Lecture

I want to welcome you to the second course in Contemporary Theology. Our first course went all the way from Hegel to the death of God theologies. At the end of that course we promised that in the second course we were going to look at a variety of proposals for the, shall we say, resurrection of God, and that’s exactly what we plan to do in this course. We are going to go from the theologians of hope all the way through postmodernism, and as we do so, we’re going to be looking at theologies and trends in contemporary theology that are the most current that you would come into contact with today. But before we begin any of that I want to open this session, as was our custom in the first course, with a word of prayer.

Father, we thank you so much for the privilege to study about you and about your Word, and Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to do so from the perspective of other theologies than an evangelical one. Lord, as we study in this course, we pray that you would give clarity of thought and expression to me and that you would help students as they listen to the material. We pray that you would help us to see what the different theological movements are saying. We pray that you would help us to see the ways in which they are instructive and helpful to evangelical theology, but that also that we could see the ways in which they are not in line with your Word and with historic Christianity. So, Father, bless our time together in this lecture as we began to reflect on the most contemporary movements in theology.

In this first lecture, I would like to do, if I could call it this, “Review and Preview.” We want to give a review of the first course and then give you a preview of what we’re going to do in this course. Let me say a few words by way of introduction then to get us back into the mindset of what we were doing in the first course. If you have taken that course, you will remember that we began our first course with a philosophical overview of developments in epistemology and metaphysics prior to the German philosopher Hegel. And you remember that a key point of emphasis was the thinking of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was a predecessor of Hegel, although not by too much.

As we saw in our look at Immanuel Kant, Kant believed that all knowledge ultimately stemmed from our interaction with the empirical external world. And since that was Kant’s belief, he felt that God no longer could be seen as an object of knowledge. You could not go out into the empirical tangible world and experience God or see evidence that God exists. Thus we could not any longer view God as an object of knowledge. And Kant came to the conclusion as well then that traditional metaphysics, traditional reflections on God trying to prove His existence, trying to talk about His different attributes and reason to them, that sort of metaphysics could no longer be done.

[However], this didn’t mean that Kant fell that you shouldn’t believe in God at all, for Immanuel Kant, you’ll remember, still felt that it was necessary to postulate that there was a God as a postulant of practical reason. If there wasn’t a God, then there wouldn’t be a way to ensure a moral governance of this universe. Even though Kant did not believe that God could be known by the traditional methods of knowing, he and the contemporary thinkers in general didn’t want to exclude God altogether from the picture. In order to avoid that from happening, you’ll remember that we saw two basic trends in the contemporary period that we studied in the first course. Two different trends as to how people thought about God.

On the one hand there were some thinkers who felt that the way to handle Kant’s concerns was to simply redefine the notion of God in a way that you could still talk about God and perhaps even reason about Him as well. You’ll remember that Hegel took this approach, but we also saw this approach in thinkers like Paul Tillich. We noted along the way that this kind of approach usually tends to depersonalize God. In both Tillich and Hegel, for example, it also tended to make God very, very imminent or near to us, though as we saw when we studied both of those thinkers, He was not near in the sense that He was a personal God who could interact with us.

The other approach that we saw to Kant’s concerns was to conceive of God in personal terms but to conceive of Him as a totally transcendent being, holy other. We saw this approach in the theology of Søren Kierkegaard and of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. But now in light of this holy other transcendent God and in light of Kant’s claims that traditional metaphysics just could not be done as it had been before, this transcendent God then had to be known, if you could know Him at all, in some non-cognitive way, some means or a way that is above and beyond reason such as through an experiential encounter, but you could not any longer prove that there was a God through the normal methods of reasoning.

We noted by the end of the last course that many theologians had come to the conclusion that if God was this transcendent, this impersonal, and all the rest, that He must in fact be dead. He surely was not very meaningful if meaningful at all for modern men and women. But we noted in that discussion of the death of God theologies and at the end of the last course that in this second course we would study various proposals for God’s resurrection, so to speak. If we think that the death of God theology was the end of the story, that really is not so. The reactions came to reintroduce the concept of God to resurrect Him in discourse, and we’re going to look at those proposals in this course. But before we take a look at the various thinkers that we are going to study in this course, what I would like to do is to first of all review some of the key themes that we saw in the first course and then after we’re done with our review, I would like to give you a preview of what we’re going to see in the second course. In that preview I want to give you a general overview of what happens to the key themes that we saw in the first course on contemporary theology.

First then to the review of the main themes that we saw in the first course. An initial theme that we saw as quite prevalent, and I just mentioned it a few moments ago was the view that God is to be understood as thoroughly transcendent, totally other, and that God is understood as very much impersonal. You’ll remember, for example, when we studied Hegel that we saw that he had a number of different conceptions of God, but a number of them thoroughly depersonalize God and make Him someone who in many respects seems to be more of a concept or a force than a personnel being. Think, for example, of Hegel’s concept of God as Spirit, and again we have to remember what Hegel means by spirit. It’s not what traditional theology has taken that to be. Think as well of Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard in their view that God is totally transcendent. He is holy other. As a result of that, we found that in both Kierkegaard and Barth, there is a heavy emphasis on Jesus Christ as opposed to God the Father. But again we don’t necessarily see a thoroughly orthodox concept of Christ.

You remember that for Søren Kierkegaard, he viewed Christ as the absolute paradox. The one in whom you have the union of the finite and the infinite and how that could possibly happen is absolutely paradoxical. In the thinking of Karl Barth, Christ, you’ll remember, is portrayed as the revealed word of God, but even here Barth makes it very, very clear that in Jesus Christ, God, is both veiled in his unveiling and unveiled in his veiling. So you remember that Barth, following in the line of a lot of Lutheran, thinking made the distinction between the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, and the Deus revelatus, the revealed God, and Jesus Christ is definitely the revealed God but that hidden God, that totally other God still remains quite remote from us and even to the extent that Christ reveals Him, He also hides Him in the incarnation.

You remember as well that Rudolf Bultmann had as a major strategy to handling Scripture: demythologizing. He felt that you had to strip away those elements of Scripture that were mythological and get to the kernel or the charisma of what Scripture was saying. And as a result of doing this, you remember that there are certain things that we thought that we knew about God, for example, the idea that He performed various miracles. What we find out is that we really don’t know those things about God because all of those things are in fact mythological. When you strip away all the mythological elements from Scripture, you find that there’s a whole lot more mystery that surrounds the concept of God then we may have thought and because of this God appears even more transcendent. He appears even more remote than we might of thought.

We also saw that when we move to Paul Tillich there was a definite move to make God more transcendent and impersonal altogether. You remember that Tillich portrayed God as the ground of being or simply being itself, and what he meant by that was that God is not a being among many other beings, but rather He is the basis or the ground out of which all that is exists. But now what sort of thing is being itself? Surely nothing that is personal in any way as a ground of everything; that is, there is a sense in which Tillich’s God is very, very eminent since He must be associated with everything that we always see, but since that God is not a personal specific being, He winds up being more distant and remote then He does wind up being close. So again you see that even though Tillich’s God had acertain imminence to Him, He really wound up being very transcendent and very, very remote and impersonal.

We also looked in the first course at analytic philosophy and its understanding of God. And you remember that the God, for example, of the logical positivist and the early Wittgenstein is in no way empirical. There are no empirical evidences of Him in the world, no way to get to Him through empiricism. So as a result of that we really couldn’t speak about this God. What that meant for the logical positivist was that He really didn’t even exist. For Wittgenstein, he told us that God, for all we knew, might indeed exist. It’s just that because there was no empirical way to get to Him, there was no way to talk about Him. When we came to the latter Wittgenstein or the later Wittgenstein, you remember that he thought we could speak of God, but what we do when we speak about God is basically to explain how the concept of God functions in a variety of language games. What that means is that our talk about God does not necessarily give us a clear idea of what God is really like. It doesn’t get us into a relationship with Him either. All of this makes God much more distant and remote, and it surely doesn’t give you the impression of a personal God at all. Then you remember that by the time we came to the end of the last course, we saw that the death of God theologians saw the direction in which things were moving. They saw that God was becoming more and more transcendent, more impersonal, more removed from everyday life, and they simply pronounced the verdict that He was dead. This transcendent impersonal God who is remote, who is this austere ruler with whom we can have very little contact at all, that God, they reasoned, must be dead.

There’s a second theme that we saw in the first course, and it really is coordinate with this first theme of God being very impersonal and very transcendent. If God is remote but you still want to talk about some revelation of God at all and you want to have something to do with God, then there must be another candidate, if we can put it that way, for theological discourse. And the candidate became none other than Jesus Christ. And so we saw that there was along with the depersonalizing of God a greater emphasis on Jesus Christ Himself, but we also saw that the Jesus that was presented to us was not the Jesus of orthodox theology in any way, shape, or form. Think, for example, of a few of the people we studied in that first course and what they said about Christ.

In Søren Kierkegaard we saw, as I mentioned a few moments ago, that Jesus is the absolute paradox. As such He is the union of the finite and the infinite. In Christ we see the bridging of the gap between that which is finite and that which is infinite. That doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard didn’t see Jesus as a real human being, but there is this emphasis on Christ being the one who bridges the gap between time and eternity, the finite and the infinite. When we get to Karl Barth, we find a theology that is very Christocentric. Jesus, you remember, is the Word of God, and as such He is the very content of revelation. Revelation is not portrayed by Barth as propositions, as language, but rather it is a person and specifically the person is Jesus Christ.

But as we noted a few moments ago, even though Karl Barth felt that Christ reveals God to us, he also felt that Christ hides God from us, and He hides God as He unveils Him and He unveils Him in the very moment that He hides Him from us. When we get to Rudolph Bultmann, we see that Jesus Christ is also very important, but it is surely not the Christ of the data of the New Testament that we have to deal with. Rather it is a demythologized Christ stripped of his supernaturalism, and that’s the Jesus Christ that we have presented to us. It doesn’t take too long to realize that if it’s a demythologized Jesus Christ that we have to deal with, there isn’t a whole lot that we really know about the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. And that doesn’t seem to be a tremendously problematic thing. From the perspective of many contemporary theologians, it is not so much the historical individual that matters but what He stood for and what that means to you and to me.

When we moved on to Paul Tillich, we saw something similar. You remember that Tillich saw Jesus as the bearer of the new being. In fact he typically refers to new being in Jesus as the Christ. You remember that new being is defined by Tillich as essential being under the conditions of existence, but Jesus gives us the answer to the problem then of man’s alienation from essential being. That’s how Tillich understands His significance. As a result Jesus becomes a very important figure in Tillich’s theology because he shows us how it is that the problem of what it means to be a human being and exist in estrangement from essential being. Christ shows us how to bridge that gap, and as result of that He is a very important figure in Tillich’s theology. But having said all of that, lest we are ready to sort of baptize him as an orthodox Christ, we have to remember that for Tillich the key thing as he looked at Christ was not so much that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, not either the particular historical details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather the crucial thing for Tillich is that someone was the bearer of the new being. It happened to be Jesus, or at least that’s what the church has said about Christ. It happened to be Jesus, but if it hadn’t been Him, it would’ve been someone else, and the historical details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth are not all that critical. What is critical is this role that He played and the way people viewed Him as the Christ and the significance that that brings into theology for you and for me as we confront the problem of what it means to exist.

Then you remember also that in the death of God theologies, Jesus is again very important, but as we saw it is surely not an orthodox Christ who’s presented to us at all. For example, you remember that for [Thomas] Altizer the incarnate Christ is someone who has been emptied, and you remember that the kenosis concept is extremely important in Altizer’s thinking. When he talks about kenosis, the fact that he uses a word that has been used in orthodox theology does not mean that he says about it what orthodox theologians mean. You’ll remember that the kenosis in Altizer’s thinking means the radical transformation of the primordial hidden God into flesh. And you remember as well that Altizer told us that Jesus Christ is not necessarily the unique incarnation of God. Rather Altizer believed that incarnation continues even beyond Christ, and he thinks this is a very good thing.

The third theme that I want to mention that we saw in the first course is a theme, if I can put it this way, that rejects the idea that God may be known through the empirically verifiable objective means that we typically use of knowing something. Let me sketch very briefly what several of the thinkers we studied in the first course had to say about this. You remember in Søren Kierkegaard that he was very, very negative to the idea that someone could base an eternal happiness on something contingent, something empirical, something historical like a book such as the Bible or a set of events or anything else historical. Kierkegaard believed that the most we could know historically, for example, is an approximation to what happened. But that is certainly not what you would want to base your eternal happiness on. You’d surely want to base it on something more than an approximation. God then is not to be known through that which is objective, like a Bible, or through various historical events. Instead God has to be known through a subjective personal encounter. That personal encounter is not empirically verifiable by anyone else. In fact if you were asked to prove that you had that encounter, there’s no empirical way you could verify that. The person is simply said to know that he’s had that experience in some non-cognitive way and to know through that that there indeed is a God and that God has spoken to him. So we see in Kierkegaard the idea that if you’re going to try to get God through something historical, something objective, something empirical, that isn’t going to work, and even if you got an approximation of the truth, that shouldn’t be enough for anybody to be satisfied with.

When we come to Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox thinkers again we find that the emphasis here is not on anything objective, not on anything empirical. Revelation is not something objective like a book or propositions. Rather it is the very person of God in Christ, but it is the person of God in Christ not as He walked the face of this earth and as we can reason historically about the events of His life—not that way at all; rather it is the person of God in Christ given in a noncognitive nonverbal personal encounter. You remember as well that when we studied analytic philosophy and took a brief look at the logical positivists and the early Wittgenstein that we saw the full-blown implications of this emphasis on empiricism. For example, the logical positivists and the early Wittgenstein said that there was no empirical way whatsoever to verify or falsify God’s existence or to verify or falsify any statements about Him. As a result Wittgenstein said that though there might still be a God after all, we couldn’t speak about Him. The logical positivists, as we have mentioned a little bit ago, concluded that the inability for empirical verification or falsification meant that God doesn’t exist at all. That empirical emphasis, as we said earlier, stems from . . . metaphysics and epistemology, and we see what that did to theology throughout the whole contemporary period that we studied in the last course.

I’d like to turn to a fourth major theme that we saw in the first course. When we looked at the approach to knowing God to doing theology, we saw that the different movements and the different thinkers took a very individualistic approach to theology and to knowing God. You remember that Hegel had wanted to build a philosophical system that incorporated everything. It also was to be a system that would show the interrelatedness and interconnection of all things including religious reality. Such a system as that would not be an individualistic approach or system; it would be a rather collective approach. In response to Hegel and in revolt to him, the existentialist theologians, and I’m thinking here in particular of Kierkegaard and Barth, instead spoke of the individual’s relationship to God. In addition, they emphasized the fact that each person needed to find his or her own meaning apart from the crowd, and they emphasized that the theologian must go his or her very lone and solitary way. In addition, and I think stemming to a certain extent from this fact, the existentialists were very anti-systematic. I think there are a number of reasons that they were anti-systematic, but they were so I believe in part because of this individualistic bent. They did not believe that you could rationally set forth a system of what it means to exist. If someone were to make such an objective system, if that were possible, then that system would be something that everyone could reason to, everyone could participate in, everyone could share it. But the existentialist theologians reasoned that a person’s relationship to God is not based on something objective like a system of ideas, nor can one capture in any system what it means to exist and relate existentially to the living God. Each person has to find that out through their own personal experience, not through the experience of the collective unit of society or some smaller group within society. Each person has to individually have that encounter and that relationship with God.

A fifth point that I want to make in terms of themes in the first course has to do with Hegel again. You will probably remember that when we started that class, I suggested to you that there have been a number of people who have said that in a number of ways contemporary theology and philosophy can be seen, so to speak, as a footnote to Hegel. In one way or another theologians and philosophers have attempted to interact with him and have either rejected him or adopted his views. In some cases they’ve done a little bit of both. We saw that in the first course as we studied the various theologians and various movements. You remember, for example, that Søren Kierkegaard deliberately rejected many Hegelian themes, and we saw the same sort of thing, same kind of emphases in the theology of Karl Barth.

On the other hand we saw some theologians who adopted various aspects of Hegel’s thought, for example, Tillich’s God as the grounded being. What we saw was not entirely unlike some of Hegel’s notions of God, in particular his concept of God as Spirit in the Hegelian sense of spirit, and we noted that most of the theologians that we studied in the first part of the course or in the first course used Hegel’s dialectical method to one extent or another. Think, for example, of Bultmann’s hermeneutical circle: that interpretation involves an interaction of the text with the interpreter working toward a certain synthesis of meaning. Think as well of Tillich’s theological method where there is an involvement on the one hand of the theologian with a contemporary analysis of the situation at his time and place in history, and then there is a turning after that analysis to look at the biblical symbols, and then there is an attempt to wed the biblical symbols to the present situation in order to answer the questions that arise out of the analysis of the contemporary situation.

There were many other examples that we saw of the use of the Hegelian method, and it’s rather prevalent. We also saw that even critics of Hegel like Kierkegaard at some points both rejected Hegel and adopted him as well, and we noted that that’s a rather Hegelian thing to do, to both reject and accept at one and the same time.

That completes what I’d like to say by way of review of the first course. I would like in the time that remains to give you a preview of the second course, and what I would like to do is to sketch briefly what happens to these themes that we were just discussing, these five themes that we saw in the first course and what happens to them in the later contemporary period that we’re going to be studying in this course.

First of all, what about the matter of God as transcendent and impersonal? Here I would say that generally the trend since the death of God theologies has been to make God much more imminent and personal, as we’re going to see in process, liberation, feminist, New Age, and postmodern theology; God is a very imminent God. Proponents of these theologies also tend to claim that their God is a very personal one. We’re going to have to take a close look to see if He really is all that personal, but at least that is the intention of the theologies and theologians that we’re going to study in this course.

Theology of hope, with which we’re going to begin this second course, still has a rather transcendent God, but He’s transcendent in a different sense than for example the God of the existentialist theologians is transcendent. In theology of hope, as we’re going to see, God is transcendent in the sense that He is really available only at the end of history. But in general the point is that most of the theologians and theological movements we’re going to be looking at in this course tend to portray God as imminent and as personal rather than transcendent and impersonal. Then if God becomes much more personal and much closer to us, then what happens to Christ? Maybe there is no need for Christ to be the focus. What we’re going to see is that Christ is still important in the theologies that we’ll discuss in this second class, but He is no more orthodox than He was in the earlier theologies that we looked at in the last course, and I would say that increasingly we are going to see interpretations of Christ as you have it in process theology, feminist theology, New Age thinking, and postmodernism, for example, interpretations of Christ that downplay the exclusiveness of Christ as the way to God and the exclusiveness of Christianity as the way to God.

What about the matter of empiricism in God? If the earlier contemporary theologians that we studied in the first course ultimately announced that God was dead at least in part because there seemed to be no empirical way to verify his existence, the theologians and theological movements that we’re going to study in this course take very seriously the need for an empirically based metaphysic. Hence theological movements like process theology construct an entirely empirical metaphysic. New Age thinking in its view that all is one and all is God, New Age thinking means with those ideas that the whole empirical world including men and women is deity. Now surely this is an empirically based theology, and as we’re going to see as well it offers many ways experientially to get in touch with the one.

What about this matter of an individualistic approach to doing theology and to knowing God? Here we find another difference in regard to the theologians of the first course. As opposed to the emphasis on the individual that we saw in the earlier contemporary theologians, the movements that we are going to study in this course focus much more on the group and on corporate unity. For example, liberation theologians focus on freeing society as a whole, not only spiritually but socially, economically, and politically. Feminist theologians emphasize as well solidarity of all people, the equality of all people, male and female. There’s also an emphasis in looking for and finding in female symbols ways of expressing God’s solidarity with us and God’s care and compassion for all people. So in that theology as well there’s less of an individualistic bent and much more of a collective approach. When we come to process and New Age theology we’re going to find that even though they come at this matter from a different standpoint, both of them stress the unity of everything that exists and stress the need to transform society as a whole, not just to focus on individual.

Most of the theologians and theological movements that we’re going to study in this second course also have a political message. You may have suspected that with what I’ve been saying about the emphasis on collectivism. They have a political message, or at least they point out the political implications of their theology, and that political message invariably focuses on the unity of mankind.

What about the fifth topic we looked at in regard to the theologians of the earlier period? What about this matter of relationship to the theology and philosophy of Hegel? When we come to the theologians that we’re going to study in this course, we find that their theologies still do show a relation to Hegelian themes, but here the relation and reaction, I would suggest, is somewhat different than it was in the case of the thinkers that we studied in the first course. For one thing, the emphasis on the unity, interdependence, and inclusiveness of all things definitely adopts a Hegelian theme; even if in fact these theologians aren’t getting it directly from Hegel, you still see that affinity, that sameness with this basic Hegelian theme. But even more directly I’d like to suggest that there is a link to Hegel through Karl Marx. Many of the theologies that we’re going to study in the second course have, as I noted a few moments ago, a political message. But that message in many cases incorporates the thinking of Karl Marx. As I’m sure you know, Karl Marx incorporated the thinking of Hegel to form a materialist rather than an idealist system, but the basic ideas are things that Marx took from Hegel. So surely in these theological movements that we’re going to study in this second course, we’re still going to see the influence of Hegel. We’re going to see echoes of Hegelian themes.

Before I close this lesson I would like to point out one other theme that we’re going to see in this later period that was not quite so prevalent in the earlier part of the contemporary era. That earlier course, we’ve noticed, focused on theologians who relied heavily on the idea of the utter transcendence of God, and I think in part because of that they didn’t emphasize the theme I’m going to mention in just a moment.

What is that theme? That theme is the deifying of man and the humanizing of God. And we’re going to see that much more frequently and prevalently in the thinkers and the movements that we’re going to study in this course. For example, when you get to process theology, you find a finite God who in many ways is more like human beings than was the traditional orthodox God that many of us learned about in our basic theology courses. Likewise, though process thinkers claimed that they are not pantheists, what they say about the world as God’s physical pole, God’s body, would seem to deify in some way everything that is including human being.

Another example of this deifying of man can be seen in New Age thinking. As we’re going to see, New Age theology openly and clearly expresses the opinion that all human beings have divinity within them, and the key thing for people is to uncover that so that they can realize their potential. But all of us have divinity within us.

That’s just a sampling of what you’re going to see. We’ll want to keep our eyes open very, very much in this course for this trend that attempts to bring God down to a more finite perspective and makes God look more like human beings and tends to deify human beings in contrast. I’m pretty sure that from what I’ve been saying you probably have some idea of who and what we’re going to be discussing in this course. But let me as we close share with you the topics and the order in which we will address them.

In the next lecture we are going to turn to theology of hope, and our major focus there will be the work of Jürgen Moltmann. Although I’m going to say a little bit at one point or another, about Carl Braaten, who is also a theologian of hope. Then after we have studied theology of hope, we will turn to liberation theology, and if you’ve done much reading in liberation theology you know that there is a great variety of liberation theologies. We, of course, are going to have to just take a taste, a sample, and I’ve chosen for this part of the course the work of Gustavo Gutierrez, his work entitled Theology of Liberation. He is working and coming from a Latin American, in particular South American, perspective, and we’ll want to see what he has to say. Then we’re going to turn to feminist theology and look at some samples of that. Get the basic ideas of what they have in mind and see what they can teach us and what we find is problematic in that kind of theology. Then after we’ve looked at feminist theology, I want to turn to take a look at process theology. This is a movement that has become very widespread in academic circles today. There are many different process theologies and theologians, but ultimately they stem back to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, and so we’re going to look at what Whitehead had to say and what a number of his followers have said after him.

Then after looking at process theology were going to take a good look at New Age theology, and then finally we will complete the course with a study of postmodern thought. And in order to understand what postmodernism is we’re going to have to be clear about what we mean by the modern period or modernity. So all of that is in store for this course. As I mentioned, in the next lecture I’m going to turn to theology of hope. This was a movement that appeared in the 1960s. It was not particularly long lived, but we do want to understand what it is that brought this particular theological movement onto the scene, what it had to say, and then we’ll move on to the other theologies of this later contemporary period.