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You Can Never Go Home
From the series: Good News Then and Now
Scripture: Jeremiah 23:23-32; Hebrews 4:12-13; John 1:1-5; 10-14
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
October 10, 1999
Transcription of the spoken word
One of the great greetings that is addressed by angelic visitors or messengers to
human beings in critical situations in the biblical story from time to time is, “Fear
not.” I would like this morning to say to you as a congregation on a pilgrimage of
faith, in an explosive and wonderful and fascinating world, “Fear not. Be not
afraid.”
It’s a wonderful endeavor to traverse 2000 years of Christian history and to find
that through those centuries there have been periods of vitality and life, and there
have been periods of dryness and desert existence. There have been times when it
would seem that the flame of faith would flicker and die. And then there have
been surprising moments when the word of God sounded, some voice was found,
some happening caused once again a new freedom and joy and confidence to
mark the people of God. A study of the history of the Church builds one’s
confidence, not in the infallibility of the Church or the infallibility of the Bible or
the total accuracy and absolute truthfulness of the Christian dogmatic structure,
but rather, that God goes with the Church; the Spirit of God now and again
breathes new life into the Church. There are periods of dryness, but there are
periods of renewal, and finally our confidence is in God and therefore, my word
to you is, “Fear not,” as we continue our pilgrimage of understanding that faith
that has been our heritage and that is our hope.
I said last week that the Reformation of the 16th century, that critical event out of
which the Protestant movement emerged, was actually a family fight. It was an
intramural exercise. To be sure, the upshot of it was the rending of the body of
Christ, unfortunately. To be sure, there was a fresh experience of the grace of
God, the Gospel was freed, the scriptures came to new life, but it was still a family
affair. There wasn’t any significant tampering with the core Christian dogmatic
understanding, the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed confessed by Catholic
and Protestant alike. As a matter of fact, the Reformation emerging in the
Protestant movement caused to happen what Luther had hoped would happen in
the first place and that was a counter-Reformation in the Catholic Church, after
which there wasn’t really any reason for the two to remain apart, but fortunately,
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after 450 or so years, we did begin to talk to each other again and we’re on better
relations now.
But that intramural, inter-family conflict of the 16th century was hardly a crisis at
all compared with the crisis of modernity, the modern period when we began to
use our critical faculties, our reason, to ask questions about the reality of which
we are a part. It had two dimensions, as I have been stressing these last weeks.
There is the rise of the natural sciences through the exercise of the scientific
method, inductive reasoning, observation, investigation, experimentation,
actually looking at what is there, testing, experimenting, drawing conclusions,
hypotheses, building models. The tremendous success of the natural sciences is
the verification of the usefulness and legitimacy of that method of investigation.
But the 17th century scientific revolution that continued apace was marked in the
18th century by the Enlightenment, that Age of Reason with which this nation was
born, the Age of Reason which saw the autonomy of the human person coming
from under the authoritarian claim of Church or Bible, the monarchies, the
political arrangements, the throwing off of all authoritarian structures and the
human being standing in his or her own light, guided by the light of human
reason. That critical rationality continued to ferment until the whole of European
culture and this nation, as well, the West, was marked by historical thinking,
historical consciousness. Thought was now given to the origin of institutions and
to dogmatic structures - how were they put together? The Bible - how did we get
this canon? Who wrote what to whom, for what reason, what motivation, when,
etc. Critical thinking issued in a sense of history, the historical method being just
the common sense method in which we all operate in every other aspect of our
lives, and that method came to expression in a thinker such as Ernst Troeltsch at
the beginning of the 20th century.
The end of the 19th century brought about the obvious conclusion that all of
history is relative, that all of history is development, that history is process, that
all of us who are a part of the historical process have no vantage point from which
to climb in order to view it all and see it as God sees it, but rather, we’re all caught
up in it. Ernst Troeltsch did not deny an absolute, but he did deny the possibility
of any historical person or institution having a grasp of the absolute, for what we
learned was that we all have but a relative glimpse of that absolute, and that our
context, our time and our place in history shape the lens through which we view
reality. Therefore, in the last decades of the 19th century, there arose the History
of Religions School, the first scientific endeavor in the West to come to
understand the nature of religion and to, with exposure to the other great world
traditions, see that Christianity was not alone, but rather there were other great
traditions that had deep spiritual authenticity and, therefore, it was impossible
anymore to speak of the exclusivity of the Christian faith or the absoluteness of
the Christian faith over against all other faiths. These were the problems, the
issues with which Troeltsch wrestled.
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Richard A. Rhem
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The nineteenth century had been a century of intense theological conversation,
debate, discussion, controversy, and European culture had blossomed into the
magnificent thing that it was, literally, culturally, its music, its art, its theological
investigations, its great universities. And then, of course, as the 20th century
dawned, the first decade of this century brought the First World War. It was as
though European culture had come under judgment, that it was tired, and there
was a brilliant student who had the finest of European education, a young Swiss
ordained pastor called to a little village in Switzerland; his name was Karl Barth,
whom we know in retrospect.
If you want to take the great leaps of theological minds you jump from St. Paul to
St. Augustine to John Calvin to Karl Barth, the most influential, powerful
theologian of the 20th century. He came to this little village church as a young
ordinand, stood in the pulpit and, as he describes it himself, he had nothing to
preach. With all of the brilliance of his education and of his mind and of his
culture, of his heritage, he stood before the people with an open Bible and then
had no message. He probably was reflective of that generation, that century that
is described by A. N. Wilson in a recent book, God’s Funeral - the lost faith, the
tiredness of the 19th century in its struggle to believe in the face of modernity.
And then Karl Barth began to study, to wrestle, to pray. He had a friend in
another village; they began to converse and communicate together, they
struggled together with trying to have an understanding of this Christian faith,
trying to find a voice into which to bring it to fresh expression.
After ten years of that, he published in 1919 the Epistle to the Romans, which was
like a bombshell on the European scene. Barth affirmed the godness of God.
Barth affirmed the reality of revelation, that God speaks, that God speaks, that
there is a word of God in the midst of the human situation. With great daring,
with great power, with great joy and freedom, Barth turned the theological world
upside down. He flew square in the face of modernity. Whereas Schleiermacher
attempted to root religion in the human being and find a new authority, whereas
Troeltsch recognized the historicity of Christian faith and its relativity, Barth just
plain proclaimed the word of God in the midst of history, full of judgment,
condemning all that was human, and then taking it all back with the gracious
embrace of God. It was a message of the word of God. Barth is the one who
formulated that rather neat understanding of the threefold word of God - the
word in flesh, the word incarnate, John 1:14, “The word became flesh and dwelt
among us.” And he said the word written, the Hebrew Scriptures were a word of
anticipation, and the New Testament documents were a word of recollection, but
it all centered in the word made flesh. There was revelation. There was the
incarnation of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the word written,
anticipating, recollecting, and then the word written becoming the occasion for
this moment, the word preached.
Barth made a very presumptuous, arrogant claim that the preached word is as
much the word of God as the word written, as the word in flesh, that the word in
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flesh pointed to by the word written continues to be pointed to by the word
preached. Revelation continues to happen now and again, here and there, who
knows when. When the breath of the Spirit blows, the word of the preacher
becomes for this one or that one the very word of God.
That was Barth. It must have been a lot like Jeremiah who understood the word
of God as a hammer that breaks the rock and as a fire that consumes the chaff, an
understanding of the word such as the writer to the Hebrews who said the word
of God is sharper than a two-edged sword dividing the bone and marrow,
discerning the very thoughts and intents of the human heart.
The word of God. Who knows when it will sound? Who knows where it will
strike? The fact is that God speaks and with daring and boldness and joy and
freedom and power. Barth announced the infinite, eternal Creator of all has
invaded our space and speaks, still judging and gracing.
When I went to Europe in 1967 at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands,
Karl Barth was within a year of his death. I wish I had hopped a train to go down
and at least try to touch the hem of his garment. But my professor Berkhof was a
good friend and colleague of Barth, so I got about as close as I could without
having been there. And in 1968 (I still have the newspaper clipping with his
picture and eulogy from the Leiden Daily), Karl Barth died. I went to a memorial
service at Leiden where a professor of the theological faculty said, whatever
future theology transpires, the theologian will never be able to go over Barth or
under Barth or around Barth, but will have to go through Barth. In other words,
before you can speak a word theologically, you had better understand the
wrestling and the struggling of this giant who was used of God in such a powerful
way.
By the time I got to Europe, the students of Karl Barth were filling the chairs of
theology in the prestigious universities of the continent, and the students of Barth
were beginning to turn back to the questions that Barth had simply obliterated.
The students of Barth who were now the professors of the universities were
beginning to ask again the questions with which Ernst Troeltsch had wrestled
because those questions were not invented, they were not a temporary incidental
kind of thing, they were the questions that had arisen out of the modern, critical
mentality, the critical rationality that was marking everything else in the whole
world - those questions for a generation could be silenced by the wonderful,
powerful, humorous, humane, brilliant voice of Barth. But his students had to
revisit Troeltsch and Schleiermacher and go back again and face the questions of
modernity, because if you don’t have the power, the daring, and the brilliance of a
Barth simply to overpower, then you have to engage in dialogue and conversation
and before long you have to deal again with the questions that are really the
questions. So, when I got there, one of the first books I had to read was entitled
The New Hermeneutic. I went to Berkhof after reading it for my appointment
and he said, “How did it go,” and I said, “I have never read anything so difficult in
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all my life.” The students of Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, a New Testament
scholar, the students were now forming a movement that was called The New
Quest of the Historical Jesus, and that new quest continues to this day. We’ve had
John Dominic Crossan here, we’ve had Marcus Borg here, because the questions
of modernity are the questions that all of us have to face, because our world, this
fascinating world of which we are a part, is so other than the world in which our
faith structures came to expression. They need a new voice; they need a
translation.
I went back to Europe, as you may remember, in 1994 when my old professor in
his 80th year was celebrated at the University. He was in a nursing home at the
time and I got a chance to spend an hour and a half with him at what I knew
would be my last personal encounter. He was telling me about his younger days
when Karl Barth was the coming rage in Europe. He told me about his professor
who heard that Berkhof was coming under the influence of Barth and he took
Berkhof aside and warned him about Barth, and Henk Berkhof laughed a bit and
said, “I didn’t like that very much.”
I said to him, “Henk, as I see you here now, I see you looking more to Barth than
I remember.”
He said, “Ja, maybe so.”
I said, “You know, I feel so close to you and yet, I feel like we’re in a really tight
circle together, but you’re looking one way and I’m looking the other.”
He said, “Say that again.”
I said, “Well, I see you looking back and I have to be honest, I’m looking this
way.”
He said, “That’s good. That’s right. You must always go beyond your teacher.”
That’s a blessed teacher to have who encourages that.
Hans Küng, in his Theology for the Third Millennium, concludes with a
discussion of Karl Barth. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Barth. Barth wrote
the introduction to his dissertation. Küng admired Barth very greatly and he
wrote, “But, if he could do it over again, Karl Barth would begin all over again.
This time he would do it on a historically, critically shaped foundation, different
from that which he did in the early part of the century, because, you see, history
moves and times are different and the context is different.” But, he had enough
confidence in a Karl Barth to believe that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t
do it the same way because he wouldn’t be doing it in the same context, against
the same fronts. He would have another word to say.
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Someone gave me a copy this week of Forbes Magazine’s big issue No. 4. The
theme of this one is “Convergence.” There is a multitude of literary, scientific,
religious, all kinds of leading lights who write a page or six, but the theme of it all
is Convergence, how everything is coming together and that the Internet on
which we are only in the opening stages will continue to transform our reality
into a global neighborhood such as even those who began to talk about
globalization couldn’t have conceived.
Edward O. Wilson, from Harvard, the biologist Nobel Prize winner, great scholar,
writes one or two pages in which he suggests that everything finally will fold into
biology and he says, as far as he’s concerned, even philosophy and religion will be
explained eventually in terms of neuro-connections in the brain, brain science,
and so forth.
I read that stuff and I think, thank God I can read it without being afraid. I hear
the angels’ words, “Fear not,” because if my religious experience is the
consequence of some chemical reactions in my brain, then I would guess that it is
consequence of some creative process of billions of years that has brought us to
this point of conscious and self-transcendence, consciousness of the other, and
then the question of the Other, and the Mystery of our existence. I refuse to live
in any kind of denial of any kind of knowledge that is available anywhere and in
any discipline. If I have to have my religion while closing my eyes or stopping my
ears, that’s when I’ll give it up. But I don’t believe I have to give it up because one
time, in the doldrums and the decadence of early twentieth-century European
culture, there was one raised up whose voice rocked the earth with the
declaration that God speaks, and that the word of God is a hammer that breaks
the rock and the fire that consumes the chaff, that is sharper than a two-edged
sword to discern the thoughts and intents of the human heart. Revelation isn’t
over. The future - who can predict the fascinating development, the unfolding of
this drama of which we are a part? Aren’t you glad you’re alive - to see it, to
witness it, to participate in it? We can do it all with freedom and with joy, with
confidence, always hearing the word of our Lord, “Be not afraid. Be not afraid.”
Once, of course, your eyes are opened, you can never go home.
Küng concludes his book, Theology for the Third Millennium, by saying we can’t
go back to Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Schleiermacher or Barth. It’s always
forward.
References:
Karl Barth. Epistle to the Romans. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Hans Küng. Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. Anchor,
reprint edition, 19900.
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
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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
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
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Interfaith worship
Sermons
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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1981-2014
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Event
Pentecost XXI
Series
Good News Then and Now
Scripture Text
Jeremiah 23:23-32, Hebrews 4:12-13, John 1:1-5, 10-14
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
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Karl Barth. Epistle to the Romans, 1968 Hans K
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1999-10-10
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You Can Never Go Home
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Richard A. Rhem
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Grand Valley State University
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
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eng
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An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 10, 1999 entitled "You Can Never Go Home", as part of the series "Good News Then and Now", on the occasion of Pentecost XXI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Jeremiah 23:23-32, Hebrews 4:12-13, John 1:1-5, 10-14.
Church
Critical Thinking
Modernity
Revelation
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Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way?
From the series: Good News Then and Now
Jeremiah 7:4; Luke 20:2
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
August 29, 1999
Transcription of the spoken sermon
We are on a 2000-year journey, a 2000-year survey of the history of Christian
doctrine, or as it is called, the history of dogma, and we are looking at the history
of doctrinal development because I want to demonstrate to you that, if we are
about the re-imagining of the faith for our day, we are only doing what has always
been done, not always voluntarily, but out of necessity, the need to continue to
reinterpret the event of God in Jesus Christ in every new age and historical
context in order that it might make sense, in order that it might be meaningful, in
order that it might be transformative.
We noted three weeks ago that the formation of Christian doctrine arose out of
that first great crisis of the Christian Church, the Jesus movement poised for the
imminent return of Jesus as the Lord of Glory to judge the earth, which didn’t
happen. And that early Church, confident that the end of the age was so near, had
never contemplated having to live in history. What did the event of Jesus Christ
mean, if history was ongoing? What did it mean, then, to be a Christian, a
follower of Jesus in a world that obviously wasn’t ending? Out of that initial crisis
came the formation of the early Catholic tradition, which did not come about
easily. To read those stories of the post-Apostolic Church is to read of
tremendous conflict, tremendous division, great tensions, outstanding leaders on
respective sides of issues trying to hammer out what in the world God had done
in this Jesus. The Church eventually regularized itself. It took some centuries,
and finally it established what it believed about what God had done in Jesus:
thus, the appearance of orthodoxy, that is, proper belief, correct belief. And also,
the possibility of heresy, for now there was a line set down, there were boundaries
drawn, and those who were outside of the pale were marked as heretical to the
established, accepted faith of the Church.
That early Church, we noted a couple of weeks ago, began to take on some stature
and it was greatly enhanced when the Emperor Constantine converted and when
a successor established Christianity as the religion of the empire. The
establishment of Christianity, which I was taught was a great providential act of
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God, might well have been the point at which the Church began to lose its soul
because, with its establishment, now having the power of the throne behind it, it
grew not only in its faith understanding, but in power, and with power came
eventual degeneration and decay and corruption (you learned about that last
week), an institution that became so insensitive to the needs of people that it
could no longer deal with the human experience of one like Martin Luther, whose
experience was the catalyst for the shattering of the institution and the
emergence of the Protestant tradition. Now we have three major Church families.
In 1054, Eastern Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Latin tradition came apart;
the Pope excommunicated the Patriarch, the Patriarch returned the favor, and
from that point on, 1054, the 11thcentury, the Christian Church, which until that
time had been one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, became Eastern and
Western. Now in the 16th century, with the shattering of the Western Church and
the emergence of Protestantism, there was born a third major family and we have
it to this day, three major groupings, Protestantism having continued to splinter
until we could sing the song, "It’s a Many-Splintered Thing."
But, while there were differences between those three bodies, they maintained
the core that was arrived at in those early centuries, the doctrine of the Trinity,
the two natures of Jesus Christ, truly God, truly human, and much else they
shared. But, there were differences, as well, and good reason for division, of
course. But, there was one thing in which Orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic Church
and Protestantism were totally agreed, and that was that they were institutions
with absolute authority. If you ask an Orthodox Patriarch, he would say the
authority is in the ongoing tradition of the Church. If you would ask the Pope in
Rome, he would say the authority is in the teaching office of the Church which he
embodies. If you would ask John Calvin or Martin Luther, they would have said
the authority lies in the written word of God.
Whether it was tradition or Church or Bible, the whole Christian Church in the
16th century was a Church that was marked by authoritarian claim, the claim that
the content of its faith was the consequence of a supernatural revelation from
heaven, and what the Church taught was to be accepted on the basis of authority,
believed, and obeyed, not questioned. You did not need to think; you only needed
to understand what was already given, what was proclaimed, what was declared,
the dogmatic foundation of the Church.
Then the modern era dawned. Whenever one does a periodization of history,
there will be fuzzy boundaries and some disagreement, but I think that we can
say without too much fear of refutation that the modern era of which we are still a
part, although people talk about the post-modern phase we’re in, nonetheless, we
are modern people and the modern era began about 1650, the middle point of the
17th century to the present, and the modern period was marked by the throwing
off of all forms of authoritarian claim and the insistence on the empirical
observation and investigation of all truth claims. While that modern movement
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Richard A. Rhem
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began with the advent of the natural sciences, and Francis Bacon formulated the
scientific method in the early stages, those scientific investigations did not seem
to challenge Church doctrine, but what happened immediately was a new way of
thinking, a new way of knowing, and the movement from the medieval world to
the modern world represents a seismic shift in human history and human
culture. Modernity, of which we are a part, is marked by critical thinking. We
don’t take statements, dogmatic statements or claims just because they are
uttered on the basis of some authority, be it tradition or Church or Bible. We
investigate; we experiment; we think critically about the question, and this is so
much a part of us that we don’t even think about it. It is that which marks the
whole modern period and it marks you and me in all the rest of our lives, except
not always in our religious experience. But that seismic shift in culture, in the way
of knowing and what could be known, marked the beginning of a serious
challenge to the Christian tradition.
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of great fame, demolished the proofs for
the existence of God, the philosophical proofs for the existence of God. His
purpose was positive; he was not anti-religious, but he wanted to show that that
way of thinking, thinking then that we had proved God’s existence, was a dead
end. He said, “I have destroyed knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
There was a young preacher in Berlin at that time who read Kant, imbibed Kant,
and recognized that the nub of the problem for the Christian tradition, now that
the modern age had dawned, was the question of authority. Friedrich
Schleiermacher was a brilliant, witty, socially desirable kind of an individual who
was assigned to be the preacher in a great hospital in Berlin, and was invited into
the social circles of that great city. He was a preacher, he was a Christian, he was
brilliant (sounds like an oxymoron, but in this case, that was true), and the
cultured, educated, sophisticated society of Berlin invited him to be a part of their
circles. They enjoyed him, and he ran with them very well. But he was a Christian,
he was a preacher, and on his 29th birthday they surprised him with a party and
they gave him a challenge and said, "Write an account of how you can still be
religious, Christian, a preacher."
He accepted the challenge and at the age of 31 published what is now a classic, On
Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers. He knew his friends. He knew what
they thought of him; he knew they thought religion was passé, and he took the
challenge right to them. He began in the first speech, of which there are five, by
saying to them, "Look, relax. I’m not going to quote the Bible; I’m not going to
quote the Church; I’m not going to quote the tradition. I am going to speak to you
as a human being; I am going to speak out of my experience, and what I am going
to say to you is rooted in my own being, in my own experience." Then he took off,
and in so doing, what Schleiermacher did was to turn the whole tradition of the
Christian Church 180 degrees for, up until that time, until the modern era, and
even at his time and even to the present, the Church, by and large across the
board, has operated on the basis of authoritarian claims, some divine revelation
that has come out of heaven embodied in a tradition, in a Church, in a book.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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Schleiermacher gave all of that up, stood, as it were, naked before his friends, and
claimed his faith and his religion as the authentic and deepest expression of his
humanity. Schleiermacher recognized that Kant had blocked the road to
dogmatic speculation and therefore if one was going to be religious after Kant,
the ground of that religious experience would have to rest in the believing
individual. And in very brilliant and sophisticated fashion, he argued for the
rooting of religion in the human subject. His claim was that to be human is to
have the feeling of absolute dependence. We didn’t create ourselves; we can’t
sustain ourselves; we are totally dependent, totally dependent on some gracious
ground that has given us life and supports and keeps us, and it was
Schleiermacher’s contention that, in those moments when that sense of
dependence comes into focus, one knows oneself to be in communion with God.
God is that foundation, that infinite mystery that upholds all, the origin and
foundation of all that is and, in the moments of our human dependency, almost
mystical moments of awareness, one knows oneself dependent which,
Schleiermacher says, is to know oneself to be in communion with God.
That synopsis hardly does justice to what Schleiermacher did in a very profound
fashion, but what he had done was radical, for he had moved from an
authoritarian claim for religious truth to a personal testimony to its reality in his
own experience. He is called the Father of Modern Theology because, in that
significant shift, he made the whole game new, and he paved the way for the
theological development of the last 200 years. You can cite all of the great names
of the theologians who have spoken and written and you will find traces of
Schleiermacher; he was the initiator. Of course, there was a counter to him; he
was rejected by many. There was a reaction, a conservative reaction and an
orthodox, confessional Church reaction against him, but nonetheless, he had
sounded a new note and he had put his finger on the problem of modernity, an
era in which we, as naturally as breathing, think, use our heads, use common
sense, and he said that goes not only when you are sending a rocket to the moon
or structuring a community education program, but that goes, as well, when you
are seeking the communion of God. He would have agreed with the statement we
used here a few weeks ago, that the heart cannot finally find true what the mind
finds false.
I find it fascinating, as I in my 64th year visit Schleiermacher seriously, that no
one ever told me that the long and tortuous pilgrimage that has been my own to
try to be a true believer with my mind engaged, was engaged and set forth
powerfully and eloquently 200 years ago. There has been in the Eastern
Orthodox tradition, the Roman Catholic tradition, and the Protestant tradition,
and all of its forms, mainline and fundamental (this is my contention now), there
has been a continuing within a medieval mind set never yet facing the acids of
modernity. I do not think the institutional Church as a whole has ever come to
terms with the modern era marked by critical thinking, even though it was done
beautifully 200 years ago.
© Grand Valley State University
�When the Foundation Gives Way
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
Why didn’t Schleiermacher carry the day totally across the board? A question well
worth contemplating. I really don’t know, but I know this matter of authority is
absolutely critical and it’s not a new issue. The Hebrew prophets spoke a word
from God, a word that possessed them. Jeremiah stood up on the Temple steps
and said, "The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the
Lord, you repeat this like a chant. You think your safety and security lies here. Let
me tell you, God doesn’t need this institution. God doesn’t need your religious
ritual. Go to Shiloh and see its ruins. See what I did there, and I’ll do it to your
temple, too, because of a lack of authenticity in your religious life."
Jesus was in the line of the prophets, and when he was engaged with the leaders
of the religion of his day, they began to cross-examine him. They were lying in
wait to catch him in everything he said. He cried out against the sterile formalism
of that institutional religion and he became a very threatening voice in the midst
of Jerusalem, coming finally to that last prophetic action when he cleansed the
temple and that triggered the religious authorities to come and say just that, "By
what authority do you do this?" And Jesus said, "Well, tell me about John the
Baptist. What was his authority?" They didn’t dare answer because if they said
from heaven, he would have said, "Why didn’t you follow him? Why didn’t you
believe?" And if they said it’s a human authority, they would have been stoned by
the people because John the Baptist also had a voice that had authenticity that
resonated with people’s experience, that spoke to them where they were and they
believed that he was a prophet of God. If you read through the Gospels, you find
more than one reference where Jesus is spoken of as having the people
spellbound because he spoke as one who had authority and not as the scribes and
the Pharisees.
Of course, it’s not an easy question; it’s not an easy problem, my friend. If you
have an institutional church and you are responsible for the institution, then you
can’t let any crackerjack come rolling through who has a vision. Or, at least, you
have to discern whether or not this voice is a voice that rings with authenticity, or
whether it’s just some fanatic. The question of authority is a critical question.
How do you know?
I submit to you that the problem of authority was dealt with in the only way it can
be dealt with in a healthy fashion by Schleiermacher 200 years ago, whose
authority, he said, rested in his own religious experience. Anything other than
that will tend to sterility and rigidity and will end up killing the prophets.
Schleiermacher is a marvelous figure, one of a small handful of truly great spirits
in 2000 years and, as he spoke to his friends, the cultured despisers of religion,
he laid his heart bare, and he said to them "You’ve rejected something, but what
you have rejected is not the real thing. The real thing is that which makes you
human; the real thing is that which gives depth, dimension to life; the real thing
is that which unifies your experience and creates meaning; the real thing is the
verve and the center and the joy of life. Without religion, you are simply an
animal with reason." And he also believed in preaching; he was a great preacher,
© Grand Valley State University
�When the Foundation Gives Way
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
a loved preacher, and he filled the Church in Berlin. He said to his people, "My
preaching is simply my testimony, and that testimony triggers in others who
desire a like kind of experience, and there is formed a community," and that very
positive sense of his Christian experience and the shared experience of the
community for which he was the preacher was so dynamic and so powerful in his
day, and when at the age of 66 he died of a lung infection, there was weeping
throughout the city; 20,000 to 30,000 people lined the streets as his coffin was
moved through the streets, and they wept from every window and every balcony
because this man had spoken to them, not of some hollow religious experience,
but something that touched them in the depths of their being, enabling them, in a
modern age marked by critical thinking, yet to find experience of that intimate
and mysterious ground of all being, full of grace, which for Schleiermacher and
the Christian church was embodied in Jesus.
Why? Why have we not been able in 200 years to do as he did? Why, out of fear
and reaction, do we trundle back into fundamentalism and absolute claims, when
if we would only trust our experience, we would know the touch of grace of the
living God and live with hope and joy?
References:
Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, 1797.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2c686ac5433457c1ac38324b75975dd7.mp3
44884c4ec4abf724bc282b6c589769d3
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/.
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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
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
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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>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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English
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Sound
Text
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KII-01
Coverage
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
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Event
Pentecost XV
Series
Good News Then and Now
Scripture Text
Jeremiah 7:4, Luke 20:2
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
References
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, 1797.
Dublin Core
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KII-01_RA-0-19990829
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1999-08-29
Title
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Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way?
Creator
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Richard A. Rhem
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Grand Valley State University
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
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eng
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Text
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audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 29, 1999 entitled "Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way?", as part of the series "Good News Then and Now", on the occasion of Pentecost XV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Jeremiah 7:4, Luke 20:2.
Authority
Critical Thinking
History of Christian Dogma
Modernity
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f742aa537b078780033ef7e13a086539.pdf
d81960265235f52ac041368b5da95c17
PDF Text
Text
Journey With Us Toward New Horizons
Text: Genesis 12:1; Hebrews 11:8, 10
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
September 13, 1998
Transcription of the spoken sermon
This is always a wonderful Sunday for us. There is a vibrancy in the air and
electricity; there is anticipation, and so we have a moment again of new
beginnings - new beginnings for the church year, for the educational year, for a
new intentionality and seriousness in making this place a place of deep reflection,
a place of education, study, taking faith seriously and trying to create a whole
congregation of theologians. The invitation this year is COME, JOURNEY WITH
US - Toward New Horizons. The image is that of the journey, which is a biblical
image, very common biblical image of the life of faith, the pilgrimage of faith.
And, Toward New Horizons - it is always so for the people of God, always called,
as was Abraham, to go into the future, claiming the future by faith, with
confidence, because of the one who calls us.
Today I want to think with you about thinking the faith, about the serious
wrestling with the Christian tradition, so that it is more than a matter of rote,
recitation, and simple perfunctory, habitual action, but that it is that which arises
out of the center of our being and is pursued with dedication and commitment,
with seriousness. Next week Peter will talk to you about another aspect of that
journey, which is the whole matter of spiritual formation, for it is not enough to
think the faith. There is a hunger within all of us for the experience of God, the
experience of faith. On the third week, Bob will call you to compassionate action,
because the faith that we think and the God that we experience is not simply a
luxury to be enjoyed in splendid isolation, but is that which shapes us and forms
us to be instruments of God for the carrying out of God’s purpose of compassion
and justice and love in this world. So, it is a time of new beginning. At Christ
Community, we are on a journey. It has ever been so. But, it is so in a new,
serious manner as we speak, because we have a new charter of freedom and a
great opportunity to find that translation of the Christian tradition that finds
resonance with our contemporary experience. That is what we are trying to do.
As Gary Eberle, in his book, The Geography of Nowhere, has said, "The old maps
don’t work anymore. The early cartography you’ve seen in books, the shape of a
world as it was conceived, those maps were wrong. They were based on an
© Grand Valley State University
�Journey With Us to New Horizons Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
inadequate understanding of the physical universe. But the mapmakers did, in
the forming of those maps, have a sense of orientation, and those maps did help
people to have an understanding of where they were in the world. We know today
that those old maps are archaic. They’re simply wrong. And today we have this
global positioning system where you can be steaming in a boat in the middle of
Lake Michigan and turn that on and from a satellite it will point out exactly where
you are. In such a day, in such an age where we can pinpoint our location on the
planet, we recognize that there are many of us who don’t really know where we
are. Because the old institutions have crumbled, and the old authority structures
have been called into question.
Just to create a little envy in those of you who aren’t going with us to Geneva this
afternoon, where we’ll spend a few days with the ghost of John Calvin over our
shoulder, and then, if you really want to get jealous, I would tell you that we’re
going down to Provence in the south of France, to lollygag on the Riviera. But, on
the way down, we’ll stop at Avignon and, in order to prepare a little bit for that
for the people going with us, I was reading again of that old church history and
was reminded that it was in the 1300s that the papacy moved out of Rome and
moved to the south of France, Avignon, and one of the old wonders that we’ll visit
and tour in another week is the Palace of the Popes, and it’s a very splendid place,
I understand. I have not seen it. But, the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was a
sign of the wealth of the papacy in the 1300s. This was the age of the domination
of the church and the papal structure found ways to tax and charge fees and to
gain money by hook or by crook, so that the income of one of those popes in those
60 or 70 years in which the papacy was in Avignon was better than three times
that of the king of France. (I’d always thought I’d wanted to be a Cardinal, but I
think I might as well go all the way and try to be a pope). My point in bringing
this up is that, in this time, the Pope was the most powerful person on earth. He
was a religious figure and the church dominated the continent of Europe, and the
kings groveled before the papal authority because the papal authority had the
keys of the kingdom. The papal authority could excommunicate a person and
shut them out of heaven. Or, on the other hand, open the gates of paradise.
Think of it. That was the world. The king groveled before the Pope because he
believed that the church was a divine institution on this earth that literally
controlled the gates of the kingdom. Now, if you have that kind of power, you can
do anything you want to, and you can control the masses, let alone the monarchs
of the earth. That was the world; that was what was believed. The kings groveled
before the religious authority, and it works if you believe it. And, if you believe it
and you have a dominating religious figure, you can control society, you can
manage people, you can manage morality, for example. They say that Moscow
was a very moral place during the heyday of the Communist regime. Dictators,
potentates, totalitarian powers can control people, and there are those who
believe that people need to be controlled. There, in Avignon, is a palace to witness
to the power and the authority of the religious authority that dominated the
world.
© Grand Valley State University
�Journey With Us to New Horizons Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
But also in Geneva is the memorial to the Reformation in which that institution
that had grown corrupt and fat began to crumble before the waves of reform. But,
even the Reformation would still, on the basis of authority, make the Bible the
authoritarian power that the Pope was in the Catholic communion. John Calvin
did everything he could with the elders of Geneva to control the morality of
Geneva. Authoritarian power and domination.
Well, is it any wonder that once that institutional form began to shatter that the
human spirit eventually emerged to a point where it threw off all kinds of
authoritarian hold? Isn’t it humanly understandable, isn’t it perfectly obvious,
human beings being who human beings are, that, where there is a crack or a
fissure in the structure and the daylight comes through, it will go like this? And so
we have the Age of Reason and we have the ascendency of the human intellect
and the honoring of human rationality to a fault, as we know in our postmodern
age, where we have come to recognize that the rational depiction of reality is only
a model and a fiction, as a matter of fact, and the human mind and human
rationality cannot get itself around the mystery that is life, the ultimate mystery.
Nonetheless, we are the products of that move to the modern and we are people
who take for granted that non-authoritarian way of living. Modern society will no
longer tolerate a church or a book or a tradition that shuts down its mind and
simply calls it blindly to follow through the labyrinths of life.
Robert Bellah, one of the most acute observers of society, a sociologist in this
country, in an essay about religious evolution, cited Tom Paine, at the Age of
Reason, who said, "My mind is the church," and Thomas Jefferson who said, "I
am a sect." Then Robert Bellah went on to say that the modern period has come
to accept the fact that people will join themselves voluntarily to institutions.
There is no compulsion for you to be here, to be a member of this institution, and
one of the marks of the church in our day is that its voluntary nature is
recognized. There is no longer that coercion. If you live in this block, you are not
automatically a member of this parish, and therefore coerced to be a part of its
institution. Robert Bellah says that private, voluntary, religious association in the
west achieved full legitimation for the first time in the early modern situation.
But then he goes on to say, in the full flowering of modernity, will there be
another kind of institutional structure that will be able to encompass the
freedom, even the autonomy of the human person? Will we find some kind of
institutional forms that will be supportive and helpful and give guidance and
direction, but apart from the kind of authoritarian control that was imposed from
the outside? He says, rather than interpreting these trends, this fragmentation in
society where we go our own way and start our own clubs and our own
denominations and our own congregations - rather than interpreting these terms
as significant of indifference, of secularization, I see in them the increasing
acceptance of the notion that individuals must work out their own ultimate
solutions and that the most the church can do is provide a favorable environment
for doing so without imposing on them a prefabricated set of answers.
© Grand Valley State University
�Journey With Us to New Horizons Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
Bellah says in the modern situation, the contemporary situation, it is the task of
the church to create here an arena, an ambience for the pursuit of the religious
quest, for the asking of the questions, for the struggle and the wrestling with the
issues of life, but no longer will it be tolerated that we impose upon you a
prefabricated structure of belief. That’s the way it was. That’s the way
traditionally it has been, and it will not work anymore, and we are simply at that
cutting age where we have accepted that fact, we celebrate that fact, and we invite
you to journey with us into a future that is unknown and uncharted, because that
is the very nature of the human pilgrimage of faith. Bellah says it remains to be
seen whether the freedom modern society implies at the cultural and personal, as
well as the social level, can be stably institutionalized in large-scale societies. Yet,
the very situation that has been characterized as one of the collapse of meaning
and the failure of moral standards can also, and I would argue, more fruitfully, be
viewed as one offering unprecedented opportunities for creative innovation in
every sphere of human action.
Now, that’s the very same note that was sounded earlier when I read that excerpt
from Gary Eberle. Will there be, out in the future, some reconfiguration of the
institutional life of the human family that will be able to embrace our questions
and our quest? Who knows? But, one thing we know - you cannot go back to
yesterday. To go back to yesterday, you might as well go back to Avignon. You
might try to re-invent a world where the Pope can subdue the king or the
President. But it won’t work. And I don’t want to go back to such a world. I want
to be able to think. I want my own belief and my own faith to rise out of the
center of my own being; I want to believe what I believe. I want to be able to think
about it so that what I believe is what I really think, so that I really believe it, so
that it’s a reflection of the authenticity of my humanness. No one is going to put it
on me. Not an institution, not a book, not a tradition. I’ll use the institution for
every value it has; I’ll value this book and study it and mine its treasures; I’ll
respect that tradition and gain all of its wisdom, all the wisdom I can from it. But,
it will finally be my journey, my pilgrimage, my faith, my insight, because it’s my
life! And I invite you to journey with me, and to think about it, so that it is a
thought-full journey of faith.
I’m afraid that in many churches today, the situation in our country will be
berated and the President will be berated and all of that despair will be
everywhere. Well, that’s the very time for the people of God, recognizing our total
vulnerability, all of us, recognizing the weakness in the heart and center of all of
us, recognizing that the decay and the distortion that is present everywhere is not
the consequence of some fall from perfection, but is simply the clinging of the
slime and the mud from which we’re emerging.
I believe in the future! Because I believe in God! I believe in the human family
because I believe the Spirit of God is nudging us, beckoning us ever onward. I
believe in a world of the future marked by justice and by grace and by compassion
because that’s in this book. This book tells me that the image is the journey. We
© Grand Valley State University
�Journey With Us to New Horizons Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
are on the way. Abraham was called to go out, not knowing where he was going to
go. He was 75 years old and married to a barren woman. When God would start a
new beginning out of the chaos of Genesis, of the garden scene, of the flood scene,
of the Babel scene - when God would start a new beginning, when God would
form a people, he starts with human impossibility; he starts with an old man and
a barren womb in order to create newness. And the writer to the Hebrews was
writing to an early church in the wake of Jesus. People who were followers of
Jesus, but who were getting weak knees, who looked about them and were
becoming dismayed, who didn’t know if they could hold on anymore, and he said,
"Hold on. Be strong. Faith is the conviction of things not seen, it is the evidence
of things hoped for." Look at old Abraham. Look at Sarah. They went out; they
didn’t know where they were going, but they simply heard the voice of God and
they followed to be the people of God.
To be a biblical people is to be a people not settled, not fixed, not set in concrete.
It is to be a people who are on pilgrimage, who don’t know what the future holds,
who are willing to take all the tradition and all the wisdom of the book and all of
the institutional forms and use them for all they’re worth, but to submit to none
of them, not to submit one’s mind and one’s heart. It is to be a person who
believes, who thinks and who goes, confident, because God is God.
That’s where we’re going, by God. Then, don’t despair. Don’t let your tail drag.
Stiffen the weak knees. Let there be a glint in your eye. Believe in the future;
believe in possibilities; believe and know, as Bob offered in his prayer, that we
create our future because we recognize that we don’t stand here as puppets on a
string, but as responsible human beings who are called to journey and faith
toward new horizons with confidence and joy.
References:
Robert Bellah, “Religion in Human Evolution,” American Sociological Review,
1964.
Gary Eberle. The Geography of Nowhere: Finding Oneself in the Postmodern
World. Sheed and Ward, 1995.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6b9904f980350aae45c887eb22ca4d2f.mp3
50fc5e996b23d211fb70cbb1f8fde47f
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/.
Title
A name given to the resource
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
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
KII-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1981-2014
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Event
Pentecost XV
Scripture Text
Genesis 12:1, Hebrews 11,8,10
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
References
Robert Bellah, "Religion in Human Evolution," American Sociological Review, 1964
Gary Eberle. The Geography of Nowhere: Finding Oneself in the Postmodern World, 1995.
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/.
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KII-01_RA-0-19980913
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1998-09-13
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Journey With Us Toward New Horizons
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Richard A. Rhem
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Grand Valley State University
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
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eng
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A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on September 13, 1998 entitled "Journey With Us Toward New Horizons", on the occasion of Pentecost XV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Genesis 12:1, Hebrews 11,8,10.
Authority
History of Church
Journey of Faith
Modernity
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7343baf68ec2d1edecdc8126ef3e9296.pdf
c1acdd19689a14c2f35f52c77378d5aa
PDF Text
Text
Two Hundred Years of Theology, Report of a Personal Journey
by Hendrikus Berkhof
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989, translation by John Vriend of
200 Jahre Theologie: Ein Reisebericht, 1985)
1990 Book Review
“A Personal Perspective on a Personal Journey”
By
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Publication of Review Unknown
On Christmas, 1990, I spoke with Hendrikus Berkhof. His voice was strong, his mind
clear; over the telephone one would not have known but that it was the same “Henk,”
full of questions, intensely interested in all that was happening in the world and in the
church – and, as always, there was his genuine interest in all that concerned me, my
family and church. It was good to hear him thus, but even so I knew he was home for
only a few hours from the nursing home where he now makes his home.
On May 26 Hendrikus Berkhof was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage that left him
unconscious for two weeks and hospitalized into September. I flew over to see him and
his dear wife Corry the first week in July. During those days I could see him make a
turn. He recognized me immediately and immediately spoke to me in English, although
in very weak voice. With his one good arm he reached out to touch my face, a kind of
blessing, realizing I had come to be with him. Paralyzed on his left side, he cannot yet
walk and how much progress remains to be made cannot be predicted at this point. My
Christmas conversation, however, convinced me that he will keep up the struggle; that
great mind and heart will not be muted.
Perhaps the most moving aspect of our conversation was his expression of deep
gratitude to God whose grace has been experienced richly as Henk and Corry have
traversed this valley. In September they celebrated their golden anniversary. With his
four children and their families gathered around him he spoke of the goodness and
grace of God and God’s faithfulness in the present adversity. That this should be the case
is no surprise to me; rather, it is precisely what I should have expected from this
Christian gentleman, theologian, preacher, churchman and, for me, mentor and dear
friend.
© Grand Valley State University
�Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 2 of 41
One of the highest privileges of my life has been the opportunity to study under
Hendrikus Berkhof for four years in Leiden and then subsequently to know the richness
of intimate friendship with him and Corry. In 1989 we spent ten days together in
Scotland, studying together and touring the Highlands. He spoke of our special
relationship and denied that it could any longer be termed that of mentor/student. But
of course I know better. He will always be my teacher. More than any other he has
shaped me as a theologian and pastor.
It was thus with great pleasure that I accepted the assignment of reviewing Two
Hundred Years of Theology, with the request that I do more than review the book but
also give a personal portrait of the author.
I received this work almost as a personal gift from my teacher. The two hundred years
he surveys from his own personal perspective is precisely the course of theological
development I studied with him from 1967 -1970. His Christian Faith, which, after five
reprintings, was revised in 1986, will obviously stand as his statement of the Christian
faith as it comes to expression within the Reformed tradition in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. But Two Hundred Years of Theology reveals the man in the passion
of his life – to bring to expression the Gospel in such a fashion that it engages the minds
and hearts of the contemporary generation.
Obviously, to survey two hundred years of theology is to reflect on that endeavor to
bring the Gospel to expression over many generations. But the sharp focus of the study
consists precisely in the manner in which that task was executed in the several
generations surveyed. There was much that transpired during the two-hundred-year
period that receives no attention or is mentioned only in passing. Berkhof makes no
claim to give a full review of theological inquiry for the period. His intention, clearly
stated, is to trace the respective attempts to bridge the Gospel proclamation and modern
thought.
Ever and again and with increasing intensity I asked myself how, speaking
generally, these two can coexist.... (p. xi)
Modern thought, set in opposition to the Gospel, is the thought that arose in the epoch
of the Enlightenment. (Berkhof uses the term “post-Enlightenment” to designate the
two hundred years under review. That should not be confused with the designation of
our present time as the Post-Enlightenment period in the sense of moving beyond the
assumptions of the Enlightenment). Berkhof’s focus is theological thought in face of the
assumptions of the Enlightenment.
In the eighteenth century...modern thought assumed the position of leadership in
European culture. Since then, as “self-evident” truth in cultured circles, it
stripped from the Christian worldview its halo of self-evident truth which it had
held in Europe for almost a thousand years. (p. xii)
© Grand Valley State University
�Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, Review by Richard A. Rhem
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Berkhof was nurtured in the Reformed tradition as it came to expression in the
Calvinism of the Netherlands. At the close of a long and fruitful career in the church and
the university, preaching and teaching Christian faith, Berkhof surveys the dialogue of
Christian theology and modern thought over the past two hundred years to satisfy his
own curiosity first of all, for he recognizes that his whole ministry has been the
articulation of the faith in the face of modern thought in the wake of the Enlightenment
which overthrew all authoritarian structures in state and church and declared the
autonomy of the human person. Berkhof’s strength and great gift to the Reformed
tradition and the whole church is the articulation of the faith in face of modern thought,
having earned his right to address the contemporary scene because of the seriousness
with which he has grappled with modern thought, doing so with sensitivity, genuinely
seeking to hear and understand; doing so with openness and humility, seeking insight
on the way to a deeper grasp of truth; doing so with appreciation for the positive aspects
of the broader culture.
In his effort to understand and in his honest appreciation for the modern world of
Western civilization he never lost sight of the fundamental contradiction of the
sovereign and gracious Creator and the creaturely claim to autonomy – the
discontinuity between God and humankind, the impossible gulf that separates the two, a
gulf that can be bridged only from the side of God as an act of pure grace, a gulf that has
been bridged in Jesus Christ.
For me, coming under the tutelage of a person of such breadth of scholarship who
evidenced at the same time a deeply personal Christian experience and commitment to
the faith in its Reformed perspective, but with the enrichment of broad ecumenical
appreciation, it was a whole new world. I was amazed at the gap in my own theological
education: thorough through the sixteenth century but almost totally lacking in the
whole development of modern thought, the thought patterns that have shaped the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thought patterns that must be engaged in any
responsible proclamation of the Gospel in the contemporary world.
I may have been at fault, not being ready or willing to hear the claims of philosophical
thinking in the wake of the Enlightenment. What I missed completely, for whatever
reason, was the factor that changes everything – the rise of historical consciousness that
developed on the continent in the eighteenth century and led to what is now taken for
granted in our culture, namely, that all biblical, theological, philosophical and
ideological statements are conditioned by the historical context in which they arise.
Fortunately, when the force of this revolution in human understanding took hold of me,
I was under the careful and caring guidance of one whose whole life has been a
passionate pursuit of bringing to expression the grace of God as it has been manifested
in the ambiguity of the historical situation. Two things became strikingly evident to me:
my own orthodox Reformed faith understanding was not a timeless expression of
eternal truth but a timely confession of Christian faith shaped in the tumultuous
context of sixteenth-century Europe. Secondly, the whole development of modern
theology which I had viewed negatively, as threat, was an attempt to translate the
© Grand Valley State University
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gospel into terms that took cognizance of the Copernican turn in human
understanding effected by critical analyses of the knowing process and by the rise of
historical consciousness. In other words, it was an attempt to do what the church is
always called to do – to articulate the gospel in every generation and in the context of
every historical epoch.
From Hendrikus Berkhof I learned to listen with appreciation and openness to the
broad spectrum of expressions of the Christian faith in the respective periods in which
they were articulated. I learned, to borrow Clarence Becker’s phrase, that “the climate of
opinion” in any given period is so powerful and controlling that often an honest attempt
to bring the gospel to expression will end poorly with only a truncated message coming
through. But even so I learned to value the effort and to learn, both from those efforts
that were somewhat successful, and from those that lost the message in a maze of
human reasoning.
Hendrikus Berkhof is a gifted scholar. To read Two Hundred Years of Theology, one
recognizes immediately that one is reading an author who has a thorough grasp of the
subject matter, who has fully digested the thought of the persons about whom he writes
and that, with an encyclopedic grasp of the thought development, he is not content
simply to render a survey but rather goes on to critique, to question and finally to put his
own feet down over against that which he has set forth. His own account of the faith
which one finds in his Christian Faith is thus his own; arising out of a thorough grasp of
the tradition out of which he speaks, the whole development of dogma in the history of
the church, and a broad engagement with modern thought.
The thinkers whom he treats in Two Hundred Years,
…tried, more or less deliberately, to build a bridge between the gospel and their
secularized cultural environment, but did they succeed? Were they able to
translate the gospel into modern language such that it could again be heard and
understood in intellectual circles and elicit a genuine yes or no? But who is able
to judge whether they achieved this goal? We probably cannot say more than this:
from where we stand now, this or that attempt seems to us successful or
unsuccessful. Such assessment is important, for we are in the same situation and
can learn, both in a positive and in a negative way, from preceding generations.
(p. xiii)
Berkhof invites us to join him in his personal journey through two hundred years.
Beginning with Kant, Berkhof recognizes that the dialogue of theology and modern
thought is a dialogue between theology and philosophy. The great German philosophical
tradition was carried on by those who had genuine theological interest and involvement.
From the development of philosophy, theologians gained knowledge of the modern
person’s understanding of life. Throughout the study Berkhof will again and again point
to the Lebensgefühl, life understanding, sense of life, that was influential in shaping
theological expression. His survey will highlight those persons who acknowledged the
© Grand Valley State University
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new situation for theology after the critical analysis of the knowing process by
Immanuel Kant and insight in the milieu of modern thought to proclaim the gospel.
Before we can fully appreciate the seismic shift in philosophical and theological thought
effected by Kant’s critical analysis of the knowing process we need some sense of the
pre-modern world.
With the overwhelming influence of Aristotelian philosophy brought to the west by
Averroës in the twelfth century, the Church was faced with the necessity of proclaiming
its message in some sort of accommodation with Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas provided
the synthesis which made room for Christian theology in an Aristotelian intellectual
climate. This was a major accomplishment but the synthesis exacted a price: reality was
now split into two realities, nature and supernature. A virtual metaphysical dualism was
constructed separating the heavenly sphere from the earthly. For the latter, reason
reigned supreme; the former was accessible to faith. Thus a bifurcation of reality
resulted in a bifurcation of the knowing process. This split in reality would bear bitter
fruit but it did forestall the onset of atheistic thought which became a dominant stream
of modern thought in the period surveyed by Berkhof.
Berkhof begins his personal journey with the critical analysis of epistemology by
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is broadly
acknowledged as the foundational work of German philosophy and, Berkhof contends, it
must also be valued “as a radical new beginning for evangelical theology.”
As a result of its appearance, orthodox scholasticism, rationalism, and
supernaturalism found that, at a single stroke, the road forward had been
blocked. In addition, the appearance of Kant’s Critique meant...the birth of the
new theology, or rather: the modern way of posing questions, and modern
methodology, in theology. (p. 1f)
The pre-modern worldview had achieved a harmony between nature and grace, reason
and faith, Aquinas offering the consummate articulation of that harmony. As James
Miller writes:
By the eve of the birth of modern culture, the relation between Aristotelian
science (including a geocentric cosmological model developed by the secondcentury astronomer Ptolemy) and Christian theology had become so integral that
it was virtually impossible to determine where one stopped and the other began.
As a consequence, it was difficult to see how a philosophical or cosmological
challenge to the system of Aristotelian natural philosophy could be anything less
than a challenge to theological orthodoxy as well. Thus, the stage was set for the
Copernican-Galilean controversy out of which modern culture emerged and in
which natural science as a discipline became independent of the intellectual or
theological authority of the Christian church. (Postmodern Theology, p. 2)
Separating Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic harmonization of the natural and the
supernatural and Immanuel Kant are four centuries which saw the Renaissance turning
© Grand Valley State University
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to the human subject, the Reformation which could only have happened in a culture
already permeated by Renaissance influence but which some would contend was a
detour, a conservative reaction rather than a development of the ferment of the fifteenth
century, and the birth of modern philosophy in the work of Descartes. The linkage
between the pre-modern culture described above and Kant’s critical philosophy,
however, should not be missed.
The Enlightenment was the flowering of the Renaissance turning to the human subject.
The bold declaration was the autonomy of the human person no longer under the
tutelage of authoritarian structures, be they ecclesiastical (church or Scripture) or sociopolitical. The early representatives of philosophy had never at the onset of the modern
period remained faithful to the church and lived in two houses: their critical analysis of
thought and scientific experimentation was carried on in the autonomy of human
reason; their spiritual existence was the appropriation of God’s grace, mediated through
the church – this tidy possibility provided by Thomas’ dual structure of reality. It was
not long however before the modern thinker found the supernatural realm optional; the
autonomous human person found that critical rationality was quite sufficient to deal
with “the real world;” the church remained a spiritual home for those who needed it.
Enter Immanuel Kant. This is the beginning point of Berkhof’s journey because Kant’s
analysis of the human knowing process changed everything. In his Critique of Pure
Reason he destroyed the traditional proofs for the existence of God and struck terror in
the hearts of conservative theologians. Actually his purpose was positive. He himself
wrote, “I therefore had to abolish knowledge in order to make room for belief.” For him
faith and knowledge were complementary. They were separate but connected and both
were necessary. It is Berkhof’s contention that it was “Kant’s purpose to save religion as
well as the Enlightenment: in this double objective, we think, lay his deepest passion as
a thinker.” (p. 5)
Dividing the realm of knowledge into two fundamentally separate domains, he posited
the world of phenomena and the world of the noumena. The former was accessible to
human reason – empirical knowledge which was not a direct mirror of the natural world
but the product of the interaction of the knowing mind and the data of the senses. This
he called the knowledge of the phenomenal world.
The noumenal world consisted of things in themselves – the world apart from the
activity of the knowing subject – that which simply was not available to empirical
verification because no sensory experience was possible. For example, the universe as a
causal whole, the human self as a free agent, and God. Yet precisely these three realities
must exist, must be true. To cite James Miller again:
Therefore, though knowledge of the world as a whole, of the self, and of God were
denied by Kant, faith in them, he argued, was absolutely necessary for practical
reasons.
(Postmodern Theology, p. 5)
© Grand Valley State University
�Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, Review by Richard A. Rhem
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This assertion was set forth in his second critical work, The Critique of Practical
Reason. It is this fundamental dualism that has characterized modern culture; it is the
inheritance of the Enlightenment and it is the “climate of opinion” that has dominated
the modern period, the milieu in which two hundred years of theology has been
executed.
How did the Gospel come to expression in light of the limits of human knowing in a
world where the authority of tradition and Scripture was no longer self-evident? This is
Berkhof’s focus. He deals with the development of the German philosophical tradition
because German philosophers were so theologically self-conscious and aware: Fichte
and the beginning of the Romantic movement which included the great Schleiermacher
who remained a theologian and pastor and sought to articulate the Gospel to its
“cultured despisers,” many of whom made up his own circle of friends; and, of course,
Hegel in whom German Idealism reached its fullest expression. Berkhof is comfortably
at home in this philosophical dimension and is able to lift the philosophical threads that
shaped the theological tapestry of the nineteenth century. Without some degree of
philosophical orientation one can hardly begin to understand the theological thinking
that came to expression in this 200-year period – or in any period for that matter.
How can we understand Schleiermacher, regarded as the father of modern Protestant
theology, except in the background of Kant? If Kant successfully blocked the road to the
knowledge of God through rational enquiry, through metaphysical speculation, then
what road remains open and on what basis can knowledge of God be grounded?
Schleiermacher turned to the interior life of the individual – to “the feeling of absolute
dependence,” an experience he claimed was common to all humankind at some time or
other. As Berkhof is careful to point out, Schleiermacher was not claiming that
Christianity arose from the feeling of dependence; rather, this feeling is the human precondition for it. He was pointing to the place into which revelation enters.
Was he successful in bringing Christian faith to expression amidst its cultured
despisers? Berkhof observes,
One can hardly say that history proved him right. What he took such pains to
formulate as the method of theology after the Enlightenment has become,
consciously or unconsciously, the common property of the greater proportion of
theologians. But there were, and are, only very few “Schleiermachians.” The
actual execution of his design has prompted many to admire but few to imitate
him. For some it was too radical; for others too traditional; and, of course, both
possibilities were inherent in this method. (p. 46)
Berkhof entitled the chapter “Schleiermacher’s Direction” because he understands
Schleiermacher as having had a distinct base and goal.
The base was the modernity which he totally affirmed. The goal was redemption
in Christ, a subject which in his own time he wanted to express in all its fullness.
Throughout his lifetime he was on his way from that base to this goal. (p. 48)
© Grand Valley State University
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Berkhof’s sense is that he was so caught up with the base that it is questionable whether
he really reached his goal. Barth wrestled with Schleiermacher throughout his
remarkable career. Strong rejection alternates with obvious admiration as Barth deals
with this one who so strongly shaped the nineteenth century, which Barth had so
strongly rejected in his own radical turn from his inherited liberalism to the theology of
the Word. Berkhof, observing the whole movement from Schleiermacher to Barth,
renders the opinion that
They were both in motion from the same base (Woher) to the same goal
(Wohin)... (p. 49).
Only viewed thus in their commonality of concern, Berkhof contends, can the great
difference between them come to light. The delight and profit of accompanying Berkhof
on his journey is to learn from him the relationships and inter-connections that
constitute the theological landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He
concludes the chapter on Schleiermacher with this paragraph:
It is no accident that suddenly we have moved from Schleiermacher to our own
time. As the first to think through so deeply the problems of modern theology,
he is just as up-to-date and relevant for us as he was for his contemporaries.
Perhaps we have to say: more relevant. For in his day most theologians had as
yet no inkling of what the problems were and could therefore lightheartedly
shrug off Schleiermacher’s answers. The bigger the blueprint, the longer the
time before it takes effect. (p.49)
We will go on to deal with Ritschl and the line of German theological development, but
we must note here another alternative to Kant’s destruction of a reasoned proof of the
existence of God. Schleiermacher moved to the interior life of the human subject; the
Danish Lutheran theologian, Sören Kierkegaard, in strong reaction against Hegel’s
idealism, pointed to the concretely existing individual who is confronted by the
revelation of Jesus Christ and is called to conversion, to the leap of faith in the moment
of decision.
Sketching Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Berkhof writes,
Only in the paradox of the God-man can one lay hold of the unity of the eternal
and the historical; and this paradox is only acknowledged in faith. This faith has
nothing to do with one’s intelligence or will. It is itself as much a paradox as the
paradox with which it enters into a positive and happy relationship. Faith,
therefore, is purely a gift received in the “moment” in which the eternal appears
in time and by which the learner becomes “contemporaneous” with the teacher.
In this contemporaneity, this leap from sinful alienation from God into existence,
the historical distance from Jesus, who is now contemporaneous, falls away. (p.
74)
© Grand Valley State University
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Kierkegaard reacted strongly against Hegel not only, but also against confessional
orthodoxy of his day, for there too, he claimed, the individual was pushed aside just as
much by universal and objective truths.
Berkhof sees Kierkegaard as an important figure in the relationship between culture and
gospel:
He brought the Christian faith into conflict with the Zeitgeist, doing this,
however, in the concepts of that time. Having in his language become an idealist
to the idealists, he proclaimed to them the faith in a new way so that it no longer
appeared to them as something antiquated but as a stumbling block and folly. He
did not do this by way of a fresh interpretation of dogma and tradition.... The new
and contemporary dimension consisted in the fact that he focused the whole of
revelation on the goal of subjectivity and by that means placed it in a new light.
(p. 76)
Was Kierkegaard the “most thoroughly reflective completion of pietism”? Berkhof raises
the question but notes this critical difference:
Whereas pietism presupposed and maintained the orthodox system of doctrine,
Kierkegaard made its content existential.
Kierkegaard failed to impact his own time and subsequent decades took little note of
him, but the alternative he posed to both the liberalism flowing from Hegel’s idealism
and confessional orthodoxy came to flower in the twentieth century in the early Barth
and in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann.
Following a discussion of Hegel and the Hegelian left, those thinkers that moved from
Hegel’s system to atheism, Berkhof discusses “the after-effects of idealism in theology,”
portraying the two streams that issued in confessionalism and liberalism. Berkhof
points out:
Two theological points of view were dominant here...: One could either, in
company with Hegel, look in Christianity for the truth of universal reason (and
run the risk of subordinating the gospel to the spirit of culture (Kulturgeist), or
one could join Schleiermacher in proceeding from the independent source and
nature of the gospel (and run the danger of isolating the gospel from the culture).
This contrast led to two distinct theological schools. (p. 62)
The first school, the liberal wing, Berkhof designates as the “Hegelian school” but he
does not deal with this line because it lies outside his sharp focus. The second school,
“the confessional group, the theology of mediation, gets major treatment because
precisely here the bridge between gospel and culture was the center. The roots of this
theology lie in Schleiermacher but there was little of the brilliance of Schleiermacher
and the effectiveness of the movement was slight in terms of negotiating a dialogue with
© Grand Valley State University
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culture. It did serve to strengthen the church – it was, in Berkhof’s words “an
ecclesiastical modality;” it had “a saving influence internally.”
Both the liberal and mediating theological groups declined abruptly with the rise of
Ritschl’s influence in the 1870’s. This causes Berkhof to raise questions directly related
to his own special interest.
Both schools wanted to translate Christian truth into the idiom of modern
consciousness (Lebensgefühl). And for both, this Lebensgefühl was
unquestionably the atmosphere created by German idealistic philosophy. In that
regard, however, both were fundamentally wrong. Already when those schools
arose, idealism was close to its demise. (p. 68)
The important insight here is that theologians that valued being up-to-date – related to
the climate of opinion of the day – failed to sense that their cultural context was moving
beyond them. Here is Berkhof’s statement:
The worlds of Feuerbach and Comte, of Marx and Engels, the achievements of
science, technology, and industry, the struggle of the working class, the “signs of
the times” of 1848, and later the German translation of Darwin’s main work
(1863) – all these events and influences occurred out of the hearing range of
theological studies and lecture halls.... The theologians could not find a point of
contact in the new empiricistic, naturalistic, and atheistic culture of Europe, as
they had found it in the world of idealism. (p. 68)
Berkhof does not fault theologians alone for this failure to sense where modern thought
was going. Even “enlightened” members of the educated class shrank back from the
forward movement of Enlightenment thought. Idealism as far back as the Hellenistic
beginnings of the church, seemed the gospel’s native air; with this new intellectual
climate there seemed no possibility of establishing a relationship.
Albrecht Ritschl, according to Berkhof, was the first “to fling a plausible bridge in
German theology to the Lebensgefühl of realism.” In the decade of the 1870’s Ritschl’s
work had a major impact because, Berkhof contends, “what many scholars had felt
unconsciously came suddenly to the surface: liberal and mediating theology had
attempted to relate the gospel to a world that was no longer there.” What these
theologians in both camps failed to recognize was that to make the gospel audible in the
modern world requires the change of conceptual apparatus and theological language
with the changing cultural climate and this means as well that any such theological
construction will, given time, become obsolete.
Berkhof gives a sympathetic treatment of Ritschl, acknowledging his considerable
shortcomings, but valuing him for his serious effort to give voice to the gospel in a
shifting cultural scene.
© Grand Valley State University
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The cultural mood in Germany turned more and more to the world of experience
and the natural laws governing it. The reality of space and time gained much
more weight and a much clearer autonomy than an idealistically disposed mind
could handle. Still, this reality was not experienced in a deterministic fashion.
The experience of the mechanisms of nature went hand in hand with a strong
sense of progress, of human freedom and power. Humanity is clearly not a
product and plaything of the powers of nature but superior to them as their ruler.
By utilizing the predictable laws of nature humanity can establish a realm of
progress that becomes ever more free. (p. 115f)
This was the cultural mood into which Ritschl addressed his theological understanding.
He moved from Hegelian idealism to open-minded research utilizing the historicalcritical method. He was serious, disciplined, wanting to be “heart and soul, a believing
Christian, and at the same time belonging with the entire fabric of his life to his own
culture and time.”
Turning from Hegelian idealism to Kant’s critical idealism, he fluctuated in his
relationship to Kant but seemed finally convinced that metaphysics and natural theology
were no longer options. He held that the knowledge of God is realized only in the act of
faith – faith directed toward the saving activity of Christ. Religious knowledge he
claimed consists in value judgments, a term by which he is best known and most
misunderstood. Berkhof cites him thus: “It is the duty of theology to conserve the special
characteristics of the conception of God, namely, that it can only be represented in
value-judgments.” Berkhof observes:
He intends to maintain the uniqueness of the Christian faith as a way of access to
the “conception of God” through trust in Jesus Christ – apart from any ground
other than that given in the unity of revelation and faith. In that context he
utilized Kant to the extent Kant is useful... (p. 121)
Berkhof defends Ritschl against a common misunderstanding that with the concept of
value judgment he delivered the Christian faith to pure subjectivism. But, Berkhof
counters, the word value was much in vogue at the time and it intended to represent the
autonomy of the world of the mind vis-a-vis the mechanism of nature. Berkhof cites two
significant statements in which Ritschl explains his use of the word:
Religious knowledge moves in independent value-judgments, which relate to
man’s attitude to the world, and call forth feelings of pleasure or pain, in which
man either enjoys the dominion over the world vouchsafed him by God, or feels
grievously the lack of God’s help to that end. (Justification and Reconciliation, p.
205, cited in Berkhof, p. 122).
In Christianity, religious knowledge consists in independent value judgments,
inasmuch as it deals with the relation between the blessedness which is assured
by God and sought by man, and the whole of the world which God has created
and rules in harmony with His final end. (p. 207)
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Ritschl is striving to explain the relationship between divine providence and human
dominion over the world. He also used the concept in dealing with the divinity of Christ
and religious knowledge. Berkhof sets forth Ritschl’s intent sympathetically but
acknowledges that
the word value judgment...is misleading; it creates the impression that it is solely
grounded in subjective human appreciation, as a postulate or projection, without
having an objective context. Ritschl’s line of thought was not at all intended
anthropocentrically but relationally and functionally... : in the face of the saving
encounter with the Christ of revelation a person finds himself forced to make this
judgment. (p. 123)
Ritschl was welcomed by many who “in the age of Emperor Wilhelm II understood and
welcomed this presentation of the gospel as moral power.” Others saw it as “a betrayal of
the gospel to the spirit of bourgeoisie” and Berkhof observes that this is the fate of every
theology that seek to articulate the gospel for its own time and culture. In any case he
“let the voice of the gospel and the voices of the Reformation speak again.”
One of his students who was to become the philosopher of religion of the religioushistorical school, Ernst Troeltsch, described Ritschl’s position thus, according to
Berkhof:
In his relation to history Ritschl remained stuck halfway. In this respect he seems
to identify with the historical consciousness which marks the modern mind,
though at bottom he is not modern at all but still supernaturalistic. One cannot
simultaneously recognize the limited individuality and many-sided dependence
of all historical figures on the one hand, and on the other, infer from the
historical process the absoluteness of Christianity and its founders.... (p. 129)
That was Troeltsch’s conclusion and he turned away from Ritschl developing to the full
the implications of historical consciousness which he faulted his teacher for failing to do.
Berkhof’s journey continues with a discussion of the alternative positions of Troeltsch
and Wilhelm Herrmann who was deeply impacted by Ritschl and developed the line of
thought he found in Ritschl in his own impressive work.
We begin with Herrmann because he developed the intention of Ritschl’s theology.
What impressed him about Ritschl, Berkhof notes, was his fundamental theme: “The
calling of people to relate and conduct themselves as free personalities within a
determined world.” Like Ritschl he found the highest of religion and morality united in
the figure of Jesus.
Faith and knowledge were held distinct as was true in Ritschl following Kant’s critical
philosophy. This separation of faith and knowledge was evidenced in “his persistent
struggle against any form of confusion between a personal faith in Christ and faith in the
authority of Scripture, dogma, or creed:
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They cannot bring about a saving personal encounter; they appeal to our thinking
only as law. Religion is a totally independent world, though closely bound up with
morality, because it relates us to divine revelation and must be the answer to the
misery of our moral condition. (p. 144)
Herrmann was more concerned for the solidity of his philosophical base than was
Ritschl. Kant loomed large, “whose mighty thoughts emerge increasingly in almost all
domains of human learning as the silent governor of all true research.” Herrmann
valued Kant “because in every connection he has placed the value of faith, its
independence from science, in the clearest light.”
Berkhof offers an illuminating image by which to understand Herrmann in relation to
the question of Berkhof’s quest – how in modern thought and culture the gospel was
brought to expression.
When I read Herrmann what emerges in my mind is the image of a rock in the
midst of a rising flood. In Ritschl the rock of moral autonomy still had a broad
surface. Now, however, with the waves of the flood rising higher and higher, it
became much narrower. The parts that are closer to the sea – like corporeality,
psychological development, history, social relationships, and the authority of
Scripture and Christian tradition – have clearly been inundated. Herrmann now
withdrew to the narrow center, to individual (though conceived as interpersonal)
inwardness where the individual is in communion with God through “the inner
life of Jesus.” With a splendid sort of consistency, he devoted his intellectual
powers to the defense of the peak of that rock. (p. 146)
The rise of the historical-critical method of biblical research led Herrmann to realize
that the certainty of faith could not rest on the probable results of historical criticism.
Faith does take shape in history but its basis is above history and beyond the reach of
historical research. “The inner life of Jesus” which comes to expression in the narratives
about him, legendary as well as historical, bring our personhood into contact with the
reality of Jesus’ personal life. Berkhof dates Herrmann’s complete divorce between
revelation and history around 1910, the period of the heated debates about the
historicity of Jesus. The Ritschlian school attacked Kähler’s distinction between the
historische Jesus and the geschichtliche Christ. This distinction which, as Berkhof notes,
can only be made in German, became very influential.
It gained broad acceptance because it promised a separate but peaceful
relationship between the gospel and modern historicism which could serve as a
bomb-proof bunker for faith in Christ. (p. 147)
In his Ethik Herrmann entered into dialogue with the intellectual Umwelt and thus
Berkhof focuses on that work first because in it “a bridge was built between the gospel
and the modern world.” In human encounters in which trust relationships grow we
recognize an “unconditional demand” and a longing to achieve “a different life than
nature can furnish us.”
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In religion man is referred to the “inner situation of human individualism” in
which “he is faced before a power before which all resistance is excluded because
he knows himself to be totally dependent on it in free surrender.” (p. 147f)
Herrmann’s other major work Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott describes how the
encounter with the superior personal life of Jesus proceeds and effects inner human
renewal. How does the saving experience of the grace of God come about? Herrmann’s
stress is on inward transformation – concrete human experience.
A fact of redemption, for a person who wants to escape the bondage of his own
powerlessness, can only be that which transforms him inwardly. That, however, is
effected only by his own experience, not by that which he is merely told about.
Hence we call a ‘fact of redemption’ the inner life of Jesus which became known
to us in contact with the tradition. (p. 148)
How does the process of becoming known actually occur?
The personal mystery of Jesus is mediated to us through the transmission of his
image. In that context we discover that “the Christ of the New Testament displays
a firmness of religious conviction, a clarity of moral judgment, a purity and power
of will, as they occur together in no other figure of history. (p. 148)
Sounding like Luther, Herrmann writes,
God takes our self-esteem and creates for us an unbreakable spirit; he destroys
our joy in life and makes us blessed; he kills and makes us alive. (Der Verkehr, p.
94, cited in Berkhof, p. 149)
Berkhof points out the difference with Luther being that for Luther it is the power of the
law that kills while for Herrmann it is a natural human experience, an experience
common to Christians and non-Christians. This was the Lebensgefühl of Herrmann’s
Europe. The Gospel meets this need reflected in the common human experience.
Berkhof puts the critical question to Herrmann’s formulation: “Is the God who is
complementarily related to our needs still really God? Or is he perhaps only the
projected reflection of human ideals and human misery? Berkhof notes, as we shall see
later, that in the year Herrmann died (1922), the revised edition of Barth’s The Epistle to
the Romans appeared. In it Barth, Herrmann’s admiring student, concluded that indeed
Herrmann’s God was a human projection, not the “wholly other” of biblical revelation.
Two alternatives flowed from Ritschl: Herrmann’s development of Ritschl’s intention
and, from Ritschl’s student Ernst Troeltsch, a rejection of the attempt to ground faith in
inner experience, thereby finding an absolute ground in history. With Herrmann,
Troeltsch was recognized as the leader of German Liberal theology. But Troeltsch took
another path. Recalling the image referred to above, Berkhof writes,
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He [Troeltsch] also saw that the rock of ethical freedom and, connected with it, of
the gospel was inundated by the deterministic-historical way of thinking in
vogue. But he did not believe that he could occupy and hold a small peak as a last
resort. He left this tight spot and plunged into the stream. To him an absolute
moment in history was a contradiction in terms. For that reason he had to
disagree with Ritschl and Herrmann, who sought to lift Jesus out of history with
its laws of analogy and correlation. It is true everywhere and for everyone: history
is an ever-moving stream in which the movement of each drop is determined by
the mass of water that proceeds it, and each drop shares in determining the
direction of what follows. That is the fundamental view of “historicism,” another
term for determinism applied to historical reality. (p. 150)
In that paragraph, Berkhof pictures vividly the climate of opinion created by the rise of
historical consciousness and the rise of historical consciousness has marked all
subsequent modern thought as indelibly as has Kant’s analysis of the human knowing
process.
Troeltsch admired Herrmann’s work but concluded that Herrmann had failed to ground
faith in an historically unconditional place; rather, his orientation to “the inner life of
Jesus” was “time conditional,” thoroughly enmeshed in the stream of history.
Troeltsch endeavored to rescue Christian faith and ethics from the historical relativism
which appeared all-encompassing. For him the historical as such can have only relative
significance. However, utilizing metaphysical psychology, he developed his “philosophy
of values.”
Whereas the natural sciences look for causality and universality, the science of
history looks for the individuality which expresses itself in the realization of
transindividual values in history. (p. 152)
With this theory of the transhistorical values realized in history in the individual,
Troeltsch believed he had overcome relativism. History has not a limitless number of
competing values; “such values are exceedingly few in number” and “disclosures of
really new goals for the human spirit are rare indeed.” By what criterion are such
disclosures to be judged? Berkhof cites the following statements from Troeltsch:
We may likewise understand the criterion of evaluation as something that
emerges within the movement of life as a result of a universal perspective on the
one hand, and involvement in the movement on the other.
The converging lines evident in these basic features suggest, however, a
normative, universally valid goal toward which the whole is directed.
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It is the concept rather, of a common, orienting goal that may from time to time
manifest itself in history in clear and distinct preparatory forms but always
remains a goal “out in front.”
At this point, Berkhof indicates, Troeltsch moves from the historically empirical to
metaphysics. Berkhof cites Troeltsch further:
This idea [namely, of an absolute goal] requires a turn to the metaphysical, a
retracing of all man’s goals and orientations to a transcendent force that activates
our deepest stirrings and is connected with the creative core of reality. The
various eruptions, breakthroughs, and manifestations of the higher spiritual life
are rooted in the goal-oriented character of this force. It stands over against what
is merely given in nature and turns up at different points – ...till it has found
concentrated expression, from that point on pressing forward to goals that exceed
all knowledge and imagination. This is the permanent element in the concept of
evolutionary development, which in this case signifies not only a postulate that
accompanies all faith in the spiritual life but also a fact of experience that has
been manifested with some degree of clarity. (p. 152f)
From this position Troeltsch went on to claim for Christianity the highest level of the
apprehension of truth. Berkhof comments,
It would seem that, with this “absoluteness of Christianity,” an “absoluteness”
based on historical development (because “absolute truth belongs to the future
and will appear in the judgment of God and the cessation of earthly history.”)
Troeltsch came very close to a kind of Hegelian pantheism and immanentism.
Over against this, however, there is a strong personalism, because for Troeltsch
as a modern person it is precisely the personalistic legacy of Christianity which
constitutes a connection of culture, individual life, and progress. (p. 153)
Herrmann and Troeltsch carried on a dialogue about the place of history in Christian
experience. Troeltsch rejected Herrmann’s appeal to the personality of Jesus while
claiming that although mediated by history, what came to expression of the inner life of
Jesus was above history and beyond the reach of historical-critical research. Herrmann
found it impossible to accept Troeltsch’s idea of development which brought with it the
possibility that Jesus might in the future be superseded by a greater revelatory
concretion in event or person. In the final analysis they were not so far apart except that
Troeltsch appealed to the socio-psychological reality of the Christian community.
In Troeltsch’s essay “The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith,” he
dealt with the question whether the Christian church can have a future apart from its
being grounded in the historicity of Jesus. Berkhof points out,
He denies it on grounds of social psychology; without a fellowship, a cult, and a
historical personality to ground it, only an individualistic spirituality remains. As
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such a historically based cult community, Christianity can well maintain itself,
even by historical-critical norms. (p. 155)
Thus he is close to Ritschl and Herrmann. However, the difference between them lies
in the fact that for Troeltsch, his claim is grounded in social-psychology; it is not for him
a dogmatic pronouncement. But Troeltsch wearied of the struggle to claim absolute
value out of history and historical development. A concluding sentence of his significant
The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches reads, “The Truth is – and this is the
conclusion of the whole matter – the Kingdom of God is within us.” World War I dealt
his view that European culture was the highest stage of ethical-cultural development a
blow.
Universal history, which was once his starting point, now became a question to
him. He began to see that even his central idea of “personality” lacked universal
historical validity but was typical for one culture – namely Western culture. Even
the basis of his historicism became historicized. Against a boundless relativism he
sought shelter in a pantheistic metaphysic....(p. 157)
Berkhof concludes the discussion of these two giants of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries under the heading “Convergence and Contrast.” They illustrate two
ways in which, “while affirming the contemporary deterministic-empirical culture, one
can still speak of ‘the absoluteness’ of Jesus or of Christianity.” Both sought to save faith
and modern culture. But Berkhof claims,
In their attempts at reconciliation neither Herrmann nor Troeltsch could in the
end avoid returning to the supernaturalism they despised. In the case of
Herrmann, Jesus – with his unique inner life – remained the big exception and
the great miracle in the midst of history. Troeltsch radically exposed himself to
the temptation of contemporary culture. But for him, too, Jesus remained the
hitherto unsurpassed high point in the great movement of the Spirit. For the sake
of redemption of the human personality neither was able to abandon faith in the
personhood of God. For the salvation of human beings both men reached for a
Beyond – Herrmann for the inner life of Jesus beyond observable history,
Troeltsch for the kingdom of redeemed spirits, also beyond history. (p. 160)
Concentrating on his own focus in this survey, Berkhof reflects on the contrasts and the
convergence of the alternatives followed by Herrmann and Troeltsch. He contends that
in the effort to reconcile the gospel and modern culture, one can begin at either pole.
The gospel cries out for concentration on the one thing necessary; culture ventures into
the full spectrum of life in the world. Beginning with either pole it is difficult to do
justice to the other. Finally both Herrmann and Troeltsch experienced and expressed
Christian faith entirely within the framework of the cultural presuppositions of their
time. After the crisis of World War I both thinkers’ influence waned; yet, the significant
intellectual and spiritual effort of both has gained a new hearing. Berkhof claims we
have still not been able to free ourselves from the choice between the two and the
struggle in which they engaged continues to challenge us into the present.
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We move now to the next generation, to students of Herrmann, who appeared for a brief
time to be one in their development and radicalization of Herrmann’s effort to find a
secure place for faith to rest beyond the relativities of history and the acids of historical
research. Karl Barth’s Romerbrief, first edition, sent shock waves through the world of
academic theology and philosophy and his salvo was affirmed by Rudolf Bultmann.
Under the title of “The Split in the Herrmann School” Berkhof discusses these two
formidable theologians and their followers. The word “split” indicates that the time of
apparent agreement was brief; in Bultmann and Barth alternative answers were given to
questions of faith and history.
Understandably, Berkhof can do little justice to the gigantic theological enterprises of
Bultmann and Barth in two chapters comprising about 45 pages. Yet the treatment is
helpful because of his sharp focus – the deeply felt chasm between the cultural
assumption of their sitz-im-leben and the gospel.
Bultmann followed his revered teacher, Herrmann, who thoroughly mistrusted
historically ascertainable facts as vehicles of revelation. Bultmann’s mistrust was even
greater – closer to Troeltsch at that point, although repeating Troeltsch’s attempt to find
some absolute point amidst history’s relativities. In Bultmann, “the Christian experience
of faith is not in the conventional sense ‘grounded’; it implies a radical release from
empirical certitude.”
Berkhof suggests that Troeltsch’s influence may have caused Bultmann to radicalize
Herrmann’s position.
The Achilles’ heel of Herrmann was, certainly, that for his faith in Jesus he
needed a little segment of history, namely, “the inner life of Jesus” or the “secret
of his Person,” however nonvisual it might be. Troeltsch did not believe in this
rock as a place of refuge to which one could go in the midst of the flood of
historical determinism. And Bultmann...had to concur here with the opponent of
his teacher. However, unlike Troeltsch he did not plunge into the sea, but
believed he could find revelation concerning the sea above the inundated rock, in
a higher atmosphere which the flood could not reach, in the free air of human
existence addressed by God, on a level of reality which can only be reached by a
radical detachment from the world. (p. 164f)
Here we hear the echoes of Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason; the
historical Jesus belongs to the first, the preaching of the crucified Jesus to the second.
Bultmann was concerned only with the “that” of the life of Jesus; nothing beyond the
“that” of his historical existence is relevant for faith. Even Herrmann’s “inner life of
Jesus” was surrendered to the relativization of historical criticism. As Berkhof explains,
Bultmann wanted to sever the last remaining connection between Historie and
Geschichte in order to protect the faith from any and every critical assault on the
part of science. (p. 165)
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Barth’s Romans impressed Bultmann. Here he heard an undergirding and development
of Herrmann’s theology. Bultmann, a trained New Testament scholar did object to
Barth’s interpretation of Paul and he criticized Barth’s understanding of the relationship
between revelation and history, an understanding similar to Herrmann’s, falling short of
the radical disjunction of faith and history which Bultmann advocated. Berkhof feels
that from the beginning Bultmann was more interested in Barth’s statements about the
human self than he was in Barth’s primary concern to point to the goodness of God and
the objectivity of the Word of God.
Berkhof points to the center of Bultmann’s concern in his analysis of human existence
which he gained from the early Heidegger, who for a time was his colleague at Marburg.
Heidegger’s philosophy of existence presented Bultmann with an understanding of the
human condtion into which the gospel is proclaimed. Berkhof cites Bultmann’s
statement:
For the existential interpretation of human existence says precisely that the
human subject (or human being, I might also say) is not without his world, nor
even without God insofar as the philosopher regards it as legitimate to speak
about God, so that self-understanding is also understanding of (God and) the
world. (p. 168f)
Is this “natural theology” or a Christianized Heidegger? Berkhof contends the two
converge in Bultmann and offers as evidence Bultmann’s statements in his essay “The
New Testament and My Theology:”
...according to Heidegger the “mundaneness” of the world “causes people to be
satisfied with an illusory existence; as a result they miss out on “the reality of
existence.” This condition of lostness is what the New Testament calls “sin.”
According to Heidegger people must now lay hold of existence on their own:
Become what you are! (p. 169)
Philosophy believes it is enough that one be shown one’s true nature but Bultmann
denies philosophy’s self-confidence.
People must first be liberated from themselves. This happens through the
message of Christ, through the forgiveness of sin, by which alone people receive
the “freedom for obedience,” surrender to the love of God, and therewith the
authenticity of their existence. (p. 169)
During the fifties Bultmann’s influence was powerful and pervasive. His existential
analysis of the human person who is addressed by the Word of God, the proclamation of
the Christ of faith apart from any rooting in history beyond the “that” of Jesus’
existence, enabled him to deliver the gospel safe from the relativities of historical
research, research in which he himself was a master. But with the advent of the next
decade the pendulum began to swing back and the climate of opinion was shifting. The
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Bultmannian school was beginning to fall apart. First the work of Ernst Kassemann who
actually stepped outside the Bultmann circle with its existentialist interpretation of the
gospel, but then by Bultmann’s students Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling who
remained with the existentialist understanding but who sensed a need for a broader
place to stand in concrete history, there was a return to interest in the historical Jesus,
to something more than the “that” of his existence.
Berkhof views this move on the part of the Neo-Bultmannians as a shift from idealism to
empiricism which was similar to the shift that had occurred in the previous century.
A theological generation grew up for whom the language of the great
predecessors was no longer intelligible. However diverse Barth, Brunner,
Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Tillich were, their basic concepts like “revelation,”
“Word of God,” “absolute and infinite Being,” even the vocable “God,” all
belonged to a conceptual Uberwelt which was not open to empirical
verification....I see no indication that the Neo-Bultmannians consciously involved
themselves in this shift toward empiricism. But since 1950 it was in the air,
expanded rapidly, and manifested itself in many areas. The “shift” from “Christ”
to “Jesus” belongs entirely to this new climate. For many during these years it
made the gospel credible again to have it anchored in the historical Jesus. (p.
175f)
Berkhof points out that this was really a return to Herrmann who also had to proclaim
the gospel to a generation under the strong influence of empiricism. He never gave up
the connection to empirical history. Bultmann argued with his students who moved
back to the concern with the historical reality of Jesus and Berkhof comments:
In my opinion, the conflict between Bultmann and his disciples has not been
resolved. His disciples were stronger in their accentuation of the essential
continuity between Jesus and Christ...Bultmann’s second objection against his
disciple-critics is one they could not, in my judgment, invalidate: the post-Easter
kerygma is not identical with the message of Jesus and does not (very often – I
would prefer to say) refer back to the message and conduct of the earthly Jesus.
(p. 177)
As the debate came to sharp focus the questions that were clearly at issue were:
Is the historical necessary to the explanation of the kerygma (Bultmann,
Marxen)? And: is this minimal history sufficient for the explanation of the
kerygma (Künneth)? By answering the first question in the negative one remains
strictly within the existentialist framework. By answering the second question in
the negative one breaks out of this framework in favor of an ontological mode of
thought. (p. 178)
The climate of opinion permeated with a move to the empirical opened up a return to
concentration on the historical ground of faith especially in the work of a circle of young
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scholars around Pannenberg. Berkhof explains this move as reflective of the way
Troeltsch posed the issue.
The gospel must not be positioned as far from history as possible but be
understood altogether as historical power and as answer to the quest for truth in
history. It seemed the path of theological development had curved back to where
it was in 1910. The alternatives were still the same. (p. 178)
But with our move to the Post-Bultmann School we have moved too fast, for we must
backtrack and pick up the other student of Herrmann, generally acknowledged as the
greatest theological thinker of the twentieth century, Karl Barth. Berkhof knew him
personally and respected him deeply. While maintaining his own independence, he
nevertheless himself was significantly impacted by this great man.
Berkhof opens the chapter with the interesting development of Barth, biographical
information so necessary to understanding him and the revolution he ignited. He cites
the following statement of Barth from the preface to the second edition of his Romans:
If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the
“infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding
this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God is in heaven, and
thou art on earth.” The relation between such a God and such a man, and the
relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and
the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this krisis of human perception –
the Prime Cause; the Bible beholds at the same cross-roads – the figure of Jesus
Christ. (p. 194f)
These are weighty sentences, Berkhof writes. He locates the respective emphases in
Barth’s development. The Romans work came out of Barth’s turn to the interpretation of
the Bible. With his friend Thurneysen he was disillusioned with involvement in the
Social Democracy movement which failed to mobilize resistance to the war and together
they were looking for a place to stand – a “crisis” brought about by the need to preach
weekly. The first edition of Romans (1919) was the eruption of all that was stirring in the
young Barth as he moved away from the nineteenth century with its classic liberalism,
struggled with the Bible and the darkness that enveloped the continent torn apart with
war.
The first edition of Römerbrief was not a product of a finished theological position.
Berkhof speaks of “The Detour of the First Edition of Römerbrief.” Berkhof cites Busch,
Barth’s biographer:
In Barth, the question of according God a place of central importance was
becoming more and more fundamental. And since he had met Blumhardt, it was
very closely connected with the eschatological question of the Christian hope.
(Busch, Karl Barth, pp. 87, 89, cited in Berkhof, p. 186)
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Berkhof points out that Barth wrestled with the question of how the Kingdom of God
manifested itself tangibly in a world hostile to God.
In the grip of this question Barth had read Romans with the excitement of a
discoverer. For him it became primarily the great witness to the absolute priority
of God, visible in the work of Christ and the working of the Spirit, the Spirit who
in an organic process, on the basis of Christ, transformed creation into the glory
of Christ. This working of the Spirit is the inner side – perceptible to the eye of
faith – of our secular exterior side. Ontology, objectivity, realism, and
universalism – these are the categories which here determine Barth’s exposition
of Paul. Paul helped him to proclaim the superior power of God in an alienated
world and even to make it visible for those to whom this is given. (p. 186f)
The publication of Romans sent shock waves through the philosophical and theological
centers of the continent. Educated in the finest tradition of German culture, Barth’s
move was incomprehensible to his teachers. It appeared that he had joined the side of
orthodoxy. But, Berkhof contends, he was still far from the Reformation tradition and
had no real appreciation for the classic teaching of justification. In the years following
the publication (1919-1922), Barth continued to grope and feel his way. Berkhof, tracing
the various ideas and persons that influenced Barth, concludes,
I doubt that it was philosophical influence which helped Barth negotiate the great
switch-in-subject which initiated in the 1916 lecture about “The Righteousness of
God” and following the detour via the theology of Württenberg (The first edition
of Römerbrief), provisionally found its “final” form in the second edition of
Romans. According to Barth’s own sense of the matter, he owed the sudden shift
in direction from the first to the second edition of Romans to an “inspiration”
which at first even frightened himself.... If one nevertheless thinks here of extra
theological influences, it makes more sense to look for them in the realm of the
negative, in the disillusionments he suffered, especially after the war, from the
liberal theology of experience on the one hand, and from social democracy on the
other. These disillusionments drove him past all the relativities of human life to
God – as the origin, the judge(crisis), and the hope of all that is known. In
contemplation of the absolute God the merely human was condemned and
redeemed to the status of relativity and so made bearable. In the first edition of
Römerbrief Barth still viewed the relationship between God and the world as
harmonious, organic, more or less perceptible. In the second edition of Romans
discontinuity and imperceptibility predominate. God is no less present than
before but his presence had fundamentally become “imperceptible,” “lightninglike.” (p. 197)
Berkhof raises the question how in the space of four years Barth could read the same
Pauline letter so differently. He is convinced the answer lies not in the domain of
intellect but “in the depths of his Lebensgefühl (sense of life).” Educated in the
Ritschlian theological school, the advancing secularization ate away at the ground on
which faith rested. In Herrmann there was a thin ridge still rising above the flood; for
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Troeltsch even that was gone, although he still sought the absolute in history’s relativity.
For Barth, Berkhof contends, the “base” is totally gone.
“History” is completely secularized and the event of the world of God is now
“verticalized.” God’s work in the world has lost its final vestiges of perceptibility.
The retreat has become a clean break...the second edition of Romans is also a
document of that cultural epoch and the Lebensgefühl which was part of it.... A
new, intensely painful experience of the godless world and, on the basis of that
experience, a new quest for the God of the Bible – these two factors determined
Barth’s groping progression during these years. (p. 198)
Though he revered Herrmann, Barth nevertheless had to take leave of him. Bultmann
had not noticed the “switch-in-subject” in the second edition of Romans and interpreted
Barth in line with Herrmann. And there was structural similarity between Barth and
Herrmann, as Moltmann points out:
The “defenseless non-groundability of religious experience” in Barth becomes, in
theologically consistent form, the “transcendental subjectivity” of the selfrevealing God, a process in which the “self” retains all the attributes, all the
relations and distinctions in which it had been formulated by Herrmann. (p. 199,
quoting Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 54)
In a lecture in 1924 Barth pointed out where he separated from Herrmann. It was not a
repudiation but rather a radicalization of Herrmann.
Herrmann tried to ground his theology on “experience,” on “the facts we
ourselves experience,” but in the section cited by Barth he continues: “But its
beginning and its end is nonetheless man’s humbling of himself before the
unsearchable.” Therefore, if experience lives from that which transcends
experience, and if this is its beginning even, then “the unabrogable subjectivity of
God” has become the starting point of our thinking, and it “becomes obligatory to
ask whether dogmatics does not have to begin where Herrmann ends.” (p. 199)
Surveying the whole of Barth’s theological enterprise, Berkhof holds that the
relationship between Barth and his teacher must be characterized as “ambivalence”
rather than a “break.” Barth’s strong stress on “the unabrogable subjectivity of God” led
to differences: no point of contact in ethics; stress on the Word event; more space for
salvation-historical facts, especially the cross and resurrection; a wider use of scriptural
witness, including the Old Testament; and emphasis on the priority and superordination
of justification over sanctification and of faith as acknowledgment over trust; also, a
higher valuation of the church, its office, and its confession. But there were similarities
as well:
The twin pillars of his mature thought as it comes to expression in his Church
Dogmatics are thus Christocentrism and, as its counterpart, the radical
repudiation of natural theology. With these positions Barth was not in opposition
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to the nineteenth century but to the Ritschl–Herrmann line of thought within
that century. But when secularization advanced still more, Barth withdrew
revelation even further from the world. It was not the “diastasis” which
distinguished him from these predecessors but the degree of radicalism with
which it was applied. Herrmann found final support in “the inner life of Jesus.”
Barth also gives that up and then severs the connection between Geschichte and
Historie. But is that a possibility if one wants to proceed on the basis of Jesus
Christ, inclusive of his “historical” appearance? ( p. 200)
Berkhof claims Barth could not do it even in the second edition of Romans. He quotes
from Romans:
In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the
flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And,
precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier – as the new
world. The Resurrection is therefore an occurrence in history, which took place
outside the gates of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 30, inasmuch as it there “came to
pass,” was discovered and recognized. But inasmuch as the occurrence was
conditioned by the Resurrection, in so far, that is, as it was not the “coming to
pass,” or the discovery, or the recognition, which conditioned its necessity and
appearance and revelation, the Resurrection is not an event in history at all. (p.
201 from Romans, p. 30)
Later, in Church Dogmatics, Berkhof writes, Barth attempted to bring Geschichte and
Historie closer together but even there “failed to reach clarity on this decisive issue in
modern theology.”
Berkhof moves to Barth’s relationship to Schleiermacher which, in his early years, was
unambiguous; he set himself over against Schleiermacher’s anthropological starting
point, the grounding of religious reality in the “feeling of absolute dependence.”
Despite his great admiration for Schleiermacher’s magnificent achievement, in
general he found himself rejecting Schleiermacher’s theology. This rejection went
so far that he closed with the question, “How can the idea [the idea that
Schleiermacher has brought us to a dead end] be squared with the providence of
God which rules over his church?” and with the observation: “What remains is
clearly – and I do not see how it can be avoided – the possibility of a theological
revolution [Barth’s italics], a fundamental NO! to the entire body of
Schleiermacher’s teaching concerning religion and Christianity.” (p. 202)
A bit later Barth treated Schleiermacher’s thought again, concluding that he “allowed
himself to be forced into the fundamentally unworthy position of an apologist” because
at bottom he was interested in Christianity “only for the sake of culture.” Yet Barth was
never through with Schleiermacher. In 1968 he wrote,
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I am certain of my course and of my point of view. I am, however, not so certain
of them that I can confidently say that my “yes” necessarily implies a “no” to
Schleiermacher’s point of view. For have I indeed understood him correctly? (p.
203)
He ends, Berkhof writes, with the same ambivalence we saw above over against
Herrmann. It is interesting to note here that in his revision of Christian Faith, Berkhof
himself added a section on Schleiermacher’s appeal to experience.
In the mid-1920’s, Barth seemed to have found his place to stand and he wrote Die
Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf. But after discovering the theological method of
Anselm of Canterbury, he wrote a book on Anselm’s method and started over with his
own dogmatics, this time calling it Church Dogmatics.
The title Church Dogmatics brings out, for Barth, the binding force of the faith
which underlies all dogmatic thought. Connected with this in Anselm’s thought is
that reality precedes possibility, not vice versa. “I believe in order that I may
understand” (Credo ut intelligam). The content of faith does not permit itself to
be grounded by the human intellect but only to be unfolded by reflection. (p. 206)
Berkhof concludes the chapter on Barth by raising the critical question which will be
taken up in his next chapter, an interesting debate about Barth’s method that took place
in the Netherlands.
For us it is decisive to see how Barth gave up the goals of liberal theology and left
its path behind him in order now to fall into line with classic theology as it was
given its shape by Athanasius and Anselm, by Luther and Calvin. After the
Enlightenment and after Schleiermacher, one can still do this with impunity? At
no time in his life did Barth take this question lightly, but after intense struggle
he nevertheless answered it in the affirmative. His students adopted his answer
as self-evident and repressed the question. However, the question must make
itself heard again, despite or precisely because of Barth.
In the post-Barthian period Berkhof points out that question again became the central
problem of theology.
Barth’s influence was dominant from 1930-1960. His power of thought and consistently
thought through position was cogent but not without its detractors. Brunner’s position
was mediating in regard to the question of the “place” in the human person where
revelation is received. Paul Tillich opposed Barth’s “Kerygmatic” theology with his own
apologetic approach, a theology of correlation which finds the human question
answered in God’s revelation.
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who expressed for many the weakness of Barth’s approach.
Berkhof writes of Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth in his Letters From Prison:
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Bonhoeffer is at his most genial when in these letters he treated the system which
imprisoned him essentially as part of the past and concentrated totally on the rise
of the new, “mature,” radically secularized “religionless” man. When the Letters
were published this secularized sense of life (Lebensgefühl) was fully on the
march, and people even spoke of a second Enlightenment ( Aufklårung). (p.
209)
Bonhoeffer had become a disciple of Barth and they maintained a close personal bond
but his prison experience moved him away from Barth’s theology. He characterized
Barth’s position as a “positivism of revelation” (“take or leave it”) – a poignant criticism,
and Barth was stung by it. Bonhoeffer ushered in the post-Barthian era. Berkhof
observes,
It arose directly from his analysis of the new cultural epoch. In the
anthropocentric age in which Barth had sought his way as a theologian, his
starting with God as the subject of faith and theology was a liberating new
beginning. In Bonhoeffer’s time this point had already become self-evident in
theology. But in the period which he foresaw, such a starting point would be
completely unintelligible. For the people for whom the wording hypothesis “God”
would be a total redundancy, “the authority of the Word of God” would only
constitute a double enigma: first, because they would accept nothing on authority
any more and, second, because they could not handle the idea of a “speaking
God.” (p. 209f)
Berkhof sees Barth’s starting point heavily influenced by the collapse of German cultural
assumptions in the aftermath of World War I. There was a felt need for “a basic foothold
in a higher, supramundane reality.” But in the post-World War II days the pendulum
swung back. For different reasons, neither Barth nor Bultmann were ever able to ground
the Word in history, within this-worldly existence.
Technology in the after-math of the war also had a transforming effect on society. Life
was understood as being shaped “from below.” Berkhof chooses the work of H.M.
Kuitert of the Free University in Amsterdam as the representative of those who sought
to come to terms with the new Lebensgefühl. Kuitert came under Barth’s influence
through his teacher, G. C. Berkhouwer. Berkhof indicates that his understanding of
Barth and subsequent departure from Barth center in Barth’s phrase “the unabrogable
subjectivity of God.” Berkhof quotes Kuitert:
For Barth revelation is an immediate occurrence; it is the speaking God
himself….that is the figure of the transcendental subjectivity in optima forma to
which Barth adhered throughout his entire life. (p. 213)
Kuitert sees the line back to Herrmann and Kant here and claims that thereby Barth
freed himself from any attempt to ground the knowledge of God either in history or in
religious experience. But, Kuitert objects, Barth thus identified his faith concept with
the subjectivity of God. Berkhof explains,
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Barth claims an exceptional position for his own theological approach. He bases
this on the subjectivity of faith granted us and realizing itself within us. Thus he
excused himself from all discussion and from the necessity of giving an account of
his thoughts. To the legitimate question: How do you know? He has no answer.
(p. 213)
Barth did later appeal to the biblical witness and the tradition of the church but the
relationship between Scripture and the immediacy of the knowledge of God remains
unclear. Barth also came to view the role of history more positively but even so God’s
acts in history are alien to history itself. Kuitert insists that the alternatives cannot be
avoided.
Either the vocable God remains empty, or it receives an arbitrary content from
within subjectivity, or it receives its content [i.e., we predicate] from within
[historical] experience. (p. 214)
Barth operates in a closed circle. Another Dutch theologian, Sperna Weiland, describes
Barth’s theology as “a house without doors.” Berkhof explains,
With its unreasoned appeal to revelation it withdraws from communication with
the outside world and culture in general. (p. 214)
Kuitert’s challenge to Barth’s approach engendered a lively debate within the
Netherlands, young Barthians coming to the master’s defense. Our interest here,
however, is in Kuitert’s alternative. In a new cultural milieu Kuitert felt the need to deal
with prologomena in the traditional sense. As Berkhof points out,
We must start with “man,” on an “anthropological floor” which believers and
unbelievers have in common. Thus Kuitert again picks up the theme of the
“apologetic” theology which Tillich opposed to the “kerygmatic” theology of
Barth. (p. 220)
Kuitert insisted that theology can claim to be a science only if it is willing to do more
than simply bear witness, even though it cannot provide “verification” in the sense of the
natural sciences. Theology must be descriptive in character:
It examines religion and religions, and thus makes also God an object of its
intellectual striving. (p. 220)
The phenomenon of faith, Kuitert contends, can be described on three levels:
anthropological, historical and institutional. On the first level, Kuitert deals with primal
faith or basic trust. One trusts oneself to what one cannot as yet perceive. This basic
trust has Christian-theological relevance. It does not turn theology into anthropology
but humankind is bound to this “anthropological floor” in speaking about God.
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On the historical level Kuitert turns to the phenomenology of religion. Basic trust comes
shaped in the form of a concrete religion. Berkhof points out,
All religions have “God” as their point of reference. This does not mean, however,
that the differences between them are immaterial. It is often certain very distinct
experiences which press people to pronounce the name “God”: as an expression
of meaning. Such experiences are only possible within certain frameworks of
interpretation. (p. 221)
Herein lies the possibility for testing plausibility. Built into faith, Kuitert insists, is an
argument which makes an appeal to experience. Berkhof cites Kuitert:
The grounds of faith therefore consist in that which religious people sense as the
footprints of God in our world of experience. (p. 221f)
When those footprints are no longer discernible, religious faith dies a slow death.
Kuitert uses as an example the death of the fertility religion in the ancient Near East.
When trade and industry, and finally artificial fertilizer, undermined the decisive
role of the fertility of the earth, it turned out that what people took to be the
footprints of God were not that at all. (p. 222)
Kuitert also speaks of a religious conviction which is turned into a “search hypothesis”
which guides one in the search for God. Without some such hypothesis, he claims, we
perceive nothing of God in the world and whatever is perceived of God is dependent
upon the search-hypothesis with which one begins. Such a hypothesis is not an end in
itself; rather, the end is the personal experience of God and the experience of salvation.
Kuitert’s third level is the institutional. The Christian search-hypothesis takes the form
of Christian doctrine.
Berkhof gives his own appraisal of the debate between Kuitert and the post-Barthians.
He puts the issue in sharp focus:
The question I have to answer is: For the interpretation of the gospel in today’s
world, does Kuitert offer a better starting point than Barth? The weakness of
Barth’s position is well known: since he starts with God, he does not seem to
reach real people. Kuitert starts “from below;” can he, from this direction, arrive
at the God of the gospel, the father of Jesus Christ? …The Christian faith orients
itself to the footprints of God in the way and work of Jesus. His footprints can
never be surpassed. How can one arrive at an assertion about them if even this
faith ever has to be confirmed in history as it unfolds? (p. 226)
Berkhof points out that Kuitert’s reference to the historicity of God and the claim that
God is love are Christian assertions with no plausibility granted by outsiders. We are
dealing with assumptions of the western Christian tradition and, Berkhof writes, we are
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thus revolving within a cultural circle facing the same problem that Troeltsch faced –
trying to find an absolute point within the history of religion. In contrast to Troeltsch,
Kuitert is not looking for an absolute point but “for that which in history has proven
itself tenable.” He is looking for certain presuppositons that will make dialogue with
outsiders possible. But, Berkhof concludes, that
…what emerges is that we are led, also from below, into a closed circle in a way
similar to that of which Barth was accused with his starting point “from above.” It
is of no help that this closed circle is presented as a concentration of experiences.
For the people who have had no such experiences themselves, these experiences
are transformed into authorities. (p. 227)
And so, Berkhof asks, “Does Kuitert essentially understand Christian faith differently
from Barth?” He takes Kuitert’s own statements that the knowledge of God is the fruit of
God’s self-revelation and that a God humans can account for can never be the true God.
Thus Berkhof contends,
These statements, as also the theory of plural search-constructs, negate the
capacity of the anthropological floor to support an accounting for the faith in
dialogue with outsiders. In one’s belief one clearly has to do with a closed circle.
(p. 227)
Berkhof holds that Barth’s contention that only by starting with God does one come to
God is confirmed by Kuitert by his own affirmation and, negatively, by the failure to
ground an alternative approach. Barth’s weakness remains. Berkhof concludes,
Both Barthians and post-Barthians live from the questions their counterparts do
not answer. (p. 228)
Berkhof concludes his journey with chapters on “Immanent Transcendentality: The
Catholic Bridge,” “North America: From Social Gospel to Neo-Orthodoxy,” and “Paul
Tillich: The Bridge of Correlation.” The chapters are interesting and well-done giving the
survey a broad ecumenical and geographical spectrum, an important inclusion because
the central question of the book comes into focus from new angles as was the case
earlier in a chapter on Anglican theology and a chapter on Conservative theology which
treated the work of Martin Kåhler.
The treatment of Catholic theology deals most extensively with Karl Rahner as might be
expected, but Berkhof also lifts up the thinking of Maurice Blondel and Henri de Lubac
who made valuable contributions to the effort to bridge the gulf between gospel and
culture. Berkhof notes the advantages with which Catholic theology begins over against
Reformed theology, beginning as it does with the assumption of harmony between
nature and grace, thanks to the synthesis worked out by Aquinas, whereas Reformed
theology begins with the contrast between sin and grace. Aquinas, responding to the
dominant influence of Aristotle brought to the west by Averrhoes, was carving out a
place for the gospel in a world being shaped by the Aristotelian philosophy of nature.
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Berkhof says that one might have hoped that once again such an effort might have been
made over against modern thought in the wake of the Enlightenment but, he claims,
such an expectation has not been realized largely because of the suspicion with which
the dominant curial theology in Rome has viewed such attempts:
Fundamentally, the Roman hierarchy has continually sought, right into modern
times, to rescue the validity of Thomistic thought, whereas thinkers it mistrusted
wanted to make Thomas’ intent and motive operational again under changed
conditions and with new, hence with non-Aristotelian, categories. (p. 229f)
Having to fight their own hierarchy, Catholic theologians have been paralyzed in their
struggle to engage modern thought, and the intramural battle has again and again been
settled unilaterally in an authoritarian fashion. Nonetheless, Berkhof points to
impressive achievements in Catholic theology.
Preceding his treatment of Rahner, Berkhof summarizes the significant efforts of
Blondel and de Lubac to do again what Thomas did: that is, to hold together in a greater
unity the duality of nature and grace. In their work one sees the advantage of Catholic
theology with its assumption of harmony between nature and grace. These thinkers
recognized that in the modern world Thomas’ nature-grace continuum had resulted in a
divorce of the two realms, leaving the whole development of nature to the secular sphere
and thus to human autonomy. Writing at the time of Vatican II, de Lubac warned
against “The dualist or, perhaps better, the separatist thesis:”
While wishing to protect the supernatural from any contamination, people had in
fact exiled it altogether – both from intellectual and from social life – leaving the
field free to be taken over by secularism. Today that secularism, following its
course, is beginning to enter the minds even of Christians. They too seek to find a
harmony with all things based upon an idea of nature which might be acceptable
to a deist or an atheist: everything that comes from Christ, everything that should
lead to him, is pushed so far into the background as to look like disappearing for
good. The last word in Christian progress and the entry into adulthood would
thus appear to consist in a total secularization which would expel God not merely
from the life of society, but from culture and even from personal relationships.
(cited from The Mystery of the Supernatural, pp. xi-xii on p. 239f)
The Catholic theologian that receives the fullest treatment by Berkhof is Karl Rahner
who made the principle of transcendentality the basis of his theology, applying it across
the full spectrum of dogmatics. Berkhof defines the approach thus:
The principle of subjectivity has for its counterpart that of transcendentality
because “this subject is fundamentally and by its very nature pure openness for
absolutely everything, for being as such.” This experience is called transcendental
experience because it belongs to the necessary and inalienable structures of the
knowing subject itself, and because it consists precisely in the transcendence
beyond any particular group of possible objects or of categories. Transcendental
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experience is the experience of transcendence, in which experience the structure
of the subject and therefore also the ultimate structure of every conceivable
object of knowledge are present together and as identity. (Berkhof, p. 242 cites
Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of
Christianity, p. 20)
Transcendence as “experience,” Berkhof indicates, derives not from Kant’s analysis of
the knowing process, but from the phenomenology and the analysis of existence.
Another citation from Foundations is helpful:
Whenever man in his transcendence experiences himself as questioning, as
disquieted by the appearance of being, as open to something ineffable, he cannot
understand himself as subject in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the
sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace. In this
context “grace” means the freedom of the ground of being which gives being to
man, a freedom which man experiences in his finiteness and contingency, and
means as well what we call “grace” in a more strictly theological sense. (Rahner,
Ibid, p. 34)
Has Rahner, in attempting to avoid the new-scholastic dualism of nature and grace, let
nature pass into the realm of supernatural grace? This is Berkhof’s question. He finds
Rahner denying that. Rather, he advocates “a sort of supernaturalization of what we call
‘nature’.”
For him creation and created human nature must be understood solely as the
infrastructure of the grace-conditioned unity of the Creator and the created in the
incarnation of God, and in the final goal of the beatific vision of God based on it.
(p. 244)
Rahner denies the existence of “pure nature,” and the possibility of human existence as
autonomous. Rahner contends:
Our actual nature is never ‘pure’ nature. It is a nature installed in a supernatural
order which man can never leave, even as a sinner and unbeliever….And these
‘existentials’ of man’s concrete, ‘historical’ nature are not purely states of being
beyond consciousness. They make themselves felt in the experience of man. By
simple reflection on himself, in the light of natural reason, he cannot simply and
clearly distinguish them from the natural spiritual activity which is the
manifestation of his nature. (from “Nature and Grace” in Theological
Investigations, Vol. 4, p. 183, cited on p. 245)
Berkhof’s discussion of Rahner’s complex thought continues but this is perhaps enough
to enable us to hear Berkhof’s critique. He points to the continuing dichotomy of nature
and grace that shines through the more modern existential language, a different
dichotomy than one finds in Reformation theology, the dichotomy of sin and grace. Still,
Berkhof notes, the liberal and mediating theologies of post-Enlightenment
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Protestantism in their engagement with modern thought struggled to express the
nature-grace relationship and came very close to the manner of Thomas Aquinas as he
sought to express the gospel in a thought-world dominated by Aristotle. Berkhof writes,
Nature – in other words, the created structure of human existence – is for all of
them the infrastructure which persists despite and in sin, an infrastructure on
which the grace of revelation builds and without which it would be unintelligible.
(p. 253)
For Berkhof Rahner’s grand theological enterprise fails because he has subordinated the
sin-and-grace dichotomy to the nature-and-grace dichotomy and the nature-and-grace
relationship is, in Berkhof’s view, all too harmoniously construed. He concludes,
As a result this grand theological project seems to overshoot the goal of a
confrontation between the gospel and the modern world. For the (restricted)
application of the notion of transcendentality we should – presumably – not go
beyond the boundaries set by Blondel. (p. 255)
Berkhof concludes his journey with a visit to the American scene beginning with the
theology of Jonathan Edwards and Horace Bushnell, then the Social Gospel movement
and the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, and finally a treatment of the Niebuhrs,
thinkers for whom he has high regard. He reserves a chapter for a treatment of Paul
Tillich.
Tillich’s method of correlation, the gospel as the answer to the human question, is
precisely the focus that Berkhof has kept through his journey of 200 years. Tillich’s life
and vocation began in Germany. His war experiences destroyed the idealistic foundation
of his thought. A man of great giftedness and broad interest, he was engaged with the
full spectrum of cultural experience. Fleeing the Nazi plague, he came to this country to
continue his long and fruitful career. Berkhof notes that, as a thinker and a Christian,
Tillich had always lived and thought in the context of the polarity between question and
answer. This formed the foundation of his mature theology and, consequently, he
became for many “the bridge builder between their personal problems and the gospel.”
His method was correlation. Tillich described it thus:
The method used in the theological system and described in the methodological
introduction of the first volume is called the “method of correlation,” namely, the
correlation between existential questions and theological answers. “Correlation,”
a word with several meanings in scientific language, is understood as
“interdependence of two independent factors.” It is not understood in the logical
sense of quantitative or qualitative coordination of elements without causal
relation, but it is understood as a unity of the dependence and independence of
two factors. (Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, American edition, p. 13, cited in
Berkhof, p. 289)
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Berkhof raises the question whether then God in self-revelation is dependent on the
human subject. He gives Tillich’s response that in God’s self-manifestation God is
dependent on the way the human person receives that manifestation. As Brunner
declared the divine-human encounter means something for both sides. For theology this
means:
Theology formulates the question implied in human existence, and theology
formulates the answers implied in the divine self-manifestation under the
guidance of the questions implied in human existence. (Ibid, Vol. 1, p.61, cited in
Berkhof, p. 290)
Berkhof discusses the method explaining Tillich’s contention that to raise the question
belongs to the essence of human existence. Tillich favors the word “quest” rather than
question. The quest is present whether or not it comes to expression; it is fundamentally
singular and it rises out of the depths expressing one’s “ultimate concern.” Out of the
human depths, the quest arises out of the human predicament, the experience of selfalienation, dread, brokenness, despair. It represents a search for integration, harmony,
reunion with the true self. It is philosophy’s task to take account of all of this and to
render a right analysis of human existence. Every human being, Christian or not, must
be able to fathom life’s final questions and, doing so, will be confronted with the gap in
human existence, a gap which cannot be bridged. One discovers a question without an
answer.
The description of Tillich’s thought sounds like a re-run of Heidegger’s Existentialist
analysis of the human situation but, as Berkhof indicates, what distinguishes Tillich is
the ontological framework of his thought – a shift also apparent in the later Heidegger.
Tillich’s interest in the human quest is its theological value. He acknowledges that his
analysis of the human situation derives from his historical context; the quest will differ
according to the epoch. For the Church Fathers it was the quest for immortality; for the
Reformation it was the quest for the justification of the sinner. Whatever the historical
period and the quest, Tillich contends however that all the ultimate questions circle
around the opposition between “finite” and “infinite,” “human existence” and “absolute
being.” This is the quest that comes to expression in modern existentialism. The
respective epochs of human history will have variously shaped quests but they will all be
fundamentally oriented to the relationship between existence and essence.
The answer does not lie within the question; it comes from without. The human subject
is the question; God in self-manifestation is the answer, an answer not at human
disposal.
The two poles, question and answer, form an ellipse, the image of Tillich’s system.
Philosophy, in an attitude of objectivity, is concerned with the question; theology is
existentially involved in the answer.
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The center of Tillich’s theology is the paradox that universal being manifests itself in a
historical person. The unity of the absolute and the finite, foolishness to philosophy, is
the great miracle in which light we live and think.
Berkhof notes that Tillich presented his doctrine of faith as “answering theology” in
contrast to Barth’s “theology of proclamation.” He also spoke of his work as “apologetic”
theology as against Barth’s “kerygmatic” theology – helpful contrasts by which to gain a
feel for these two giants. And Berkhof points to Tillich’s popularity in the fifties and
sixties in a theological world sighing under “the burden of Barth’s rigorous theology of
the Word.” The alternative Tillich offers appears simple and convincing. But on closer
scrutiny questions arise.
Did Tillich correctly understand man’s existential quest (if we may speak of it in
such general terms)? Is not giving answers as essential to human beings as asking
questions? (p. 295)
Berkhof doubts if human self-understanding can be captured in the word quest. Tillich
struggles to give logical explanations of his correlation scheme but, Berkhof points out,
he operates within a circle and intentionally so.
Immediately at the outset of his prolegomena he introduced the concept of the
theological circle. Like all humanities, theology is based on “mystical experience”
and rests therefore on a “mystical a priori.” Besides, it works with the norm of
the Christian message, and so its circle is narrower than that of the philosophy of
religion. (p. 296)
Tillich sought to narrow the gap between philosophy and theology, having admitted the
circle, by claiming that modern philosophy bears a Christian stamp. Berkhof quotes him
accordingly:
In this sense [in the sense of a philosophy ‘whose existential base is historical
Christianity’] all modern philosophy is Christian, even if it is humanistic,
atheistic, and intentionally anti-Christian. (1:27)
And again:
The modern vision of reality and its philosophical analysis is different from that
of pre-Christian times, whether one is or is not existentially determined by the
God of Mount Zion and the Christ of Mount Golgotha. (1:27, cited in Berkhof, p.
296)
The marks of the Christian tradition simply cannot be erased from the face of modern
thought. Berkhof renders his conclusion regarding Tillich’s system thus:
…in Tillich the answer shapes the question – as a rule by selection from given
materials. Only the person who already knows the answer knows wherein the
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true question consists: the question from within his anxiety, estrangement, and
guilt (fundamentally Tillich’s anthropology is reformationally pessimistic) is for
healing, salvation, and reconciliation and therein for the meaning of life and the
courage to be. But can one view this question as a universally human question
(since after all modern existentialism is a post-Christian phenomenon)? (p. 296)
Tillich himself realized that the claim to universal validity could be called in question as
he himself reflected on modern culture and Asiatic religions. But Tillich concluded that
…nevertheless we must hold before all these groups the “mirror” of human
misery, show them “the structures of anxiety, of conflict, of guilt,” because these
structures mirror what we are, and if we are right, they are in other people also,
and they will concur with our analysis.
Whether we are successful is in question; we take the risk. In this regard Tillich turns to
pedagogy:
There are two principles we should follow in the religious education of our
children. The first is that the questions which are really in the hearts of the
children should be answered and the children should be shown that biblical
symbols and the Christian message are an answer to just these questions. And
secondly, we ought to seek to shape their existence in the direction of the
questions which we believe are the more universal ones. This would be similar to
what we do with primitive people in the mission field. We seek to answer their
questions and in doing so we, at the same time, slowly transform their existence
so that they come to ask the questions to which the Christian message gives the
answer. (Theology of Culture, pp. 202-3, 205-6, cited on p. 297)
Has Tillich offered an alternative to Kerygmatic theology? This is the question Berkhof’s
interest raises. Whatever one may say, Berkhof argues, the gap between Tillich and
Barth is much narrower than either suspected at the time. Referring back to
Schleiermacher, Berkhof writes,
As in Schleiermacher, so in Tillich, human self-understanding is not identical
with the question to which revelation gives an answer; it is only the “place”
(Schleiermacher) at which man finds himself and at which the gospel "calls” him.
Nevertheless, like Schleiermacher and differently than Barth, Tillich avoids – as
long as possible – presenting the transition to faith in the God-given answer-andquestion as a break with the presupposed human understanding of existence.
God is at work everywhere, and hence there is a “latent Christianity” everywhere,
which can, however, only be discovered in the light of Christ. Barth also asserts
that the creation is “the external ground of the covenant” and that there are
therefore many “lights of the world”; indeed, Jesus Christ, precisely in his
exclusiveness, is universally inclusive. While Tillich would say that the right
question is selected from the given situation in the light of the gospel, Barth
would say that the gospel itself first creates in man the question appropriate to it.
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In Tillich the classic doctrine of “common grace” regains the place it had lost in
Barth. (p. 297f)
Berkhof’s critical question put to Tillich’s method is whether the answer of the gospel
does not remain in the grip of a non-evangelical formulation of the question and
therefore suffer distortion. Berkhof must conclude that it is impossible to view Tillich’s
theology as a genuine bridge between the gospel and modernity, but this conclusion, he
maintains, does not diminish the significance of this great theologian.
Berkhof’s journey is concluded but he pauses to take a backward glance over the way he
traveled. He begins his review with the question “What really happened?” He
acknowledges that the reader may have experienced confusion; yet, one need not
despair for, contrary to what many theologians – and the evangelical church tradition –
generally maintain, theology is not a heavenly enterprise but a form of human scholarly
quest involving trial and error. Theology is not like the natural sciences where progress
is possible, one generation building on another (although Thomas Kuhn has called that
in question even in the physical sciences). Rather, in theology and the humanities in
general, there is not progress; rather,
Here one …moves continuously in a circle around one’s object, ever and again
viewing it from a different angle – and the angle changes with the experiences
and predicaments of every given cultural epoch…. We are talking about a search,
a questioning, an encounter, an interaction. Here neither subjectivism nor
objectivism but inter-subjectivity is, in many cases, the highest obtainable
measure of objectivity. (p. 299f)
For theological method, this means that systematic-theological conceptions are the ways
in which the Christian community gives an account of the gospel as its source and norm.
The Western world out of which Berkhof speaks and in which his journey was taken is a
culture estranged from the gospel and that is the challenge to the church – to bring the
gospel to expression in such a fashion that it might again become a vital option.
Theology serves an intermediary function interrogating the gospel from within its
experiences within the culture. The theologian stands not outside, but within the
culture, sharing consciously or unconsciously its experiences and presuppositions. The
theologian stands between the gospel as a normative word and concrete human
experience. He or she is in an encounter situation, more existential than in the other
humanities because of the ultimacy of the issues involved.
The best theologian is not the person who knows how to escape the dangers
inherent in this process of encounter, for such people do not exist; the best
theologian is the person who is most aware of these dangers and hence practices
modesty and caution in what he says. (p. 300)
Commenting on the modern culture, Berkhof holds that the presuppositions given with
the Enlightenment have remained essentially intact: the autonomy of the human
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person, the objectivizing and manipulating of nature, and the marginalizing of God. But
experience has been varied:
Great technical achievements, wars, revolutions, environmental exhaustion, etc.,
can change people’s views and conduct and force them to modify (not, however,
to abandon) the presuppositions. The theologian will sense all this and in his
feedback situation and mediating activity question the gospel from changing
points of view. (p. 301)
As Berkhof has indicated throughout the journey, this has been the case: Schleiermacher
within the perspective of German idealism; Ritschl in the light of the realism of the
technical-industrial world; Barth in the collapsing German culture after World War I.
The situation in which theological formulation comes to expression is dynamic, calling
forth different nuances and emphases at different times – not surrendering the gospel
to the spirit of the times – but speaking in timely fashion the judgment and grace that
the gospel offers.
Theology appears chaotic and many theologians have given it a bad name by
condemning the thinkers of the preceding generation for interpreting the gospel falsely.
But, queries Berkhof,
…was the interpretation of the previous generation really false? And did the
succeeding generation then do it right? Against their better knowledge many
theologians still seem to proceed from a static, unhistorical, freely available
“truth” and to believe that it is most safe within their keeping….In contrast my
journey has taught me that the basic concerns and aims of the several schools,
modalities, and generations have much more in common than concentration on
the larger and smaller differences…would ever lead one to suspect….For me as an
observer the journey has been an exercise in tolerance. (p. 301)
So that’s what happened. Was it legitimate? That is Berkhof’s next question. The great
degree of commonality discovered among the respective theological schools does not
lead Berkhof to a kind of relativistic mix without distinctions. There is room for mutual
criticism and correction – a function he himself has executed with brilliance. The most
fundamental question to be raised is the question with which he opened this study: Is an
understanding possible between the gospel and the presuppositions of our modern
culture? Modern culture’s presuppositions are described in the Old and New Testaments
as sinful. Is the effort to relate these two worlds a hopeless enterprise?
No. Central to both worlds is the human person and salvation. Human revolt is not a
modern phenomenon; it is recorded as early as Genesis 3 and finds expression
throughout the biblical story.
Now the man who breaks his ties with God because he respects his salvation is
there when God is not is nevertheless not abandoned by God,….God pursues this
wayward human being with his judgment and grace. And judgment stands in the
service of grace. Though man wants to live without God, God does not want to
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live without man, and therefore man is never God-less….Whatever may have
motivated the theologian not to take the godlessness of modern man with total
seriousness – in the light of the gospel this attitude must at least in part be
regarded as legitimate. (p. 302)
The task, to be legitimate however, must involve both dialogue and dispute. The gap
may not be patched over; rather it must be uncovered in order that it may be bridged.
Berkhof points to Paul as a model of one who was in solidarity with his culture because
of a greater solidarity with the gospel: “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may
share in its blessing.” In I Corinthians 9:19-23 solidarity with Paul’s world is stressed. In
I Corinthians 1:18-31 however, the break with his culture comes to expression. The
message is a stumbling block and foolishness but is nonetheless proclaimed as God’s
power of salvation. Paul in Athens, Berkhof contends, was right on, illustrating “the
double solidarity, the mutual contradiction, and the conflict.”
From this evidence one can infer that the relationship between the gospel and the
world is dialectical, ever swinging back and forth between yes and no. The
question concerning legitimacy can thus be answered with the observation that
everyone is justified in his theological methodology provided that when he says
yes or no he bears in mind the counterpart and brings it to his audience in one
way or another. (p. 304)
Berkhof explicates the key word dialectic by continuing with Paul. In Philippians 3:4b14, the autobiographical paragraph relating Paul’s movement from his Jewish
experience to his experience of Christ, Berkhof points out a perspective not often
appreciated. Paul, the Jew, was on the way. He was not pointing to that experience as a
time of darkness and despair. Rather he speaks of his experience of Christ as so much
more. The encounter with Christ brought him into crisis. He then moved from the crisis
into Christian existence. There was continuity and break.
Speaking of the theologians he has surveyed in this journey of two hundred years,
Berkhof says, they were determined from the beginning to be Christian, but they wanted
also to be modern people.
On that basis they want to start their intellectual journey, traveling in the
direction of the gospel. What unites the beginning and the end of the journey is
the time of man and his salvation. In the course of that journey it has to become
apparent sooner or later, however, that the road is not at all as innocuous as it
seemed in the beginning. The wandered is thrown off course. He experiences the
transvaluation of his values. Gain becomes loss and what he prided himself on
turn to “refuse.” But the crisis does not mean the end of the road. After the crisis
there awaits him a road that does not end within our world and time, one on
which large differences of opinion can and do arise among travel companions, on
which all sorts of lapses and aberrations are possible. (p. 305f)
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That says Berkhof is the journey that has been going on now for nearly two thousand
years. On the journey everyone must travel by himself. This road is itself the Truth.
One does not “stand” in the Truth but “walks” in it on the way toward the goal
that is not attainable this side of eternity. (p. 306)
Berkhof does not want to be understood in an individualistic fashion. There is a broad
community with intensive interchange. There is the swing of the pendulum as the way
develops.
…The Spirit finds theological reflection where it is initially at home, however
“carnal” that home may be. The Spirit then leads us toward a crisis in our
thinking. After the crisis our thought has to and is allowed to proceed under the
guidance of the motto “I believe in order that I may understand.” However, just as
our thinking before the crisis is threatened by an uncritical modernity, so after the
crisis there is the danger of scholastic sterility. The gospel is the great non-selfevident factum which is ever threatened by betrayal on our theological journey. (p.
306f)
Berkhof then relates the question of legitimacy to the key word “dialectical.”
I now venture to say: the measure of legitimacy belonging to a given theological
method or system corresponds to the measure in which it is involved in the
double movement toward crisis an away from crisis. (p. 307)
Over the two hundred years, Berkhof observes, we have seen liberal theologians who in
their movement toward the gospel stopped short of the crisis and we have seen, too,
orthodox theologians who detached the gospel from the arena of struggle, thinking
mistakenly they could begin the process of thinking beyond the crisis. The greatest
theologian is one who consistently “plumbed and pondered the double movement: the
one toward the crisis and the one following the crisis.” Paul remains for Berkhof the
model. In the last two hundred years Berkhof points to Schleiermacher and Barth. Both
were one-sided on opposite sides; yet the crisis was evident in both. Berkhof raises the
question whether a person can ever think on some level beyond such one-sidedness.
That for him is a major question. What one gains in comprehensiveness one loses in
power.
A third question in this backward glance is “Did it mean anything?” Berkhof uses
“mean” in the sense of succeed – was the goal achieved? His answer is in the negative.
With certain exceptions “secularized culture manifested polite indifference if not
outright intolerance.” Orthodox theologians have been no more successful. Being
regarded as they were, outsiders, some were respected for that but considered even less
credible than their liberal colleagues.
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But Berkhof qualifies his negative response. Outside not much impact was made, but
within the churches the work done has been crucial, enabling many brought up within
the church to remain within it or to return to it.
They have been useful, if not for the penetration of the light of the gospel, then
for the presence of the gospel in the intellectual world. (p. 309)
The efforts of theologians have thus been more successful in conserving the faith than
recruiting people from outside.
Berkhof concludes this retrospective with a final question: “Now what?” Today, Berkhof
claims, theology on a world scale appears more confusing than ever. But actually this
has a positive side because there is a broad and diverse interest in theological reflection.
Everywhere large groups are joyfully discovering that they themselves, each in
their own uniqueness, are known and called of God. In all these new theologies
the word experience serves as a point of entry…. In the 1970s one often had the
feeling that in the multiplicity of experiences and the demand of “contextuality”
arising from them, the oneness of the object, the universal cause of the gospel,
threatened to disappear from sight and that only a tower of Babel was left. (p.
310)
Such was not the case, however, Berkhof contends, for even academic theology in the
West operates out of its own sitz im Leben.
The real difference lies in the cultural, social, and political climate from within
which people are trying to discover the gospel and to which people want to
communicate it.
The recent plurality of theologies can be explained by younger theologians beginning
their journey from within their own experiences (blacks, women, liberation theologians,
etc.). But Berkhof argues,
…they must sooner or later push their own experiences toward the crisis of the
gospel and walk a road on which they do not harden into an ideology but let their
experiences be criticized, corrected, deepened by the crucified and risen Lord,
and placed in his context. (p. 311)
Does two hundred years of theology in the West, which coincides with the heyday of
Western bourgeois culture, constitute an epoch on its last legs? Berkhof thinks not. The
issues of struggle for this post-Enlightenment period are to be found in the biblical
record as well and non-Western theologies display the same experience-revelation
tension that has characterized Western theology. However, Western theology will lose
its predominance; it will die in its Western-ness in order to rise again in globalism and
pluralism will be more extensive.
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The process is ongoing – taking the road that leads into crisis of revelation and
emerging from the crisis able to incorporate our experiences into a new experience.
We must again and again start within our respective contextualities in order then
to fuse our context increasingly with the context of the gospel, in a way such that
the message gains superiority over all that which emerges from our situational
analyses…. Everyone who spends so much time in the praeambula fidei, be it of a
sociological, linguistic, philosophical, or political nature, is in danger of losing the
chance to enrich his Umwelt with the great and new experience of the Word of
God. (p. 312)
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
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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
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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English
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Sound
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Text
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References
Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, 1989
Dublin Core
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RA-4-19900702
Date
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1990-07-02
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Text
Title
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Two Hundred Years of Theology, Report of a Personal Journey
Creator
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Richard A. Rhem
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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eng
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Book Review created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 2, 1990 entitled "Two Hundred Years of Theology, Report of a Personal Journey", on the book Two Hundred Years of Theology, Report of a Personal Journey, written by Hendrikus Berkhof. Tags: Hendrikus Berkhof, Reformed Theology, History of Theology, Modernity, Ecumenical, Historical Thinking, Enlightenment, Faith
Journey. Scripture references: Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, 1989.
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application/pdf
Ecumenical
Enlightenment
Faith
Journey
Hendrikus Berkhof
Historical Thinking
History of Theology
Modernity
Reformed Theology