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The Book That Binds Us
Article by
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Published in
Perspectives
A Journal of Reformed Thought
December 1992, pp. 12-17
The Bible is the book that binds conservative Reformed orthodoxy, binds not in
the sense of holding us together but, rather, in the sense of shackling us,
immobilizing us as we attempt to address the Word of God—the Word of
judgment and grace—to our contemporary situation, to present human
experience.
The 1992 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, in its anguishing debate and
failure to move forward on the question of women in office, is only the most
recent instance of our inability to bring the scriptural witness into fruitful
dialogue with present human experience and the knowledge and insight available
to us from the various disciplines of human research.
The Bible is being misused. It is being asked to function in a way it can no longer
be expected to function, a way it was never intended to function. Until there is a
radical revisioning of our understanding of the place of Scripture in shaping our
faith and forming our practice, the church will be deadlocked, at an impasse,
firing salvos of accusation and recrimination from opposing camps while the
body bleeds and languishes.
It is painful to read the account of the Christian Reformed drama as it has taken
shape over the past two years since the Synod of 1990. A similar drama was
played out in the past in the Reformed Church in America, which now has opened
its offices to women but continues to be a house divided, living in a coexistence
filled with dis-ease. Advocates of both positions in the Christian Reformed
Church cite Scripture and claim to be faithful to its authority. But a great gulf
separates the two sides, and it is difficult to imagine them reaching agreement.
Cultural…climate of opinion does work its ferment on the staunchest of
orthodoxies, and time is on the side of those who seek to open the offices to
women. That will come. But the Christian Reformed Church will be much like the
RCA at present—of two minds on the issue. The church will live with a pragmatic
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
accommodation but without a unified, joyful vision of truth, of justice, energized
by fresh insight and understanding.
In this journal April 1991,I wrote,
In theology old paradigms keep their adherents even when theological
development has left them behind. But they can do so only by some form
of authoritarian claim. In the case of Reformed orthodoxy, the authoritarian claim of the Bible has held theological movement hostage, hindering
meaningful dialogue with the sciences and philosophy. We are
theologically stuck, and we will not become unstuck until we learn to value
Scripture as authority, but break loose from its authoritarian use.
In that same article I referred to a statement of Hendrikus Berkhof in his Two
Hundred Years of Theology that Herman Bavinck turned away from dogmatic
theology in his later years, sensing that the modern period needed a much more
vigorous renewal of theology than he was able to produce. And I raised the
question whether he might not have recognized that his own objective principle
of knowledge—the Scriptures—blocked him from fruitful engagement with the
rapidly expanding horizons of knowledge in the modern period. I stated again
that the orthodox Reformed view of Scripture and its hermeneutic make it
impossible either to engage the cultural assumptions that are the legacy of the
Enlightenment or to be in dialogue with the probings of the present, postmodern
period.
The current dilemma of the Christian Reformed Church confirms my contention.
The question of women's ordination cannot be solved by appeal to Scripture
alone. What must be recognized is that the Bible is not a book of propositional
truths, timeless and eternal, covering the full spectrum of cosmic reality, to be
applied objectively to questions of faith and practice. Rather, it must always be
heard as a cumulative witness of those encountered by the God of Creation who
came in judgment and grace to Israel and in the humanity of Jesus. The canon of
Scripture includes that witness spanning centuries, but the canon has been closed
for subsequent centuries to the present while the human story has continued on
with dramatic development and amazing breakthroughs in the understanding of
the cosmos, of historical development, and of the human person.
In the present debate in the Christian Reformed Church we can see the failure on
both sides to acknowledge the legitimate place of contemporary experience in the
discussion of women's ordination. Each side is claiming biblical authority for its
position. Obviously, something is wrong, and what is wrong is the view, shared by
the opposing sides, of how the Bible functions in such a discussion in relation to
present experience. It is my contention that the failure to engage contemporary
experience stems from a failure to recognize the function of a living tradition of
faith.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
Let me say clearly, I stand unreservedly with those who advocate opening all
ecclesiastical offices to women. They can mount a biblical case for their position.
But their opponents can mount an equally strong argument against women's
ordination if it is assumed that the Bible must provide the answer for or against
that ordination.
It is clear that what is at issue is not women as women in office, their giftedness,
leadership capacity, or spirituality. The issue is the Bible, how it functions in the
life of the church, where its authority lies.
Until the church wrestles with the authority of Scripture in determining the shape
of its faith and the form of its practice, it will not be able to make progress on any
theological front or come to consensus on any doctrinal debate. The apparent
issue being debated will never be the real issue; lying behind it will always lurk
the question, “But what does this do to the authority of the Bible?”
In Reformed orthodoxy, the Bible carries not only authority; it is used with
authoritarian coerciveness and uncritical literalness that brings every new
discussion to an impasse whether the question be the ordination of women, the
status of homosexual or lesbian persons, of creation versus evolution, of ethical
issues such as abortion, genetic engineering, or euthanasia.
In Bondage to the Bible
The Bible is the book that binds us. In our academic, theological institutions we
acknowledge that the Bible is not a scientific text, not a chronicle of history in the
modern sense of historiography, that it comes to expression through human
persons with all the limitations that entails. But we have never been honest with
the church about the implications of our recognition of the nature of the Bible.
Somehow the critical study of Scripture, the results of two hundred years of
intensive study of its formation and its contents, has never trickled down to the
people.
We have continued living in the paradigm of Protestant orthodoxy deriving from
the Protestant scholasticism of the seventeenth century. By that time both the
Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches had battened down the hatches and set
themselves against the emergence of Renaissance humanism, which came to full
flower in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Rightfully, the church
resisted the drive for human autonomy and the enthronement of human reason,
but it fought fire with fire; the theological enterprise took on a strongly rationalistic character and attempted in intellectual formulation to ground certainty,
buttressed by an authoritarian church (Roman Catholic) or an authoritarian
Scripture (Protestant).
The historical-critical study of Scripture created a crisis for the churches of the
Reformation, and a battle ensued that our churches have yet to settle. It is
incredible, in light of what is widely recognized about the nature of the
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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Scriptures, that there should be such a prevalence of literalism in our
understanding of the Bible. In his Dynamics of Faith, Tillich distinguishes two
stages of literalism. The first is the “natural stage” before making a clear distinction between the symbolic and the factual; it consists “in the inability to separate
the creations of symbolic imagination from the facts which can be verified
through observation and experiment.” This represents the first naiveté, and such
literalism creates no problem for the mediation of meaning.
But when the symbol system is broken or seriously undercut in the continuing
growth of knowledge and understanding, to continue to assert literal
correspondence between symbol and fact is to fall into a “reactive literalism.”
Literalism in this second stage is “aware of the questions but represses them, half
consciously, half unconsciously.” This path is chosen by “people who prefer the
repression of their questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking
of the myth.” Reactive literalism cramps the figurative language of the Bible into
the narrow framework of interpretation appropriate only to the literal usage of
modern science. The desire is for certainty, but not, as Barth says, the certainty of
faith that is given and given again, but the certainty of human control. Identifying
the Bible with revelation, elevating the doctrine of inspiration so that the written
word is inerrant and the truth infallible represents a “lust for certitude.”
That phrase comes from Charles Davis. In his Temptations of Religion he
discusses the social construction of all human knowledge, which excludes the
possibility of “a revelation insofar as that implies an a priori claim to absoluteness and universality.” He contends,
Revelation in that sense is given as an absolute in the order of knowledge;
it is regarded as a set of unquestionable data, from which all opinions may
be evaluated. It represents an attempt to limit criticism, to put a stop to
the endless questioning of human thinking by establishing an a-critical
point, a point not subject to criticism because beyond criticism. (18)
To reject revelation in that sense is not, he claims, to exclude God's manifestation
in our midst in word and event. It is, however, to exclude an a priori absoluteness
and universality as violating human intelligence and freedom. Davis quotes Peter
Berger:
The theologian is consequently deprived of the psychologically liberating
possibility of either radical commitment or radical negation. What he is
left with, I think, is the necessity for a step-by-step re-evaluation of the
traditional affirmations in terms of his own cognitive criteria (which need
not necessarily be those of a putative “modern consciousness”). Is this or
that in the tradition true? Or is it false? I don't think that there are
shortcut answers to such questions, neither by means of “leaps of faith”
nor by the methods of any secular discipline. (The Sacred Canopy, 187)
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
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Davis recognizes how fearful such a recognition of the social construction of our
reality is. To become conscious of the extent to which our “knowledge” and
“values” are social fictions is “to look into the abyss, the void, surrounding human
life in every direction.” Such honest recognition is very rare in the church; rather,
theologians and preachers reinforce reactive literalism, feeding the lust for
certitude. But should there not be an honest facing of what is widely recognized
in our postmodern world—that human knowledge is socially constructed and
symbolically expressed? When we do so, we are faced with an alternative.
According to Davis,
We can respond to the nothingness by a nihilism that interprets it as
chaos, as meaninglessness, as the ultimate absurdity making everything
absurd. Or we can respond to the void as positive nothingness, as mystery.
That is the religious response. Faith in the last analysis is a basic trust in
reality, an openness to mystery, a being drawn toward the abyss in selfforgetfulness and awe and love. Faith acknowledges the relativities of
finite human existence without the nihilistic denial that these do, however
gropingly, lead us toward absolute meaning and value. (21)
The Bipolar Reality of Scripture And Present Experience
The Bible contains the words of those in Israel and in the event of Jesus Christ
who were encountered by God in judgment and grace, who witnessed to the Word
of gracious salvation more or less adequately in their stammering words and
historically conditioned understanding. But God is not dead. God still encounters
us. God's Spirit still illumines the human understanding, not only in reference to
the biblical witness but in the larger landscape of human experience.
In the ongoing life of the church we must take seriously not only the Bible but
also authentic contemporary experiences of being human in this world. We are
people rooted in history, creatures of the cosmos, whose secrets scientists are
probing, bringing to light fascinating findings. What of our knowledge of history
and the awesome development of human knowledge in the respective disciplines
of science? Because it lies outside the Bible's primary focus and purpose, is it
therefore of no account in shaping our faith and forming our practice? Is it
reasonable to assume that we can engage critical questions of ultimate human
concern and determine crucial action and behavior as a human family living
together on Spaceship Earth by reference alone to the Bible?
It is precisely the theologian's task to coordinate the bipolar reality of Scripture
and present human experience. Theology performs a hermeneutical function; its
task is to interpret the biblical tradition in the present context of the church's
life—an ongoing process that is never finished, always provisional, necessarily
open-ended. All interpretation is a mediation of past and present within the
history of a faith tradition. And the present is a moving target.
Breaking the Impasse: Scripture and Tradition
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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How can the church move forward with theological discussion that will illumine
contemporary human experience and shape the faith and practice of God's people
in the image of Jesus Christ? What connects the canonical biblical witness to the
present? What forms the bridge between the revelatory events in Israel's history
and in Jesus Christ—to which the biblical story witnesses—and our present
experience of being human in this world?
We need a new understanding of the place of the living tradition of faith as lived
out in the community of faith. We must recognize the elements at play here: the
revelatory events, the witness to those events in the biblical canon, the church as
the community constituted by that witness and the place of ongoing witness, and
the whole spectrum of human knowledge and cumulative historical experience
that continues to grow and develop.
As I engage anxious folk in our churches who fear faith is being diluted and
biblical Christianity is being jeopardized, I get the impression they assume that
there was a time of pristine revelation infallibly recorded in the writings of the
New Testament and that apostolic truth was rather quickly overlaid with church
tradition that distorted that truth. Then, it is claimed, in the Reformation of the
sixteenth century, the apostolic Christian faith was recovered and brought to
expression in its original clarity in the creeds and confessions of the church, reformed according to the Word of God.
That is a delusion, a colossal distortion of the way of the gospel in the church over
nearly two thousand years. Yet it is still cavalierly asserted for popular
consumption.
A more accurate portrayal of the situation must recognize the interpretation of
the revelatory events in Israel and in Jesus Christ by the witnesses to those
revelatory events; that interpretation was instrumental in constituting a faith
community. That faith community (Israel and the church) was formed out of the
witness to revelation and, in its ongoing life, that community reinterpreted its
understanding of the original revelatory events and continued to translate its
faith understanding in ever new historical circumstances.
We can trace the process already in the canonical Scriptures. For example,
Israel's faith is reinterpreted by the prophetic word in terms of Israel's ongoing
historical experience. Development can also be seen within the New Testament in
Christological understanding. The primitive Christology of Acts is not at all the
full-blown incarnational Christology of the fourth gospel.
With the setting of the limits of the canon, such reinterpretation and
development did not cease. We distinguish the biblical witness from the postcanonical tradition, but it was a historical decision of the church that determined
the breakpoint. And the lines are blurred. Common agreement as to the canonical
books was not reached until around a.d. 400.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
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The problem of the canon reopened at the time of the Reformation. The
Protestant churches excluded the Apocrypha, a whole series of Old Testament
writings that had been recognized as canonical for over a thousand years. Luther,
in his September Bible of 1552, openly separated Hebrews, James, Jude, and
Revelation from the other New Testament writings, thereby constituting a dual
canon. Erasmus questioned the authenticity and authority of Hebrews, James,
Jude, and 2 and 3 John. Zwingli thought Revelation should be rejected, and
Calvin's expositions cover every book except Revelation. In the introduction to
his commentaries it is clear, according to Barth, that he had doubts not only
about the books mentioned by Luther, but also concerning 2 Peter and 2 and 3
John.
The history of the canon indicates a shifting and a questioning that denies the
possibility of a claim of absolute certainty regarding its limits. But even within the
present Protestant canon we can see the process of translation and
reinterpretation of the faith traditions, as stated above, and that process has
never ceased. The preaching of the church is the bridgehead where the biblical
text comes to contemporary expression. The heart of the preaching task is the
hermeneutical moment when the words of the text that witness to the Word that
once sounded find fresh expression in the hope that through the preacher's stammering words the Word might again be heard—that the living God might speak
here and now.
Every historical formulation is provisional; to absolutize an interpretation at any
point on the historical continuum is idolatry. The historically conditioned
interpretations of the Christian faith through the centuries vary in the degree to
which they express a faithful interpretation of the originating revelatory events in
Israel and in Jesus Christ, in the degree to which the original revelatory
luminousness shines through. Sometimes there is clarity, sometimes distortion.
There is action and reaction; the pendulum swings.
In the nineteenth century the climate of opinion dominated by Newtonian
physics and historicism smothered the witness to the newness and freedom of
God's engagement with our world. Against a truncated, liberal faith expression,
Barth boldly proclaimed the “Wholly Other,” the God who shatters “our little
systems.”
In the wake of the renewal of the church and the rediscovery of God's liberating
grace in the sixteenth century, Reformed orthodoxy fell into the sterility and
rigidity of Scholasticism. It absolutized its interpretation of the faith as though it
were a statement of timeless and eternal truth unalloyed with the cultural
assumptions of its day. Reformed orthodoxy failed to recognize that this
interpretation was forged out of the crisis created by the ascendancy of
rationalism as the Enlightenment was coming to flower, and so it declared the
autonomy of the human person and human reason as the measure of truth.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
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What we must recognize is the constant interplay of the biblical witness and
contemporary interpretation and the fact that we are part of a faith community
that is living out of and carrying forward a living faith tradition. We have an
anchor in the past; the church has demarcated certain writings as canonical.
Present interpretation of the Christian faith and shaping of Christian practice will
always involve serious listening to the biblical witness. But the present
determination of faith and practice will not treat the intervening centuries
between biblical times and our own as a vacuum. The history of the transmission
of the faith will also be mined for wisdom, insight, and guidance.
But neither do we live in a vacuum. Our contemporary expression of the faith and
the shaping of our practice will finally have to be our truth. Finally, our witness
and life must be authentically our own, our voice bringing to expression the living
tradition.
Jaroslav Pelikan differentiates that sense of the living tradition from
traditionalism. Tradition, he says, is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is
the dead faith of the living. If we would move forward in our understanding of all
reality before the face of God, we must come to a new appreciation of the living
tradition of biblical faith as a dynamic movement.
Hendrikus Berkhof acknowledges that as a rule Protestant dogmatics has no
separate chapter on tradition. But this disregard of the concept of tradition
cannot be maintained, he argues. In Christian Faith he writes,
Revelation means that God enters the field of history to bring about an
encounter with men which transcends human history, and which therefore
goes far beyond the temporal spatial bounds of the original field of
revelation. The encounters which took place at that time were means and
suited for leading to further encounter in other times and places. Hence
the revelation of Christ in the New Testament, in spite of, or rather
because of its definitive nature, is not the end but calls forth as its sequel
the coming and the work of the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from Christ to
continue and interpret his saving work world-wide. This coming of the
Spirit is a new redemptive act, of the same importance as the coming of
Christ of which he is the complement and counterpart. It is one
continuous revelational event. Fixation without interpretive transmission
petrifies the faith….
Berkhof contends that if the concern of revelation is the continuing encounter
between God and humankind, then tradition is theologically of the same
importance as Scripture. The redemptive work of God must be “handed over,”
faithful to the fixated form (Scripture) but verbalized such that it becomes
intelligible in other times and places.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
Page 9
The current impasse in the conservative Reformed churches is the result of
fixation with the biblical writings and a failure born of fear to find fresh
expression for contemporary faith.
Sola Scriptura. That was the clarion call, the battle cry of the reformers. Faith
will be shaped, practice formed by reference to Scripture alone. The claim can be
easily understood given the historical context, and the return to Scripture as the
authoritative witness to revelation proved fruitful in the life of the church. But
there was a loss as well: it was the sense of tradition as the living, ongoing,
mediating, and interpreting expression of biblical faith as it is confessed and lived
in the community of faith, the church.
Tradition. In Fiddler on the Roof Tevye booms out the word claiming that life is
as precarious as a fiddler making music on a perilously steep roof and that
balance is maintained by tradition. According supremacy to tradition over
Scripture in the Roman Catholic Church allowed it to drift from testing its faith
and practice by the Word of God and to lose the clear sound of the gospel.
Tradition and Scripture were a dual source of authority, but tradition had the
ascendancy. The recovery of the authority of Scripture to exercise its critical
function was a great contribution of the Reformation. But such movements as the
Reformation are reactionary; often there is such a strong reaction to the status
quo being attacked that the pendulum swings too far.
How does the cumulative, growing experience of humankind become
incorporated into faith's vision and practice? The witness of prophets and
apostles continues to be heard in the pages of the Bible. But what of the ongoing
encounter of God's Spirit with the church as it moves through history confronted
by new questions, immersed in circumstances beyond that of the biblical world?
It is in the living tradition of the faith community that new experience and fresh
discoveries are brought into dialogue with the biblical witness. The tradition, like
a fiery river of lava, moves with the current of history, a stream continuous with
the erupting volcano, yet ever moving through new landscapes.
This function of tradition was brought home sharply to me by the New Testament
scholar Krister Stendahl, who joined Rabbi David Hartman in an all-day, JewishChristian dialogue on the theme “Faithful Interpretation.” Stendahl spoke of
tradition as an instrument of continuity and change. Continuity was obvious to
me; tradition connects backward to the past. But is tradition an instrument of
change? Indeed, he argued. By means of the tradition we enter the new and
negotiate the future.
Stendahl spoke warmly and charmingly of a visit to Swedish relatives in
Minnesota. There he experienced life as he remembered it in Sweden when he
was a child and visited his grandparents. In Minnesota the Swedish tradition is
frozen, as is true in most immigrant ethnic communities. If you want to see a
piece of Sweden past, he said, visit Minnesota, for there the tradition has become
a museum piece. But Stendahl has recently returned to the United States after
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
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serving for a time in Stockholm as Bishop of the Swedish Lutheran Church. If you
want to experience the living tradition of the Swedish people, you must go to
Sweden where the dynamic tradition is continuing to evolve, he pointed out.
Stendahl offered a vivid image: a boa constrictor periodically wriggles out of its
skin, leaving the skin behind, an empty shell. He pictured a biologist taking the
skin, measuring it, analyzing it, and then having it stuffed and mounted—a
museum piece. Someone exclaims, “There's a snake!” But, says Stendahl, that's
not the snake. The snake has wriggled out and away and is still living—in new
skin—still making history.
The living tradition of Christian faith is the contemporary reinterpretation of the
biblical witness in light of the cumulative historical experience of the church and
the growing store of human knowledge. In Words Around the Table, Gail
Ramshaw writes,
Tradition is not like an obsolete edition of the encyclopedia, full of half
facts, and old prejudices. Tradition is not like a 1948 etiquette book that
lists the activities and even the fabrics forbidden a widow in deep
mourning: All we can do is grimace and ignore it. The tradition of the
church lives. We can read medieval books being discussed, we can unearth
attitudes that were subsequently buried, we can make tradition different
tomorrow than it was yesterday or today. Where “tradition” repeats tired
slogans out of context, when “tradition” yells louder and louder to drown
out queries, it becomes a sarcophagus that the dying church deserves. But
when tradition is the history of the movement of the Spirit, darting here,
hiding there, migrating halfway around the world, it can serve as one
expression of God's Truth.
As much as any contemporary theologian, David Tracy has addressed the
question of the faithful interpretation of the Christian tradition to make it
accessible to a serious and reasonable public. As I have been contending, he sees
systematic theology's task to interpret, mediate, and translate the meaning and
truth of the continuing living tradition in dialogue with the biblical witness in
light of present human experience. Where this is not the case, the notion of
authority shifts from a truth disclosed to mind and heart to an external norm for
the obedient will. Then theologians can no longer interpret and translate the tradition but “only repeat the shop-worn conclusions of the tradition.”
Eventually, the central, classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition
become mere “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly
repeated. (Analogical Imagination, 99)
In an earlier work, Blessed Rage for Order, Tracy calls for a revisioning of the
Christian tradition. He explains:
© Grand Valley State University
�The Book That Binds Us
Richard A. Rhem
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[T]he revisionist theologian is committed to what seems clearly to be the
central task of contemporary Christian theology: the dramatic
confrontation, the mutual illuminations and corrections, the possible basic
reconciliations between the principal values, cognitive claims, and
existential faiths of both a reinterpreted post-modern consciousness and a
reinterpreted Christianity. (32)
The revisionist theologian is not motivated by the desire for relevance, Tracy
argues. Rather,
The reality of the situation is both more simple and more basic: when all is
said and done, one finds that he can authentically abandon neither his
faith in the modern experiment, nor his faith in the God of Jesus Christ.
(4)
The church lives in a creative tension because it lives in a bipolar reality of Bible
and present experience, an ancient faith and the undeniable reality of the modern
experiment. We need a new understanding of the Bible and a new appreciation of
tradition if we would be faithful to the Word and present to our world.
In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman
describes the church, tradition, the cosmos itself after the manner of an
organism. Their development is seen as an organic process. This view was in
contrast to a fundamentalistic view that regards revelation and tradition as a
fixed, unchanging body of truths and rejects all change and pluralism. Newman
was able to accommodate ongoing human experience in his organic view of
tradition.
In What Is Living, What is Dead in Christianity Today? Charles Davis comments
on Newman's view:
The result was a concept of tradition as cumulative experience, subject
therefore to change whether as development or as decline, which
distinguished [him] as conservative, from reactionaries, who did not
acknowledge history and development. In a religious context the
conservatives... were those who saw tradition as a dynamic process rather
than as a static deposit. (33)
This is not enough for Davis to meet the situation we face today. He calls for a
more radical revisioning of faith, raising the question,
Are we not in a situation that cannot be met by an orderly development of
traditional categories; but which demands something radically new? (34)
One may lean more to Newman's view of a growing organic process or to Davis's
with his call for radical revisioning, but the option not open to an honest facing of
the present crisis of the church is a conception of the Bible, theological
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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formulation, and Christian practice as fixed, into which contemporary human
experience and present human knowledge on all fronts must be crammed.
In a recent issue of Context, Martin Marty lifts a quotation from Newman from
Ian Ker's Newman on Being a Christian. Marty writes, “With development and
change in mind—over against a static picture of God, the human, faith, and
doctrine—we read:
It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring.
Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the
history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable,
and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and
full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time
savours of the soul. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is
foreign and temporary.... It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries,
as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way.
From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence
abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length
strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange
territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall
around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles
reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the
same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change,
and to be perfect is to have changed often.
References:
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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English
Type
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Sound
Text
Identifier
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KII-01
Coverage
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1981-2014
Format
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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RA-4-19921201
Date
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1992-12-01
Type
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Text
Title
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The Book That Binds Us
Publisher
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Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought
Creator
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Richard A. Rhem
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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eng
Description
An account of the resource
Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on December 1, 1992 entitled "The Book That Binds Us", it appeared in Perspectives, pp. 12-17. Tags: Authority of Scripture, Experience, Faith Tradition, Critical Thinking, Faith, Mystery.
Format
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application/pdf
Authority of Scripture
Critical Thinking
Experience
Faith
Faith Tradition
Mystery