship between human concerns and questions and
Christian answers to them.
A. Paul Tillich argued that Barth failed to appreciate fully the inherent links between the human and the divine.
B. Tillich thought that meaninglessness was the most important way in which the threat of non-being was experienced in the modern period.
III. A second important strand of 20th-century Protestant thought was evangelical theology.
A Before the very public revival of evangelical Christianity and the “religious right” in the 1970s, evangelical theology saw an intellectual revival marked by the publication of Carl Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
1. Henry affirmed the infallibity of the Bible, the uniqueness of Christ’s redeeming work on the Cross, and the idea that God’s grace is received through a personal act of conversion in which one is “born again."
2 But Henry was critical of the intolerant separatist attitude of fundamentalism and argued that It had sight of evangelical responsibility for reforming and humanizing society.
B. Henry focused hrs theology on an objectivist understanding of God’s revelation, on “fixed truths," "moral absolutes,“ "a sure and final hope.”
1. Like Barth, then, he has an objectist view of revelation, but unlike Barth, he defends this idea philosophically.
2. All forms of human thought, he argues, must begin with presuppositions that cannot be Proven but can be rationally defended.
3. His presupposition is that revelation is the source of all ultimate truth and that the Bible is the depository of this truth. The Bible consists not primarily of stories and metaphorical language but of direct, intelligible propositions.
Suggested Reading:
Ford, The Modern Theologians.
Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
Tillich, Systematic Theology.
Questions to Consider:
1. What does Paul Tillich mean by "correlation"?
2 How does Carl Henry see the convergence of reason and revelation?
Lecture Twenty-Five -- Transcript
Protestant Theology after Barth
It’s safe to say that for much of the 20th century and perhaps beyond, the theological agenda-at least for Protestant thinkers-was set by the work of Karl Barth. After Barth, it became impossible to accept without reservation either Schleiermacher’s starting point in experience and consciousness or the comfortable 19th-century liberal assumptions about Christianity and culture.
Barth challenged religious thinkers to take seriously the relativity, even the idolatry, of all human experiences and projects by emphasizing the transcendence or otheness of God. This transcendence acts as a kind of critical principle with respect to human projects and human culture.
Yet, even though in his later work, Barth emphasized more strongly that this transcendent God who condemns human religiosity is also a God of grace and salvation, a God that says “Yes” to humanity through Christ-theologians after Barth argued that his view of revelation puts too strong an emphasis on God’s action, and so could not adequately address the human experience of, and response to, revelation. So, the question was: Are human beings totally passive in receiving God’s revelation? Or is there some kind of active religious reception of revelation on the part of humans?
For those who answered “Yes” to this second question, Barth’s revelation was too objective-it focused too much on God’s action and excluded any real consideration of how we receive revelation -- and so, despite Barth’s immense influence, the question of the relation of Christianity to modern culture remained as vexed as ever. That is, if theologians are going to continue to take seriously the religious reception of the divine initiative, then we have to consider how such reception is always shaped or mediated by the categories and the questions that human beings bring to their engagement with the divine.
In this lecture, I want to explore two very different Protestant efforts to address these issues. First, l’ll focus on the work of Paul Tillich -- and in doing so, I want to explore what has been called “correlational theology,” a theology that tries to overcome the objectivity of Barth’s revelation by focusing on the relationship or correlating human experience concerns and questions on the one hand, and Christian revelation on the other. Second, I’ll discuss the Fundamentalist theologian Carl Henry, who -- in sharp contrast to Tillch -- places even more emphasis than Barth on the objectivity of divine revelation.
Simply put, theologies of correlation try to strike balance between what we’ve been calling “confessional” and “apologetic” approaches to theology. They try to correlate or define the relationship between, as I've said, human questions and divine answers. Such a theology is confessional 1n the sense that it starts with faith in God as the answer to the human perdicament but it’s apologetic in the sense that it affirms the necessity of explaining how this answer makes sense in terms of the culture in which the answer is proclaimed. So, this apologetic aspect of theology requires the theologian to carefully analyze the human pole_of this equation, using the resources of philosophy and the social sciences to show how-in a given historical and cultural context-human beings are asking questions that make a space or open them to God’s revelation. For correlational theologians, revelation can only make sense to people if they’re already asking questions that revelation answers.
Here, I’ll focus on arguably the most important correlational theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich. In his early career, Tillich followed Barth and was convinced that Barth’s emphasis on divine transcendence provided a crucial corrective to the liberal theology of the 19th century. Like Barth, Tillich’s theological and political activities got him into trouble in the Germany of the early 1990s. He was dismissed from his academic post in 1933 and emigrated to the United States, where he worked for the rest of his life -- teaching first at Union Theological Seminary, then at Harvard University, and then the University of Chicago. He wrote most of his major books in English, and a number of them -- such as The Courage to Be --reached a non-academic and secular audience.
Where Barth saw all human “religiosity” as inevitably idolatrous, Tillich saw religion in a more positive light. He saw it as the primary Way 111 which human beings cultivated, practiced, and reflected on the predicament of their existence. Tillich was also always more philosophically oriented than Barth and was critical of what he perceived as Barth’s failure to appreciate fully enough how philosophical and theological discourse were manifestations of the natural human propensity to look beyond itself for answers to this predicament of existence.
So, Tillich claimed, in talking about correlational theology, that: “The substance of these answers -- the revelatory experience -- is independent of the questions, the questions human beings were asking at any given context. But the form of the theological answer is not independent of the form of the existential question.” So, what Tillich was going to try to do then, was to put the answers that the Christian tradition provides in terms that would address the questions people were asking. The form of the questions were taken from his own context. A part of Tillich’s project, then, was to see what are the questions that are being asked, and for him this was the context of Europe and America of the middle of the 20th century-and especially, he thought existentialist philosophy was asking the questions in the most important way. So, he sought to correlate the questions raised by the existentialists with the answers found in the Christian revelation.
Essentially, existentialism -- as we’ve seen hinted at in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche -- is a philosophical orientation that begins not with abstract, rational reflection on the essence of reality and humanity, but rather in the philosopher’s passionate engagement with, and attention to, actual human existence in the world. It’s a philosophy of, and not just about, life.
We can think about the existentialist orientation of Tillich’s theology in at least two ways. First, existentialism shapes Tillich’s conception of faith as what he calls “ultimate concern.” On the one hand, Tillich views ultimate concern as follows: “It is the state of being grasped by something unconditional, holy, absolute.” This sounds like Barth, since the action is coming from God or the Holy. The human being is being grasped by the divine-but by calling it a concern, Tillich also signals that we, as human beings, are naturally oriented to the ultimate: We’re moving toward it, even if, as sinners, we often are mistaken about what actually is ultimate. So, like Barth, Tillich knows that all human beings are idolatrous, They tend to give their ultimate loyalty or to find ultimate meaning in things -- such as money, or family, or nation -- that are perhaps important, but not really ultimate.
The second point to make about Tillich’s existentialism is that he used existential categories to claim that what concerns us ultimately is our being -- our very being -- and the threat of non-being. In other words, it is our fate-it’s our predicament, Tillich argues-to be threatened by non-being. He calls this predicament “estrangement”: We experience the threat of non-being when we are estranged from the source of our being, which, for him of course, is God-or, and this will be important as we go on in a few minutes, or to use Tillich’s existential term for God, what he calls “being-itself” So, we are estranged from being-itself But, he goes on to say this estrangement is experienced and so articulated in different ways in different cultural contexts, and Tillich claims that in the history of the West it’s been experienced variously as anxiety, guilt, and-now in his time, in the 20th century -- as meaninglessness.
So, Tillich we see has been influenced by philosophers such as Nietzsche who thought that meaninglessness was the most important way in which the threat of non-being was being experienced in the modern period. But, of course, as we saw in Nietzsche, he didn’t really have an answer to this question of meaninglessness, and in Tillich’s way of thinking, existentialism in general as a philosophy is not going to give us the answer to meaninglessness. Rather, the answer is to be found in God’s revelation, in Jesus Christ -- who, Tillich claims, should be understood as the New Being. That is, in Jesus Christ humanity is renewed by being reconciled to the source of its being.
There is much more to say about Tillich’s interpretation of Jesus, his views on sin, and other theological matters, but at this point I want to focus on the dynamic of faith and suspicion in Tillich. As I’ve noted, Tillich, like Barth, is suspicious of the human tendency to idolatry -- but where Barth responds to the threat of idolatry by proclaiming the objectivity of God’s revelation, Tillich reflects carefully on what he describes in the title of one of his books as The Dynamics of Faith.
Faith, for Tillich, as I’ve said, is ultimate concern, and what we are ultimately concerned about is our being. In faith, then, we are directed towards being-itself, or God, as our ultimate concern. This brings us back to Tillich’s idea of God as being-itself It’s crucial here to note that Tillich claims that the statement that God is being itself is the only non-symbolic statement we can make about God. In other words, all the specifically Christian things one might say about God are not literal, but symbolic -- and, therefore, according to Tillich they are relative; they’re not absolute statements about what God is.
Let’s think about this in terms of idolatry and ultimacy. One way of being idolatrous is to treat legitimate, proximate concerns such as self, family, or nation -- as ultimate, to make them God in some sense. But another, less obvious, way of being idolatrous is to treat symbols of God themselves as ultimate -- to treat them as literal truths. When we talk about God, therefore, according to Tillich, we must recognize that anything we say about God -- for example, calling God “Father” or “Mother,” or thinking about God as -- a Trinity -- is only true as a symbol. That is, only in the sense that it is also at the same time that it’s saying something true, it's also pointing beyond itself to God as being-itself. To fail to do this is to pin down God in human language, which is idolatry.
From this perspective, we can think about Tillich’s theology as directing suspicion toward our tendency to domesticate God by taking symbolic statements as literal statements about God. Some have argued that this makes Tillich, in the end, an atheist, or at least something other than a Christian, because he’s not proclaiming the Christian God. But Tillich argues that these radical claims about Christian language as symbolic capture the dynamics of ultimate concern and is already present in the biblical dynamic of crucifixion and resurrection. I’ll come back to that point in just a minute.
It also allows him to address the issue of meaninglessness in a fascinating-and to some extent even in a Nietzschean-way. We can think about it like this: When Tillich says that christianity answers our existential questions he is not saying that it solves the problem of meaninglessness in any final way: Rather, he's saying that in the faithful relation to, or the participation with, the promise of New Being in Jesus Christ, one finds the power and the courage to live fully, and hopefully, and affirmatively in the face of meaninglessness-that is, in the face of non-be1ng..In what is perhaps his most famous book, The Courage to Be, Tillich puts it like this:
The answer [that is, the answer to the question of meaninglessness] must accept, as its pre-condition, the state of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done. He who is in the grip of doubt and meaninglessness cannot liberate himself from this grip; but he asks for an answer which is valid within and not outside the situation of his despair. He asks for the ultimate foundation of what we have called the “courage of despair.” There is only one possible answer, if one does not try to escape the question: namely the acceptance of despair is in itself faith and on the boundary line of the courage to be.
The key here for Tillich is the concept of courage. Christianity, God, being-itself, are not answers in the sense that they solve the human predicament once and for all -- rather, the power of being informs, infuses our life by giving us the courage to face this predicament.
This is a deeply Protestant approach to theology. It’s one that we see in Barth as well, where it is precisely in immersing one’s self in the human predicament -- Barth calls it “sin” -- that one finds God’s “grace,” another word for what Tillich calls “courage” I think this points to an interesting parallel with Nietzsche, who did not solve the question of meaning, but immersed himself in the problem of nihilism -- seeking to affirm life in the midst of it. Tillich, again, puts it this way: “Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us.”
For Tillich, of course, the most powerful symbol for this kind of courage to take on the negativity of meaninglessness and despair is Christ on the cross. Christ gave himself up to death and, in doing so, was able to enter into a new life. For Tillich, to genuinely despair about meaning means that even the Christian meaning must be brought into question. Again, as in Barth, though in a very different way, we see suspicion and faith going hand in hand. Faith as ultimate concern is faith always pushed to its limits. As Tillich puts it, the acceptance of the despair of meaninglessness means that: “ordinary faith must be subjected to criticism and transformation.”
He’ll go on to say that this means that even theism itself must be transcended in a state of what he calls “absolute faith,” and he describes this absolute faith like this:
“It is the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts. It is the power of being-itself that accepts and gives the courage to be.”
Again, many have seen in statements like this, confirmation that Tillich was an atheist who had gone beyond the bounds of Christianity. He talks here about there is nothing without somebody that accepts. It seems that he’s at least abandoned traditional language about God, and that he is talking maybe as a philosopher, or even as a nihilist philosopher, rather than a Christian theologian.
But perhaps a better way to look at this is to note that Tillich is here entering the realm of Christian mysticism, particularly the realm of what has been called “negative” or “apophatic” theology, where recognizing God’s radical transcendence means that we must negate all positive claims about God and enter into what some mystics have called “the darkness of God” or the “cloud of unknowing.”
As the scholar of mysticism Denys Turner puts it, apophatic theology is “speech about God which is the failure of speech -- so, speech about God that in a sense has its own failure built into it. Or, to put it perhaps more plainly, we can look at the l4th-century mystical theologian Meister Eckhart, who puts it this way: If I pray to God to rid me of God.” These mystical traditions stress spiritual disciplines by which one constantly is balanced on the edge of the abyss of nothingness in the conviction that it is only there that one can make a real connection with God.
Conceptually, this balancing act faces us constantly with paradoxes, such as Tillich’s formula: “the God above God” -- or Eckhart’s formula: “I pray to God to rid me of God.” Tillich’s “God above God” is always more than the personal God to whom we pray -- It’s a God above all personality, a God who simultaneously is at the very core of one’s being and embraces all that is. Again, Tillich claims that it is precisely this paradoxical God that we find at the heart of the Christian message. He writes:
a church which raises itself in its message and its devotion to the God above the God of theism without sacrificing its concrete symbols can mediate a courage which takes doubt and meaninglessness into itself It is the Church under the Cross which alone can do this, the Church which preaches the Crucified who cried to God who remained his God after the God of confidence had left him in the darkness of doubt and meaninglessness.
So, all claims about God, all symbolic religious statements, which means all religious statements, must be interrogated and subject to suspicion. Faith, as ultimate concern, is a process. It’s always a dynamic movement that pushes us to the limits of our human capacities, so that we can hand ourselves over to God’s grace. The symbol for this is the cross -- a symbol that captures this dynamic by always pointing beyond itself to the God beyond, or the God above God.
Tillich is like Barth in arguing that genuine Christian faith pushes us to radically question our humanity and, in particular, to question the way we seek to confirm our humanity through our religion. Both argue, though, that we only find our true humanity -- that is, our relation to God -- by being suspicious about our wishes, desires, and our religion. We must, they argue, be willing to accept God’s radical transcendence -- for it’s only in recognizing that a crucial aspect of our faith is our willingness to accept the fact that God always exceeds our grasp. It’s only then that we can experience God’s grace.
At the opposite end of the Protestant spectrum on these issues is the Fundamentalist theology of Carl Henry -- for where Barth and Tillich bring suspicion into their faith, Henry and other Fundamentalists direct all their suspicion outwards at secular culture and liberal Christianity, and thus offer a less mysterious and less dynamic sense of faith and revelation.
Lets go back for just a minute to our earlier lecture on Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. This took us to the point in the early 20th century when a diverse group of conservative Evangelicals united under the banner of “the Fundamentals”-that is, five doctrinal points that they saw as the basis of any genuine Christian faith. The most important of these was the “doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture” -- which, as we saw, was developed in the 19th century by the Princeton theologians.
Even as the Fundamentalists became more and more marginal to American culture and mainstream Christianity in the decades between 1920 and 1970, the Fundamentalists and their conservative Evangelical allies actually continued to thrive outside of mainstream culture. They created a network of colleges, and youth groups, and a strong radio and later television presence. I’ll return to this in a later lecture.
But Fundamentalist and Evangelical theology also saw an intellectual revival-and this was marked, in particular, by the publication in 1947 of Carl Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modem Fundamentalism. In crucial ways, Henry affirmed the statement of the Fundamentals as representing traditional Christianity that he wished to defend. He affirmed, with some qualifications that I’ll mention later, the inerrancy of the Bible. He also affirmed the uniqueness of Christ’s redeeming work on the cross, and he affirmed the idea that salvation comes from God’s grace, apart from any human works -- and that this grace is received through a personal act of conversion in which one is “born again” to lead a Godly life.
But Henry also was critical of the intolerant, separatist attitude of Fundamentalism and argued that the Fundamentalists not only marginalized themselves by refusing to engage modern thought, but that they had lost sight of their responsibility to reform and humanize society. So, his career was characterized by an apologetic effort to, first, engage modernity from the perspective of a traditionalist Evangelical Christianity; and, second, to offer an intellectually viable alternative to theological perspectives that he thought had succumbed to the rootlessness and relativism of modernity.
Henry had left the Episcopal Church in his teens and then experienced an Evangelical calling at the age of 20 and became a Baptist. He studied at Northern Baptist Seminary, served for a time as a pastor, and then embarked on a teaching career: first at Northern Baptist Seminary and then at Fuller Theological Seminary in California -- this school was established in the late ’40s and had quickly become the intellectual center of New Evangelicalism. In 1956, Henry became the editor of the magazine Christianity Today, and he had that position for 12 years.
Like Barth, Henry argues for an objectivist understanding of God’s revelation-that is, we must view God’s Word as absolute truth that comes to human beings from without, and to which human beings must totally submit. Revelation, he says, is the source of all truth. But where Barth focuses on Jesus Christ as the revelation, as the Word-and on the Bible as witness to this Word, Henry argues that the words of the Bible themselves give us what he describes as “fixed truths,” “moral absolutes,” and “a sure and final hope.”
I’ll return to this difference in a moment, but first I should emphasize that Henry also differs from Barth in that he sees the apologetic task as crucial, for it can show that the Christian perspective on revelation and the Bible is a rational one. So, Henry wants to show those who are suspicious of the Fundamentalists or the Evangelical approach, he wants to show them that their approach to the Bible and theology is rational in philosophical terms -- and he does this by adopting a philosophical perspective called “presuppositionalism.” He argues that all systems of thought -- theological, philosophical, and scientific alike -- are grounded in first principles that cannot be proven with certainty, though they can be rationally defended.
His presupposition is that revelation is the source of all ultimate truth, and that the Bible is the depository of this truth. With this as a presupposition or a starting point, Henry then can go on to affirm the use of human reason as God -- given and not a threat to the authority of God’s revelation. He puts it like this: “rationality has its very basis in the nature of the Living God,” and if this is the case, then rationality is something that Fundamentalists and the Evangelicals will affirm -- though there is this presupposition that everything in the Bible is literally true.
So, We can’t use reason to judge God’s revelation, but because reason comes from God, it can help us to recognize the truth of revelation through the use of the laws of non-contradiction and coherence, That is, we can develop the meaning of the Bible if we start with its literal truth -- and reason to more specific claims about what human beings are and what they should do in their lives. So, Henry can also hold that it’s only with reference to God and God’s revelation that we can avoid falling into relativism. We have these absolute truths -- they ground us. This brings us back to the Bible and to Henry's claim that revelation gives us these fixed truths and moral absolutes.
One of -- if not the -- central point of Henry’s theology is his claim that God’s revelation has been deposited for us in the Bible -- and that in the Bible this truth takes the form of direct, intelligible propositions. The Bible is not primarily figurative, or metaphorical or a collection of stories, but it’s objective and conceptual -- it thus directly conveys to us, in human language, God’s view of God, world, and humanity.
He puts it this way:
“God supernaturally communicated his revelation to chosen spokesmen in the express form of cognitive truths. ... The inspired Scriptures contain a body of divinely given information actually expressed or capable of being expressed in propositions.”
Or, he puts it this way as well:
“God’s revelation is rational communication conveyed in intelligible ideas and meaningful words, that is, in conceptual-verbal form.”
So, Henry criticizes Barth and others who do not treat the Bible in this conceptual, propositional manner, but who view the Bible more in terms of a personal, existential encounter with the divine. Of course, the price of Henry’s approach (and this is a price he’s gladly willing to pay) is that his view of the Bible -- the meaning of the Bible -- is, therefore, quite static. The meaning of the words of the Bible and the doctrines derived from it are clear and not subject to change -- or, as in Tillich, tied up in the dynamic of faith and symbol.
A final point to make about Henry’s view of the Bible is that while he does claim that the Bible is inerrant, he is critical of those who place so much emphasis on this issue that they neglect to really think carefully about what the Bible means. He does say that the Bible is “in all its parts the very Word of God, completely true in what it says.” But he also says that this claim only goes for the autograph copies of the Bible -- that is, to the original written words -- not the copies that were made of those words through the tradition, and that we have now. The copies that we have now, then, are not perfectly inerrant in the way the autograph copies were, but they are, he says, infallible -- and by this he means that “they cannot lead man astray in the knowledge of God and his will.” So, although the Bible is true in everything it says, this does not mean that it is as precise in all its claims about, for example, the age of the world as science allows us to be.
So, what Henry does here is give us a little room. We have to treat the Bible as absolute truth. We have to treat it as infallible, but there is a little room here for bringing in what he would consider more precise accounts, say, of the creation of the world, and perhaps even a little room for evolutionary theory or something like that.
To step back and summarize, it’s important to note that with his emphasis on the propositional nature of the Bible, Henry offers a vision of God’s truth that is immediately clear and intelligible -- a kind of compendium of basic truths that we can depend on to give us absolute certainty about ourselves and the world. In that sense, even though from one perspective Henry does give us a vision of the transcendence of God and his revelation, from another perspective one might say that the use of reason allows us to possess this revelation to know it inside and out. it’s precisely this kind of possession that Tillich -- in his more radical, mystical, and suspicious way of thinking about God and revelation -- rejects. This difference Points to a wide gap between Protestant theologies in the 20th century.
In the next lecture, we’ll consider how Catholic theologians were, at the same time, dealing with their own disagreements.
