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The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow
From the series: Moving On To Maturity
Text: Isaiah 44:18; Ephesians 4:13; Matthew 5:48
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Pentecost VIII, July 11, 1999
Transcription of the spoken sermon
As the children leave the sanctuary, the words of the old Spiritual come to me,
"Give me that old time religion; give me that old time religion; it was good
enough for my mother; it was good enough for my sister; it was good enough for
my brother, and it's good enough for me."
Well, we've all sung it and I think we can understand and feel some of the
emotion that is behind that old Spiritual, but I will say this morning quite clearly
and straightforwardly that the old time religion isn't good enough for me. It's not
really that it's not good enough for me; it's just simply that it no longer works for
me. The old time religion can no longer resonate with my knowledge and my
human experience, that manner in which it sought to express the reality of the
living God and the embrace of God, of the cosmic reality of which we are a part. It
no longer tracks with what I understand about myself, about the world, about
history, about God. And so, the old time religion comes up short in my experience
and I want to speak about that this morning as I begin a new series of messages
on "Moving On to Maturity." Moving on to maturity, or growing up as people of
faith.
I have experienced a freedom to address these issues in the last year and a half,
which is a freedom that I didn't know that I didn't have before. When people ask
me, "How are you doing," I say, "Just great," and they say, "Really, how are you
doing?" And if they really want to know, then I use the phrase which many of you
have heard me say, "I have a freedom that I didn't know I didn't have." That's
quite a remarkable experience, because I had always felt free in my thinking and
in my preaching, and you as a congregation had always encouraged and affirmed
that freedom to probe and to wrestle and to question and to wonder. But I now
recognize, in retrospect, that I was not totally free because I was always trying to
express my best understanding and insights within a certain box, within a certain
confessional home. There were certain parameters against which I was always
testing my struggle to understand, and, of course, that's not all bad. In fact, such
freedom as I have now in this independent status in which we find ourselves has
perils that go along with it. There is a real danger in the non-accountability of my
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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present situation. I am aware of that and you need to be aware of that, too. There
is the voice of an old professor always ringing in my mind who used to say,
"Beware of the perils of independency." I have always affirmed the importance of
ecclesiastical connection, but I must say to you, for the time being at least, I am
savoring the freedom and enjoying it very much.
I got a visit from my computer son from Florida who got me the computer against
any indication that I would ever be able to use it. It has sat moribund on my desk
for a couple of years. But, since he was just here, once again he forced me to learn
how to read my mail and, thinking that perhaps having just learned it anew, I
probably ought to practice it a couple of times, last night in order to avoid
working on the sermon, I punched the computer on and I read my mail, and I had
this long letter from Pilgrim out east in Maine, a Congregational minister who
said that you are a marvelous community of people, and he said, "For a year and
a half now I've been taking your sermons off the Internet and while I don't agree
with everything, they're always stimulating and provocative," and he went on to
affirm us and then he went on to say, "And why I am now contacting you is that
we were a congregation who forty years ago as a Congregational Church didn't go
into the union with the Reformed, German Reformed Church to form the United
Church of Christ." And he says the Congregational churches that didn't go into
that merger formed an alliance called the National Association of Congregational
Christian Churches, and he said, "From what I sense on the Internet about Christ
Community, it's a place where you could feel at home. It has great diversity of
theological opinion, and the reason we didn't go into the merger was because we
value congregational autonomy."
Well, it's a very nice letter and I will respond to him. I will say to him, "Thank you
very much, and it sounds as though you have the best offer going. But now, in the
springtime of my senility, sliding toward summer, I am having the time of my life,
and I have no right to determine the future of this congregation forever, but just
for a little while I want to be free."
Now, that's a kind of freedom that I didn't know that I didn't have, and I
acknowledge its perils and its dangers because a person in my position can lead a
people astray, can abuse, can exploit, and without a system of accountability,
where might one go? The only thing that causes me not to worry too much about
this congregation is the fact that nobody's going to lead you blindfolded
anywhere. I wish you could all know all the stories of the people that joined this
faith community today. You are people who are here very intentionally and very
deliberately precisely because you want to think and wrestle and struggle and
come to your own religious experience, your own Christian experience, and you
have thrown off that mantle of authoritarianism that has marked the Church
traditionally. You, I believe, are mature and maturing people, and I think it's time
for us to move on to maturity altogether, and in doing that very deliberately and
very self-consciously, moving on.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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The title of this first sermon in the series indicates what I want to say and that is
that the heart cannot rest where the mind cannot follow. The heart in terms of the
whole being, our whole being, our intuitive sense of what is and what is true and
what is real - that heart cannot dwell or rest where the mind cannot follow. I put
the title in quite a long time ago and I was remembering the statement that I read
in a book a lot longer time ago and I thought I was quoting the statement
correctly. Last night I pulled the old book off the shelf and paged through to see if
I could find that statement again. I found it and I found out I had misquoted it.
The statement really is, "The heart cannot finally find true what the mind finds
false." That's a better statement; that's sharper and that says precisely what I
want to say to you this morning as we think about moving on to maturity. The
heart, the being, our total being cannot finally find true what our minds find
false. And that's the problem with religion. It's the problem of the Church. It's the
problem of every religious institution and every world religion. It is endemic to
the religious experience, that tension between what the heart finds true and what
the mind knows.
The mind deals with the stuff of everyday reality and there has been an explosion
of knowledge and a cumulative human learning by this time in the cosmic
journey. It is just fantastic and it continues to float all over the place. And the
mind takes all that in, but then, also plays it off against the faith structure, the
creedal condition, the confessional statements, and there is conflict. And what I
want to say to you this morning as an expression of the freedom that I am sensing
is that I delight to address these things, not in some manner in which I would
imply that I have grasped all the facets of truth or that I sort of have a handle on
this thing, but this morning I want to say to you that I will never preach to you
what my heart cannot finally find true. And my heart will not be able, finally, to
find true what my mind finds false.
Now, it's taken me 39 years to say that. All of the past time trying always to
translate that Gospel message within certain parameters and then suddenly to
come to this giddy experience of saying, "What do I really believe?" and daring to
share it, hoping to encourage you, maybe even inspire you, stimulate you, to be
provocative in your own experience, but not as an authority. Ah, you say, "You're
an authority figure and you can't get away from it." I refuse the office. I'm a
pilgrim with you. I will not be your authority. I'm going to think with you; I'm
going to share with you the best insights I have, but you can listen and you can
filter and I hope that you will be stimulated in your own pilgrimage to move from
secondhand religion to firsthand experience.
That's the problem with religion, of course. It begins with an explosion, with a
fire. Someone has a vision. God knocks someone off their horse, prostrate on the
ground, a burning bush, whatever it may be. A word made flesh, and that
explosion, that fire, that flame engulfs and sweeps, but eventually the initial fire
begins to dampen, to be banked, to die down, and then those who have been
caught in the explosion begin to wonder what in the world happened, and the
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experience, then, begins to be distilled for certain truths that can be stated
rationally, reasonably. So now, we have an experience that cannot really be
communicated, but, having to be communicated, having to be told, shared, and
so we do the best we can to distill what we can from the explosion and say this
and that and so forth. There is a real tension in the beginning, differing opinions,
alternative systems. There's a conflict going on, but eventually, some party or
some person gets the upper hand and the truth is defined. That's what we call
orthodoxy.
You know what orthodoxy is. Well, you know what orthodontists do? They
straighten your teeth. You know what orthopedic surgeons do? They realign a
cracked bone. You know what an orthodox preacher does? He keeps you thinking
right. Ortho - straight or correct. Doxa - from dokein, to think. The orthodox
church is a church in which people are nurtured, trained, schooled and controlled
to think right. Orthodoxy has the truth defined rationally. This explosion, this
experience that burst forth gets domesticated to a creedal statement, a
confessional statement, and there is a right way to believe or to think. That is
orthodoxy, and it is the inevitable movement of every religious movement. It is
the necessity of every institutionalization of a religious movement and, to the
extent that the distilled truth of the experience is clear and concise, to that extent
it can be passed along and it will be successful and it will build a community of
people, followers, and it will be a means for many for the stimulus of fresh
experience. But, it will be the case with many, many more that it will simply be
the second-hand creed that one received, that one inherited that was passed
along to one and which one passes along.
The problem with orthodoxy is the problem with secondhand religious
experience that shuts off the possibility of continuing thought and growth and
new adventure. Oh, there have been instances of movement. For example, the
Genesis stories. If you have an Old King James Bible around, look in the column
between the columns and you will see there 4004 B.C.. Bishop Usher, an English
Bishop, went back and added up all the years of all the genealogies and he
concluded that creation had to be 4004 B.C. And it was really a matter of creedal
conviction for generations, and when Darwin came along in the 19th century and
the whole evolutionary hypothesis was set forth, there was this intense struggle
between science and religion. In fact, orthodoxy has had a tremendous problem
in the whole modern period in the last four to five hundred years because
orthodoxy is a rational statement of what is. It's no longer simply the experience,
the fire, that which is deeper than the rational. It is a rational statement of what
is. Now you have the whole advent of the natural sciences whose principle of
verification is able to determine what is, empirically through experimentation.
Religion and science have been in conflict and science will win every time as long
as you are dealing on the rational basis, as long as you are dealing on
propositional truths, claiming what is, what is reality, what is the human person,
what has happened in history, etc., etc.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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The Church has made some progress because we have come to see the symbolic
nature of those Genesis creation stories, and the roof hasn't caved in. Yet, here in
1999, there's a whole fundamentalist Christian movement that would have
Creationism taught in the public schools. It seems impossible that that discussion
could still be going on, but it is.
In terms of the apocalypticism of the New Testament in several of its expressions,
expecting the soon return of Jesus Christ - well, we've had to make adjustments
to that because nothing has happened. But, here we are on the threshold of the
third millennium and there are those who are still talking about the second
coming of Christ in terms of this millennial turn. So, we are able to continue, to
perpetuate anachronistic understandings and outmoded manners of faith to a
remarkable degree in a world that is as open as ours where there is as much
information around.
This has been the ongoing problem of the orthodox Church, the orthodox
expression of any religion. Correct thinking. But the world doesn't stop; history
doesn't stop; human experience continues to go on and there is an accumulation
of knowledge and experience, which finally has to shatter that little box of faith
that has been given to us. And when that happens, one either leaves and drops
out, and that's happened en masse, or one shuts off the mind, or one says, as I am
saying to you this morning, my heart cannot dwell and affirm as true that which
my mind finds to be false. But, if my experience, if the reality to which my whole
being is drawn, in which it is grounded, embraced, if that total experience
transcends my rational understanding, then I have to try to find a new way to say
reasonably, understandably what that deeper experience is.
That's my hope for all of us - that we will move on to maturity, that we will come
to a deeper expression of our faith in order that we need not jettison that deep
religious experience of the grace of God, nor live with our heads in the sand,
failing to acknowledge that the old paradigms and stories are simply shot out of
the water with everything that is coming to light in what we know about our
world, about our history, about our person. Maturity, moving on with fresh
experience and fresh faith expression - that's the goal.
There is precedent for doing this. Jesus said, "It has been said, but I say unto you
...," and he called the people in the culminating point to that portion of the
Sermon on the Mount where he calls for the loving even of enemies, saying, "Be
ye therefore perfect..." a terrible translation filled with all the moralism that has
been oppressive throughout all the centuries, "Be ye therefore perfect, as God is
perfect?" No, that's not it. Telios is the Greek word. Be therefore mature, be ye
therefore complete, as God is mature. Jesus is talking about a new being - a
kingdom person in that Sermon on the Mount. He comes to this culminating
point and says, "Be inclusive, not exclusive. No more tribalism, no more drawing
circles around my little people, no more over-againstness, no more 'us and them.'
For God's sake, love your enemies, as God loves all, for the rain falls on the just
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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and the unjust and the sun shines on the good and the evil because there are no
good and evil, just and unjust, but all human beings in various states of disarray
who are embraced by the eternal God who created us." Jesus says love your
enemies, embrace, be inclusive.
Paul uses the same word, Telios. Jesus says be like God, be complete, be mature.
Paul says in the 13th verse of Ephesians 4, "Come to maturity." Grow up. No more
children blown about by every wind of doctrine. Grow up! Think! Because the
passion of Paul, the vision of Paul came to expression in that third chapter, the
14th verse following where he says, "I pray for you that you be rooted and
grounded in love, that you'll come to know the length and the breadth and the
height and the depth of the love of God, that you will come to know all the
fullness of God. That's what I want for you." He recognizes that it is a process, but
he says, "Move on to maturity; be mature in Christ Jesus."
I don't know, but I wonder how long – even with the institutional structures and
the momentum that they create and the power they possess and the control they
have over many – many people can go on. Can the heart find truth where the
mind finds falsehood? Do we not have to enter this world of ours and open our
eyes and take it all in and then know that, beneath it all, above it all, and beyond
it all is the eternal God whose grace is an experience of the heart far beyond a set
of rational propositions?
If I were to put it in sum this morning, I would say, on the basis of what Jesus
says, and what Paul says in our text – "Be open-minded." “It has been said, I say
to you ...” – to make that transition you have to have an open mind. Don't tell me
it was Jesus, the son of God and therefore, it doesn't apply to the rest of us. Jesus,
with all of the limitations of his humanity, had the courage to give expression to
something new. "It has been said, I say unto you ..." Be of broad and liberal spirit,
embrace, do not exclude, love your enemies, be done with tight tribalism, narrow
ethnicism, destructive nationalism. Stop drawing lines unless the circle embraces
the whole human family. And, trust deeply. Trust deeply. Let it wash through
your mind and over your heart that you are rooted and grounded in love, that
love is the ultimate reality.
The French thinker, Pascal, said it better than I can say it. "If one subjects
everything to reason, our religion will lose its mystery. If one offends the
principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. There are two
equally dangerous extremes - to shut reason out and to let nothing else in."
Let us go on to maturity. No more studied ambiguity; no more word games; just
plain-speaking, because the deepest truth of this place, for better or for worse,
because it is the deepest truth of this preacher is that the heart cannot finally find
true what the mind finds false.
© Grand Valley State University
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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.
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
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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English
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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Event
Pentecost VIII
Series
Moving On To Maturity
Scripture Text
Isaish 44:18: Ephesians 4:13, Matthew 5:48
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
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1999-07-11
Title
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The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow
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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 July 11, 1999 entitled "The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow", as part of the series "Moving On To Maturity", on the occasion of Pentecost VIII, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Isaish 44:18: Ephesians 4:13, Matthew 5:48.
Critical Thinking
Inclusive Grace
Orthodoxy
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Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage
Richard A. Rhem
Page 1
Re-imagining the Faith:
A Theological Pilgrimage
Richard A. Rhem
Introductory Reflections for the Articles Page
December 12, 2012
At my retirement in 2004, Christ Community Church was exceedingly gracious in so
many ways, one of which was to collect a number of my sermons and publish them
under the title Re-Imagining the Faith. I could not have named it as well; it succinctly
expressed the story of my thirty-seven years as pastor of that congregation. It was at the
First Reformed Church of Spring Lake, Michigan, that I was ordained to the Christian
ministry on June 30, 1960. From 1960, just out of seminary, to 1964 I served that Spring
Lake congregation. During those four years I was in no way seeking to re-imagine the
Christian faith; in fact, I would have been threatened by the thought. My understanding
of Christian faith was orthodox, evangelical in the Reformed tradition as conveyed by
the Dutch Reformed Church rooted in the Netherlands and brought to this country in
the nineteenth century emigration from the Netherlands.
It was, however, in those four years through pastoral experience that my orthodoxy was
being tested. That whole story is critical to my theological pilgrimage, but I won’t go into
it here, except to say that a move to a very conservative, evangelical Reformed
congregation in New Jersey [in 1964] only accentuated my struggle, which was really
about the view and authority of Scripture. I left New Jersey for the Netherlands to
pursue post-graduate studies. I was indeed fortunate to be received and accepted by
Professor Dr. Hendrikus Berkhof, Professor of Dogmatics at Leiden University. As I was
leaving his study after my first appointment with him in the early Spring of 1967, I saw a
piece of paper pinned on a drape, on which was written:
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
In those lines by Alfred Lord Tennyson I knew I had found my teacher and my task. My
little system had had its day; I longed to find the Sacred Mystery toward whom my little
system, now broken, had pointed.
Though I had earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology following my BA
from Hope College, I was about to embark for the first time in my life on an intellectual
and spiritual quest with an open mind and heart – seeking truth wherever it might lead
me. For the first time in my life I began with questions rather than answers to be proven
and confirmed. It was a liberating moment; finally I was ready to learn.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
Lest I be misunderstood, my failure to gain an education, to learn, was not the fault of
the institutions from which I attained degrees, nor the teachers who taught me. To be
sure, a denominational seminary has not the task to lead students to new visions of the
faith but rather to teach the faith system, the confessional foundation of the church that
supports it and governs it. That being said, I must confess the problem was mine. All my
energy and intellectual gifts were committed to learning and then teaching evangelical
Reformed faith. The last word had been spoken; now it was my calling to proclaim and
teach it. And I was deadly serious about it.
But no longer. After my little system began to break in those seven years of pastoral
ministry, I knew I had to begin again to see if indeed I could come to new insight and
understanding that would enable me still to be a Christian minister with a message in
which I could passionately believe and proclaim.
The fact that at my retirement a book of my sermons was published with the title ReImagining the Faith is the finest tribute I could receive, witnessing to the journey that
began in the late 60’s under the guidance of Professor Berkhof and that continued all the
years after my return to the Spring Lake congregation in 1971. Through all those years I
was about re-imagining the faith and, even in retirement, the journey continues.
As I look back over my ministry that continued in Spring Lake following my four-year
European sojourn, I realize that what I essentially gained was an ability to think
theologically, to think critically. No longer was there a set confessional system of
theological propositions to be explained and defended. I was full of wondering, of
questioning, of questing for a deeper understanding of biblical faith in the context of
contemporary culture.
My new posture found expression in preaching and teaching but it was with the birth of
the journal Perspectives, a Journal of Reformed Thought in 1986 that I began to
articulate that new posture on central theological/biblical themes.
My first article was on the theology of Robert Schuller as I will describe below. But from
then on I addressed some critical themes that reflected my own groping for a new
understanding of biblical faith.
As I was working on the thread of those pieces I received a note from Professor Dr.
Hendrik Hart who had begun reading the articles I had given him. In response to
questions he raised, I gave some background about my experience in the RCA. Our
correspondence I include here:
Email from Hendrik Hart, November 20, 2012:
... I’m reading Dick’s articles in Perspectives. I was entirely unprepared for them because
Dick keeps saying that he was a latecomer in moving beyond conservatism. But the first
piece, from 1987, digs into the God-Jesus-male cluster with a vengeance. And so it is
with most of the pieces. They are radical in choice of topic, position and approach. They
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
are not mealy-mouthed either. The language is clear, direct, and hard-hitting. I would
have thought that, early in the game, the pastoral side might emerge, knowing how upset
conservatives might be. Not so. So where’s the conservatism? The only evidence for
Dick’s pleading a late start in getting beyond conservatism is that the style of argument
has not been touched by the then rising postmodern spirit. But that took time for all of
us.
OK, if I’m near the mark with this, how would you characterize where you were in 1987,
Dick? What readings or experiences would have spawned those articles and how did you
expect they would be perceived? By your congregation, by your classis, by Perspectives
readers?
I am curious because, if I go by my own memories, I think there was a mixture of urgency
and naiveté. In 1983 I wrote “Must I Believe in God as Father?” in The Banner. It was a
soapbox piece and the editor and I had previously discussed at length how this should be
done. I think I wrote very carefully, so I was fully unprepared for the storm of invective
that broke over me, as well as for the complete silence of supporters. Only now (right
now!) does it occur to me that the problem may well not have been the piece as such (it
was about praying to God as Mother), but the heading. Why did I not see that 30 years
ago? So, if you can, tell us something about why you may have written things possibly
unaware of how they would be perceived or of how you would endanger yourself. Did you
know you were taking risks?
Reply from Richard Rhem:
Henk, great to hear from you and I am pleased you are reading the articles. It so happens
that I have spent over a week gathering my writings over the years of my ministry post
Netherlands. (I have a few more for you, especially two pieces that appeared in The
Reformed Review, Western Seminary’s journal. In 1972 I gave a lecture at Western
which was published in The Reformed Review – “A Theological Conception of Reality as
History – Some Aspects of the Thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg.” Then in 1986 I wrote
in a [tribute] for Gene Osterhaven – “Theological Method: The Search for a New
Paradigm in a Pluralistic Age” – which dealt with Küng’s paradigm change in connection
with Tracy and referring to Gadamer, etc. Those three pieces were received quite well.
Then the RCA founded Perspectives. I just found the first editorial by Rev. Dr. James
Van Hoeven – first editor and major figure behind the project. (That he was brother-inlaw to Ed Mulder, General Secretary, got the Journal underway.) Jim wanted me on the
board of editors and immediately asked that I write about Schuller’s new reformation. I
had been inspired by Bob Schuller upon my return from the Netherlands - my leadership
people felt, having been out of the country for four years, I needed such exposure. It
worked. Within four months of beginning again in Spring Lake, the First Reformed
Church became Christ Community and a second service in the morning was added (and
eventually a third). About 28 of our people attended Schuller’s Institute for Successful
Church Leadership. But Bob Schuller was under fire for his book New Reformation and
being too easy on sin!! Therefore Jim Van Hoeven thought I should do an article on
Schuller. It was quite well received. You ask about whether I wrote with awareness of
reaction from the church. I’m sure I was naive but, according to Jim’s first editorial, this
new journal’s purpose was to “engage issues that reformed Christians meet in personal,
ecclesiastical, and societal life.” It also aimed to be in conversations that “help shape the
identity and mission of the Reformed Church in America.”
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Jim continues, “If in the process, Perspectives can enable a community of scholars to be
formed – women and men from within the church who bridge race, region, and
discipline, who enjoy the give and take of thoughtful discourse, and who do not mind if
their Sundays sometimes get pretty rough [an allusion to a Mark Twain quote with which
he opened] – this enterprise will have fulfilled its expectations.”
The editorial moves to a quote from Robert Bly: “Certainty lives on either side of the
border, but truth lives on the border.” Jim continues, “The editors of Perspectives will
push themselves and the church toward that border, theologically. This means, on the
one hand, Perspectives will affirm and deepen the richness of the Reformed tradition.
Tradition tells us who we are, gives us a definition, a point from which to set our course,
and reminds us ‘we belong...to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.’ And yet truth lives on the
border. The danger of too much tradition is that it turns a good thing into idolatry. The
church’s faith and life must always be creative. …holding to the tradition, being creative,
living on the border is part of what it means to be Reformed, according to the Word of
God.”
That was January, 1986, the first issue. Perspectives was initially sent free of charge to
ministers, members of boards and agencies, elders on request. It was to engage the
leadership of the RCA in creative conversation. I really believed that, naive as I was...
It is coincidental that you raise the questions my writings raised as your brother Peter
has asked me to write an overview of the thread that runs through my articles to
introduce them on a Web site of an archive of my work. I have begun writing after
sorting through piles of files. That piece will answer some of your questions, but let me
respond to your questions regarding my being a late bloomer. Throughout my education
I was trying to reinforce the faith structure of my childhood. I never challenged or raised
a question. Yet, beneath my sturdy dogmatism, there was an insecurity: I wondered if the
faith/church would survive – not because it wasn’t God’s truth but because the darkness
arrayed against the light was formidable. A pastoral experience in Spring Lake showed
me that an inerrant, infallible Bible wasn’t enough. During my last year there, the
Covenant Life curriculum from the RCA/Presbyterians came out. I taught the foundation
papers in Spring Lake and then introduced the curriculum to the New Jersey
congregation. It created an uproar from a few who felt it was weak on Scripture [long
story]. For me – finally owning my own questions – it was very helpful. I knew I would
have to spend years bringing that congregation around or make good on my desire to go
to the Netherlands for postgrad work. Berkhof accepted me and proved a great mentor
and friend. Thus began my first real education because finally I was open to the quest.
But, Henk, I was 32! Four years in Leiden and my return to Spring Lake where I began to
preach out of the reservoir of the Leiden years.
This I knew: the orthodox view of Scripture was the bottleneck. I felt a real freedom to
explore in that marvelous community. I taught Berkhof’s Christian Faith, Küng’s On
Being a Christian and Does God Exist? Coming from a serious study of Pannenberg, I
was ready for Küng whom I came to appreciate deeply. I mentioned my writings/lectures
in The Reformed Review in 1972 and 1986. These were about the theological method.
But, as I wrote earlier, it was Perspectives that gave me the occasion to address issues
before the church. Yes, I was naive, but I was also totally free in bringing to expression
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what I had been thinking about. Now I was 51, Henk: no youngster, but just finding my
voice. I was blessed with a congregation that allowed me to “think out loud”. That was
my preaching style and it was a safe and honest place. Thus when Perspectives came
along I expressed myself quite honestly. The “Habit of God’s Heart” piece I knew was
treading on dangerous terrain, but I tried to be careful, wondering but also being honest
about my hope that God’s grace was universal.
As time moved on I got the assignments that were controversial because I was a pastor in
a safe place. I think there was only one other pastor on the board of Perspectives. The
rest were professors at colleges or the seminaries and were reluctant to take on the
themes I tackled.
So, my conservatism in the traditional form ended when I left for Leiden in 1967. From
there I had to begin again. I consumed book after book. Berkhof would say, “You must
begin to write,” but I said, “I just found six more footnotes leading to a dozen more
books!”
Trying to answer your questions: by 1987 I had been engaged in serious theological
reading/thinking for 20 years. Perspectives gave me the opportunity to bring to
expression all I had been thinking/teaching/preaching about. I felt safe and confident
and thus put myself on the line. Perspectives was not the Church Herald, read by RCA
lay folk. The Banner was something else. You wrote in a very much more conservative
context to a well-informed readership in the bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy.
As for “the silence of supporters,” I know that well. When my Grace article appeared, I
was teaching homiletics at Western. A colleague also on the board of editors, present and
participating in the discussion about the theme, in favor of my writing...but when the
storm rose, in a faculty meeting asked, “Why did you feel you had to write that piece?”
He also, I’m told, said if I had changed six words there would have been no problem.
I must say, Henk, it never occurred to me that I would get into trouble. My congregation
was solidly supportive and I had fine collegial relationships with the RCA leadership and
I honestly felt I was being a positive influence for good in the RCA. In the end it was not
RCA leadership but young, threatened pastors in the Muskegon Classis that spelled my
demise in the RCA. It is all quite a story.
And now to return to the thread of my articles. My second Perspectives piece was
entitled “Karl Barth: Preaching and Theological Renewal.” I set forth Barth’s own
experience of preaching and the high regard he had for the preaching moment – very
inspiring.
But then, in a series of articles, I addressed contemporary issues in the Church and my
own deepening grasp of those issues.
February 1987, pp. 4-6: “An Accident of the Incarnation.” The issue was the male
domination of the church. I argued that the maleness of the Incarnation was an
“accident,” not of the essence of God’s revelation in human flesh.
In the January 1988 issue, I wrote a piece, “Purgatory Revisited.” Hans Küng at the
University of Michigan in the Fall of 1983 lectured on questions surrounding death,
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heaven, hell and the future, subsequently published under the title Eternal Life. Küng
got me to thinking. I suspect it was a beginning step toward the hope of universal grace.
In the September 1988, issue I brought to full expression my hope and growing
conviction that God’s grace would finally bring all God’s children home. The piece,
entitled “The Habits of God’s Heart”, elicited major responses from RCA ministers and
the public readership – positive and negative, the latter predominant.
In the April 1991, issue I became even bolder. I wrote of my growing conviction that my
faith community, the community of Reformed faith issuing from Calvin’s Geneva by way
of the Netherlands had never come to terms with the Enlightenment - the place of
critical rationality and historical consciousness in the understanding of the Christian
credal tradition as espoused by the Reformed community in this country. It was
Hendrikus Berkhof’s Two Hundred Years of Theology that made me aware that the
community of which I was a part “was not even engaged in the struggle.” The article was
entitled “Sleeping Through a Revolution.”
As one can well imagine, I got some serious response, including from my beloved
theology professor, Dr. Eugene Osterhaven – who treated me gently however.
Someone challenged me on biblical grounds, on my use of Scripture. That drove me on
to my next piece, “The Book That Binds Us” in the December 1992, issue. My bold
contention was that the Bible is being misused. It is being asked to function in a way it
can no longer be expected to function, a way it was never intended to function.
In the March 1993, issue I returned to the theme of “An Accident of the Incarnation”
with a focus on God language. I wrote in collaboration with my colleague, Colette
Volkema De Nooyer, who did the major work.
In the May 1995 issue, I “completed” as it were the thread I was weaving with an article
“Interreligious Dialogue – What is Required of Us?” I had recognized long since that the
orthodox understanding of Jesus’ death as atonement blocked openness to the other in
interfaith discussion. In this piece I gave that full expression. The article concluded:
My intention is not to advocate Hick or Ogden or any other thinker who is addressing the
matter of interreligious dialogue. Rather, I wish to point to the necessity of honestly
drawing out the consequences of the recognition that human grasp of the truth develops,
evolves, and needs ongoing assessment and adjustment – and sometimes conceptions
need to be rejected. By use of historical imagination, the originating experience that gave
rise to a theological formulation needs to be recovered in order to express the same
reality differently, in order to make the experience available in a totally different cultural
context.
Rather than seeing this as a burden, a cause for fear and defensiveness, it should be seen
as an exciting challenge. Is not such a pursuit of the truth to love God with mind as well
as heart? And is not the recognition that every biblical and theological expression is
marked by the human and historical limitations that adhere to all human thought the
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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reason there is need for continual reformation? To be Reformed is not to be in
possession of a set of timeless and eternal truths but, rather, to refuse to absolutize any
human arrangement or formulation. It is not to be saddled with a set of truths that were
once new, innovative, and destabilizing of the established order of the sixteenth century,
or the first century. It is an approach, a spirit, a posture that is open to new knowledge,
fresh insight, and cumulative human experience within historical development.
The church has managed to spend the century in a state of schizophrenia, pursuing
research in the academy and sharing the results in the lecture hall, while the liturgy,
prayers, hymns, and sermons have given little evidence of the honest engagement with
insights of the modern period.
My mentor, Hendrikus Berkhof, claimed the only heresy was to make the gospel boring. I
would add another – the heresy of orthodoxy, the evidence of a failure of nerve and lack
of trust in the living God. It is the heresy of an inordinate lust for certitude that seeks
premature closure, the shutting down of the quest for truth and growth of knowledge in
the magnificent and mysterious cosmos by the creatures whom the Creator calls to
consciousness and embraces in a Grace that pervades the unfolding cosmic process.
© Grand Valley State University
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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.
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
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Interfaith worship
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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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Introduction to Articles Page in Web Archive
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Re-imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage
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Richard A. Rhem
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eng
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Introduction to the Articles created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) entitled "Re-imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage", as part of the series "Introduction to Articles Page in Web Archive". Tags: Spiritual Quest, Reformed Theology, Authority of Scripture, Critical Thinking, Universal Grace, Orthodoxy, Nature of Religion, Sacred Mystery.
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2012-12-12
Authority of Scripture
Critical Thinking
Nature of Religion
Orthodoxy
Reformed Theology
Sacred Mystery
Spiritual Quest
Universal Grace
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/afd3b40b4aecfe3e3eb959246fc447f7.pdf
4bdbfa03d5b19d3667f982afeaad4e64
PDF Text
Text
Sleeping Through a Revolution
Article by
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Published in
Perspectives
A Journal of Reformed Thought
April 1991, pp. 8-14
Reformed theology in America, the roots of which lie in the Netherlands, has
managed to sleep through the revolution of the modern world and survive.
Through strong ethnic identity, internal growth, and a militant mind that
maintained an adversarial attitude over against modern culture, a Reformed
community of Dutch origin still exists. But the defensive posture that has largely
characterized it has prevented it from translating the richness of its sixteenthcentury legacy of Reformation theology into a proclamation of the gospel to
engage modern thought.
I was struck by this fact as I read Hendrikus Berkhof’s Two Hundred Years of
Theology. Berkhof wrote this work after retiring from the dogmatics chair at the
University of Leiden. He calls it a personal journey because he wrote to satisfy his
own curiosity about the philosophical and theological developments since the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The engagement of the gospel and
modern thought has been the passion of Berkhof’s own endeavor as a Christian
thinker. He traces the efforts of those theologians who sought to build a bridge
between the gospel and modern culture, a culture dominated by the assumptions
of the Enlightenment: the autonomy of the human person, human rationality as
the measure of truth, the historical conditionedness of all truth, and the
epistemological dualism of subject-object, of knowledge and faith.
Berkhof’s conclusions at the end of his survey are sober. Was the effort
successful? He answers in the negative: “Secularized culture manifested polite
indifference if not outright intolerance.” Nevertheless, the struggle was necessary
and its consequences significant.
What struck me as I followed the story of the past two hundred years – the world
of modern culture in the wake of the Enlightenment – was that the community of
which I am a part was not even engaged in the struggle. As I reflected on my own
theological education, I realized I was thoroughly schooled in theological
development through the Reformation, but understood very little of the
revolution in cultural understanding effected by the Enlightenment, especially
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Richard A. Rhem
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the understanding of the human process of knowing and the rise of historical
thinking.
In an attempt to understand why there has been so little engagement with the
thought and cultural assumptions of the modern world in my own tradition, I
turned to the study of paradigm shifts in the history of dogma, a study
spearheaded by Hans Küng. Küng traced theological development with major
epochal shifts over two thousand years. He, along with David Tracy, gathered an
international Ecumenical Symposium at Tubingen in 1983 to discuss “A New
Paradigm of Theology.” Papers delivered at the symposium are published in the
volume Paradigm Change in Theology. At the symposium, Küng charted the
epochal shifts in theology to test his scheme of periodization. Beginning with the
primitive Christian apocalyptic paradigm, the historical progression moves
through the ancient church Hellenistic, the medieval Roman Catholic, the
Reformation Protestant with its two consequent paradigms of counterreformation – Roman Catholic and Protestant Orthodox paradigms – the modern
Enlightenment paradigm, and on to the present contemporary ecumenical
paradigm.
Küng came on the idea of paradigm shifts in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn portrayed scientific development as
occurring, not as had been commonly assumed, in smooth cumulative progress,
but rather in leaps triggered by paradigm shifts, the displacement of one model of
understanding by another. Küng applied Kuhn’s discovery to theological
development and found points of significant shift there as well.
Paradigm as Kuhn defined it and as Küng utilizes it means “an entire
constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a
given community.” Küng’s periodization marks off those points in the movement
of history where a major shift in understanding took place, a shift from one
constellation of beliefs to another – a change in the explanation model through
which Christian faith was interpreted. The points of shift can be debated and the
flow of history cannot be rigidly sectioned off. Nevertheless, the periodization
Küng has suggested has been widely received.
Küng developed his study of paradigm shifts further in Theology for the Third
Millennium. There he pointed out the interesting difference between paradigm
shifts in the natural sciences and in theology. In science, as data pile up that
cannot be explained within the existing paradigm, pressure builds to find a new
paradigm. When the new paradigm becomes available, one that succeeds in
explaining a broader range of data, it replaces the old paradigm, which becomes
obsolete.
But this is not the case with paradigm shifts in theology. The same process
operates: new understanding of the knowing process and of the nature of human
knowledge, new data – for example, data acquired through the rise of the
historical-critical method of biblical study, new philosophical insights, scientific
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Richard A. Rhem
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knowledge – eventuate in a major shift in understanding of the Christian
tradition. A new paradigm comes into being. But in contrast to the process in the
natural sciences, the old paradigm does not become obsolete; it continues to be
the paradigm within which certain Christian communities understand Christian
faith and existence.
Thus, the two thousand years of theological development traced by Küng, reveal
eight major paradigms. But the fascinating fact is that all eight paradigms
continue to claim the loyalty of significant communities. All eight continue to
exert their influence down to the present.
This insight enabled me to discover how Reformed theology, with roots in the
Netherlands, has been able to remain largely unscathed by the world of modern
thought. It has continued to live within the paradigm of Reformed orthodoxy that
took shape in the Reformed scholasticism of the seventeenth century, insulated
from the acids of modernity. A form of the gospel thus has been preserved, but at
a great price. The failure to engage the modern world under the cultural assumptions of the Enlightenment has led to a kind of ghetto existence and a failure to
bring the rich legacy of Reformation theology to new expression. An historically
conditioned theological confessional position has been frozen in time,
absolutized, and perpetuated largely intact over generations, largely untouched
by ongoing cultural, philosophical, and scientific assumptions.
Theologically we are stuck, and the best and the brightest know it. Reformed
orthodoxy has slept through the revolution of human understanding and
knowledge created by the Enlightenment, never to this day having come to terms
with the autonomy of the human person, the throwing off of all forms of authoritarianism, and the rise of historical thinking. These cultural assumptions are now
being challenged. Many observers believe we are living at an epochal hinge point
in history, experiencing the emergence of the postmodern age. But we will not be
able to move directly from a seventeenth-century paradigm to the postmodern
world without going through the baptism of the Enlightenment. While its
assumptions are losing their self-evident status, what will not be lost is the value
of critical rationality, and what will not be tolerated is any return to authoritarian
claims, be they of church, of tradition, or of Bible.
In theology old paradigms keep their adherents even when theological
development has left them behind. But they can do so only by some form of
authoritarian claim. In the case of Reformed orthodoxy the authoritarian claim of
the Bible has held theological movement hostage, hindering meaningful dialogue
with the sciences and philosophy. We are theologically stuck, and we will not
become unstuck until we learn to value Scripture as authority, but break loose
from its authoritarian use.
In order to give that contention foundation, I will review in brief the
philosophical and theological movement of the past two and a half centuries,
indicating how philosophical, especially epistemological, analysis has impacted
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Richard A. Rhem
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theological formulation in the broader Christian tradition. Under the domination
of Enlightenment assumptions, that development has reached an impasse. I will
then discuss new possibilities for theological breakthrough opened by the
emerging postmodern paradigm. Finally, with reference to one of the great Dutch
Reformed theologians, Herman Bavinck, I will suggest what is necessary if our
tradition is to come to new and fruitful expression.
The Copernican-Galilean controversy out of which modern culture arose was a
severe challenge to the medieval synthesis of theology and Aristotelian science
achieved by Thomas Aquinas. A challenge to the Aristotelian cosmology and
natural philosophy was a challenge to theological orthodoxy, both to Catholic and
to Reformation orthodoxy. In that opening battle between the church and natural
science, science won its independence from the intellectual and theological
authority of the church.
The early representatives of philosophical and scientific endeavor lived in two
houses: the house of human rationality in which they plied their scientific skills,
and the house of faith, in which they remained faithful to the church and its
theological authority, understood as based beyond human reason in revelation.
This was true of Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy. He
remained in the church, but understood his critical thinking as belonging to the
natural realm – a purely human activity. It was Descartes who set the thinking
subject over against the object to be thought, the world of material reality. He
argued for the certainty of knowledge that could be arrived at by the mind
observing the universe, which was understood as a vast machine. This subjectobject split became determinative for modern thought in science, philosophy, and
theology.
The mechanistic character of the natural world became the premise on which
Newton described the natural laws by which the universe operated. The solid
success of the natural sciences, in their effort to understand and control nature,
seemed to verify Descartes’ model of human knowing and Newton’s model of the
physical universe.
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century cannot be explained or understood
without reference to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his critical analysis of how
human knowledge is attained. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is broadly
acknowledged as the foundational work of German philosophy. In his Two
Hundred Years of Theology, Hendrikus Berkhof contends that this work of
Kant’s must be valued “as a radical new beginning for evangelical theology,” and
that in the wake 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. (pp. 1 ff)
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
Although Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason destroyed the traditional proofs for the
existence of God, thereby striking terror in the hearts of conservative theologians,
it is Berkhof’s conviction that Kant’s purpose was positive in intent. Kant himself
wrote, “I therefore had to abolish knowledge in order to make room for belief.”
For Kant, faith and knowledge were separate but complementary and both were
necessary. Here again we see the split of faith and reason which Aquinas
synthesized when the overwhelming influence of Aristotelian thought in the West
forced an accommodation with revelation in the thirteenth century. It is the same
split mentioned above in regard to Descartes and Newton. In Kant, however, we
have an acute analysis of the human knowing process brought about by the
growing autonomy of human reason, which was throwing off all authoritarian
structures, whether ecclesiastical (the church) or revelational (the Bible). Kant
was a child of the Enlightenment. Preeminent philosopher though he was, he
nevertheless maintained an intense theological and religious interest. Berkhof
believes that it was “Kant’s purpose to save religion as well as the Enlightenment:
in this double objective... 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 unaided human reason. The empirical knowledge gained by the
knowing subject 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.
For the noumenal world, the things in themselves – for example, the universe as
a causal whole, the human self as free agent, and God – no empirical verification
was possible. Yet, for practical reasons, Kant argued, faith in them was absolutely
necessary. This assertion was made in Kant’s second work, The Critique of
Practical Reason.
This fundamental dualism has shaped and determined modern culture; it is the
inheritance of the Enlightenment, whose center is the autonomous human
person. This dualism has been regarded as axiomatic – the climate of opinion
that has dominated the modern period.
It is on this background that the whole enterprise of modern theology must be
understood, at least the theology that attempted to bridge the gulf between the
gospel and modern culture, the theology of classic nineteenth-century liberalism,
to use Küng’s schematization of epochal paradigms.
This is evident in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, regarded as the father
of modern theology. If Kant successfully blocked the road to the knowledge of
God through rational inquiry, through metaphysical speculation, then what road
remains open and on what basis can knowledge of God be grounded? Appeal to
authority (of church, tradition, or Bible) was no longer compelling. Where, then,
could one turn except to the interior life of the individual – to “the feeling of
absolute dependence,” an experience that Schleiermacher maintained was
common to all humankind at some time or other. This was not to claim, as did
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Richard A. Rhem
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Feuerbach and others later in the whole development of modern atheism, that
religion, or specifically Christianity, arose from the feeling of dependence of the
human person. No. Rather, the feeling of absolute dependence was the human
precondition for it. Schleiermacher was pointing to the place into which
revelation enters.
The ongoing development of modern theology was filtered through Kant
philosophically and Schleiermacher theologically, whether a theologian followed
them or rejected them. They determined the shape of the playing field and the
rules of the game.
We can see this in the theology of Albrecht Ritschl, whose influence came to
flower in the 1870s. Ritschl was the first German theologian to recognize the
intellectual shift from idealism to realism under the impact of such thinkers as
Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, and Engels; the significant achievements of science,
technology, and industry; the alienation of the working class; and the impact of
Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1863). The cultural mood in Germany turned
more and more to the world of experience and to the natural laws governing it.
Ritschl concluded in such a cultural milieu that the knowledge of God could be
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 for
which he is best known and most misunderstood. Berkhof explains:
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.
(p. 121)
Wilhelm Herrmann developed the intention of Ritschl’s theology. He was
convinced, as was Ritschl, that the highest of religion and morality was united in
the figure of Jesus. Again following Ritschl under the impact of Kant’s
epistemology, faith and knowledge were held distinct. The authority of Scripture,
dogma, or creed had to do with knowledge, not faith. He wrote,
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.
Herrmann was deeply concerned about the philosophical base of his theology.
For him, Kant loomed large, “whose mighty thoughts emerge increasingly in
almost all domains of human learning as the select governor of all true research.”
He valued Kant’s analysis of the knowing process positively “because in every
connection he has placed the value of faith, its independence from science, in the
clearest light.” In his analysis of Herrmann’s theology, Berkhof offers an
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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illuminating image by which to understand Herrmann over against the rising tide
of historical consciousness and historical thinking.
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 deveopment, history, social
relationships, and the authority of Scripture and Christian tradition – have
already 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 this rock. (Two Hundred Years of Theology, 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.
Is it possible to posit a basis for faith above history invulnerable to the acids of
historical criticism? Ernst Troeltsch, a student of Ritschl, did not think so. He
rejected the possibility of grounding faith in inner experience, thereby finding an
absolute ground in history. Troeltsch, too, recognized that the deterministichistorical mode of thinking was inundating the gospel, but he did not believe,
contrary to Herrmann, that there was yet a ridge of the rock above the flood.
Troeltsch saw no alternative but to plunge into the stream of historicism with its
relativity. Jesus could not be lifted out of the stream of history. Every historical
person and phenomenon is subject to historical conditionedness. In Berkhof’s
words,
history is an ever-moving stream in which the movement of each drop is
determined by the mass of water that precedes 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)
Historical thinking, which arose in the eighteenth century, is another hallmark of
modern thought. It has marked all subsequent modern thought as indelibly as
has Kant’s analysis of the knowing process. In Troeltsch the full consequences of
historical thinking were drawn; Herrmann’s “inner life of Jesus” was “time conditioned,” thoroughly enmeshed in the stream of history.
The struggle to find a basis for faith continued into the twentieth century. The
catalyst for a major reversal of the tide of continental theology was Karl Barth.
The first edition of Barth’s Romerbrief sent shock waves through the world of
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Richard A. Rhem
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academic theology and philosophy. Associated with Barth’s name in the early
period was Rudolf Bultmann, who affirmed Barth’s move, seeing in it a shift to an
existentialist interpretation of the gospel – a direction soon rejected by Barth. For
Bultmann, Barth’s early probings seemed consistent with the effort of their
common teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, to find a basis for faith beyond the
relativities of history. For Herrmann and even more radically for Bultmann, there
was a basic distrust in historically ascertainable facts as vehicles of revelation.
Revelation for Bultmann occurs above history in the “existing” individual who, in
the encounter with the claim of the gospel, is called to decision, the decision of
faith or unbelief apart from recourse to the investigation of any ground for faith
in historical data. Bultmann’s whole program of demythologizing the gospel was
an attempt to peel off the husk of historical happening, for which only relative
certainty could be gained, and find the kernel of God’s appeal in the Christ event.
That Jesus was is all that can be claimed as certain. The “Das” of Jesus is the
point at which God’s claim touches historical reality.
Barth’s first edition of Romerbrief was a seismic shock, but for Barth it was only
an initial probe – he was in transition. The second edition showed Barth not so
interested, as was Bultmann, in the existential analysis of the human person
addressed by the gospel, but in the God Who addresses the human person. In the
preface to the second edition of Romans, he writes:
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.
The second edition of Romans marked Barth’s turn to the interpretation of the
Bible, a turn precipitated by his disillusionment with involvement with the social
democracy movement, which failed to mobilize resistance to World War I, and
the “crisis” created by the need to preach weekly. In his wrestling with Paul’s letter to the Romans, Barth was overwhelmed with the sense of the absolute priority
of God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ and the working of Spirit. Barth was
on the way, on a new way, and for a time continued to grope and feel his way. For
him – as for Bultmann - the thin ridge of the rock on which their teacher
Herrmann had grounded faith was flooded. There was no place to stand. God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ, effected in the individual by the miracle of the Spirit’s
illumination, came “vertically from above.” In the world, in the domain of history,
there were no vestiges of perceptibility except, for example, the crater which
indicates that a meteor has slammed into the earth.
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It is clear that even the paradigm shift to the contemporary period demonstrates
continuity with the nineteenth century. Barth and Bultmann both radicalized the
efforts of Ritschl and Herrmann to ground faith beyond history in order to place
faith beyond the attack of historical criticism and the widespread Enlightenment
assumption that historical reality can yield only relative certainty. It is further
clear that the crucial question that has dogged theological reflection over the past
two hundred years is the question forced by the rise of historical consciousness,
the question of how absolute truth can be discovered in history’s ongoing
movement, how faith can find a certain resting place in the ambiguity of history.
The later Barth, the Barth of Church Dogmatics, turned more and more to
history, valuing it as the “place” of revelation, in contrast to his early work.
However, to the end he never answered what has been perhaps the most serious
criticism of his theology, a criticism expressed sharply by his young friend and
admirer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke of Barth’s “positivism of revelation,” a
“take it or leave it” approach that denied the legitimacy of questioning the
grounds of the revelation, of the claims of the gospel’s appeal. In the final
analysis, neither Barth nor Bultmann were able to ground the Word in history,
within this worldly existence.
The attempt to do so is the story of the post-Bultmannians and the postBarthians – students of these giants who felt the pressure of the cultural mood to
find within human historical existence the experience that afforded a place for
revelation accessible to empirical verification. The development of Christology
“from below,” such as one finds in the early writings of Pannenberg and in Küng,
are examples of this swing back to the attempt to give historical foundation to the
gospel’s claim. In the Netherlands the work of Kuitert, Berkhouwer’s successor, is
an attempt to find in history “the footprints of God.”
The pendulum swings back and forth. Berkhof concludes that if one starts, as
Barth did, with God, it seems impossible to reach real people, and to start “from
below” as Kuitert and others have done makes it questionable whether one
reaches God.
It seems clear that the assumptions of the Enlightenment – the autonomy of the
human person, the subject-object split in the process of human knowing, the
historical consciousness – have created false alternatives (an approach from
below or an approach from above) thereby bringing theological work to an
impasse.
If Enlightenment assumptions have led to an impasse, are there indications that
by moving out from under the dominance of those assumptions, breakthroughs
might be possible in a new cultural period? In a volume of essays entitled
Postmodern Theology, James B. Miller contends just that. Miller sets forth the
variety of forms in which Descartes’ subject-object dualism and Kant’s
knowledge-faith dualism have been manifested in modern thought. From a
different angle, he points to the impasse noted above:
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The logical positivist movement implicitly accepted this dualism, but
denied meaningfulness to the nonempirical, nonscientific side (i.e., the
domain of the noumenal.) Reductionists sought to explain religions and
religious phenomena in exclusively scientific (or social scientific) terms,
thus denying the autonomy (or independent reality) of the religions (i.e.,
explaining the noumenal in terms of the phenomenal.) In contrast, the
existentialist movement, while implicitly accepting the dualism, invested
all significant meaning on the side of faith, moral action, and the religious
life (i.e., in the noumenal domain. (p. 5)
In Miller’s last group, the existentialists, we can see the line of development we
have been tracing from Ritschl through Herrmann to Barth, Bultmann, and their
successors. Indeed, we can see it already in “the father of modern theology,”
Schleiermacher, who sought the ground for theology in the interior life of the
individual.
Miller himself sets in contrast the two poles represented by Barth with his
“positivism of revelation” – the uncritical confidence that the revelatory “word”
provides absolute knowledge of God and God’s purpose for the world, and the
logical positivists who held that reason and empirical observation were the sole
and sufficient sources of absolute knowledge of the world. Thus, Miller observes,
the modern worldview or, as it has been named here, the domination of the
cultural assumptions of the Enlightenment, continues to form the dominant
perspective in Western and Christian culture. He writes:
It is found in the popular understanding of science as an impersonal,
detached, and objective search for the facts of nature. Its neoorthodox
theological manifestation is “normal” Christian theology. The prophetic
rhetoric of the theology justifies a program of cultural change through
social action. Its existentialist roots encourage contemporary forms of
pastoral care and spiritual renewal which turn people away from their
intrinsic relation to nature and history and focus them on a kind of
atemporal personhood. It offers a revealed (and so, absolute) dogmatics of
transcendence for those who would claim for Christianity a right to
cultural dominance. (pp. 7f.)
Miller sees such dominance slipping away; he senses that we are entering a
postmodern world. Developments in biology and physics are pointing the way to
a fundamentally new worldview. If the Enlightenment paradigm characterized
reality as mechanical and dualistic, the model for the postmodern world,
according to Miller, is historical, relational, and personal. He describes what this
means for the emerging understanding of the world and how the understanding
of the human process of knowing is changing.
The world is not simply here; it is evolving. In contemporary biology the world
does not embody an eternal essence, but is rather on ongoing process of creating,
humans being both the product of and participants in this ongoing process.
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The world is understood “to be relative, indeterminate, and participatory.”
Existence is fully relative, meaning nothing exists in and of itself; “To be is to be
related,” in contrast to the absolutes of Newton’s time-space categories. Quantum
theory in physics has overthrown the “substantial universe;” the world does not
have a history, but is history. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty points to the
indeterminacy of the core of reality and this, in turn, points to the core of reality
as an unfathomable mystery. Interestingly, there is more awe before mystery in
contemporary physics than in much theology.
We began this inquiry with Descartes and Kant and their epistemological
analysis. The understanding of what it means to know is called in question by
these developments in biology and physics. Miller contends,
From a postmodern perspective, all knowledge is historically implicated.
Nothing is known apart from its cultural setting, and that setting is
constitutive of what is known. There are no culturally neutral facts.
Knowledge is not so much found as made, or better, it does not grow so
much as it is grown. (p. 11, italics his)
There is a significant difference between this conception of the historical
character of all truth and the historicism of the modern period as represented by
Troeltsch, for example. Here the human subject is not caught in an impersonal
historical determinism, but is a participant in the unfolding history of the whole
of reality.
Truth relative to any community of knowers makes all knowledge incomplete.
Alfred North Whitehead described the world not in terms of substances, but in
terms of events, pointing thereby not to a world of static substantiality, but to a
world of dynamic temporality. From Whitehead has developed the inquiries of
the school of process theology. Miller considers what new theological insights are
offered from such a conception of reality.
In regard to creation, the idea of the dualistic relationship between God and
world is called into question, as well as the objectifying of the world as a thing.
The view of God creating provides the possibility of overcoming cosmological
dualism and historical determinism.
Anthropology looks different from such a perspective as well. The processes
producing the human person are not different from those out of which all else in
the universe emerges. Humankind becomes in such a view part of but not the
center of the cosmic drama.
There are also implications here for Christology. Incarnation might be
understood to characterize every moment of the history of the universe with
Jesus of Nazareth being the one who articulates the incarnational model in
his teaching and the one who in his person is said to demonstrate the
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meaning of that model for human living. In this sense, Jesus’ uniqueness
as incarnation is historical but not ontological. (p. 19)
With these brief references to Miller’s application of a new understanding of
human knowing and human knowledge, we can see the potential fruitfulness of
theological inquiry that throws off the dominance of the cultural assumptions of
the Enlightenment and allows the fresh breakthroughs in biology and physics to
overcome the impasse into which modern thought has led us. The shape in which
Christian faith has come to expression in every cultural epoch has borne the
marks of the cultural assumptions of each successive epoch. This is no less true of
the modern period under Enlightenment assumptions than of Reformation
theology under the assumptions of the sixteenth century with its heritage of
medieval thinking and Renaissance humanism. The challenge before us is to
bring the legacy of sixteenth century Reformation theology to new expression,
given the openings provided by the emerging postmodern age.
In his Two Hundred Years of Theology, Berkhof provides a chapter on the
engagement with modern thought in the Netherlands. What he has to say about
Herman Bavinck is especially interesting in regard to this discussion. Bavinck
was firmly rooted in the Reformed Church of the Secession led by Abraham
Kuyper. Brilliant and highly gifted, he studied at Leiden under Scholten, against
the prevailing tradition of his church. He was attracted to ethical theology, an
attempt to mediate the gospel and modern thought. Kuyper appealed to him to be
clear in his objections to this mediating theology but was never satisfied with
Bavinck’s criticism – it was not strong enough.
Bavinck remained within the Secession Church and, in time, became Kuyper’s
successor at the Free University. He wrote his Gereformeerde Dogmatiek and in
the first volume enunciated the theological foundations upon which his work was
built. The objective principle of knowledge is primary: the Holy Scriptures. He
was viewed, according to Berkhof, as “the faithful theological partisan and alter
ego of Kuyper.”
Yet Berkhof notes that apart from the second edition of his dogmatics and a onevolume summary, Bavinck produced little in the field of dogmatics during his
years at the Free University, and nothing that was new and original. He observes,
He [Bavinck] felt increasingly that the modern period needed a much
more vigorous renewal of theology than he himself had produced or was
able to produce. Particularly the issues arising from the historical-critical
interpretation of Scripture needed a very different approach. (p. 113)
Berkhof goes on to say that Bavinck’s views on the issues at stake became
increasingly relativistic, and, in 1910, he sold a large part of his dogmatics library;
during these years his interest turned to issues posed by culture.
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Berkhof writes that after 1900 “Bavinck increasingly felt that his theological
direction was leading to a dead end.” Was it only historical-critical research that
undermined his earlier certainty? Berkhof asks. Or was it deeper? Did he finally
yield to his earlier fascination with ethical theology, recognizing that the issue
between it and his Reformed orthodoxy was not really an issue between
theocentricity and anthrocentricity, but rather between intellectualism and
personalism?
Is faith submission to the authority of scripture truths or is it the personal
encounter with God through the person of Christ by which we are transformed
into personalities? Bavinck opted for the priority of the scripture principle, . . .
Hence Bavinck remained more strongly burdened than he wished by the legacy of
the Reformed scholasticism of the seventeenth century and gave up intellectual
tools he could not well do without in the continuing confrontation with the
modern spirit. (p. 114)
One cannot help but wonder why Bavinck’s latter years were not more fruitful.
Why did he sell most of his dogmatics library? Why did his interest turn to issues
in the broader culture? Berkhof does not speculate, but he does tell us that
Bavinck felt his theological direction was leading to a dead end. Could it be that
he sensed he was stuck? Was he not perhaps blocked from fruitful engagement
with modern thought by his own objective principle of knowledge, the holy
Scriptures? Indeed, not by Scripture as such, but by Scripture as understood by
premodern seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism, a view still prevalent in
present-day Reformed orthodoxy.
Scripture itself is the cumulative translation of tradition over several centuries.
Where it is not valued as an inspired human witness to encounter with the living
God, but rather as a book of absolute truths not only about God but also about
science, cosmology, anthropology, and history, how can genuine dialogue with
ongoing human intellectual and spiritual development be engaged in? It is
impossible. Given Bavinck’s ecclesiastical context, to raise that issue would have
been fruitless; it would not have been tolerated.
Reformed theology in this country faces the same dilemma. Its doctrine of
Scripture has remained immune from the acids of criticism, and an authoritarian
use of Scripture continues, making it impossible either to engage the cultural
assumptions that remain as a legacy of the Enlightenment, or to capture the
attention of an obviously spiritually destitute and groping present generation
where the yearning for transcendence is pervasive.
Perhaps the insights and breakthroughs in science and the spiritual bankruptcy
of the West have created the moment that will compel us to move beyond both
the theological impasse traced above and an authoritarian use of Scripture. In his
biography of Karl Barth, Eberhard Busch records a conversation of Barth in
which he referred to being dubbed orthodox. That was fine with Barth, if it
pointed to a willingness “to learn from the Fathers.”
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But he rejected any restriction to the doctrinal position of any teacher, school or
confession.... “Confessions” exist for us to go through them (not once but continually), not for us to return to them, take up our abode in them, and conduct
our further thinking from their standpoint and in bondage to them. (Karl Barth,
p. 375)
That is the freedom we must discover in order to enter the contemporary
discussion, bringing the richness of Reformed theology into engagement with a
postmodern world.
References:
Hendrikus Berkhof. Two Hundred Years of Theology, report of a personal
journey. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989, translation by John Vriend of 200
Jahre Theologie: Ein Reisebericht, 1985)
Hans Küng. Paradigm Change in Theology: A Symposium for the Future. David
Tracy, editor. Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989.
Hans Küng. Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. Anchor,
reprint edition, 1990.
James B. Miller. Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World.
Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006.
© Grand Valley State University
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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
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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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English
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
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References
H. Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 1989, Hans Küng, Paradigm Change in Theology, 1989, Theology for the 3rd Millennium, 1990, James Miller, Postmodern Theology, 2006
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RA-4-19910401
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1991-04-01
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Title
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Sleeping Through a Revolution
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Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought
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Richard A. Rhem
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eng
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Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on April 1, 1991 entitled "Sleeping Through a Revolution", it appeared in Perspectives, April 1991, pp. 8-14. Tags: Reformed Theology, Orthodoxy, Historical Thinking, Faith, Postmodern, Nature of Religious Development. Scripture references: H. Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 1989, Hans Küng, Paradigm Change in Theology, 1989, Theology for the 3rd Millennium, 1990, James Miller, Postmodern Theology, 2006.
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application/pdf
Faith
Historical Thinking
Nature of Religious Development
Orthodoxy
PostModern
Reformed Theology