Wednesday, March 22, 2006

More Barth - Romans 8:18

The gap between the knowable transcendent God is bridged in Christ ... but then for the Christian, in suffering.

Barth, Epistle to the Romans, paperback edn 1968 (London: OUP, 1933), pp. 304-5:

"What place does suffering, that vast and immeasurable factor of human life, occupy in the context of our Sonship? Evidentally, suffering cannot be compared with the glory of God so as to disturb or prevent our entering in to that 'Now' to which we have free access, because the conscious recognition of suffering is the gateway to knowledge and redemption which is in the 'Now', in the Spirit, in Jesus Christ. God reckons with us precisely at the door of suffering. There it is that he justifies himself in our presence and teaches us through His Spirit to cry abba, Father. It is thus evident that time is the negation of infinity. In that negation men encounter the barrier which confironts them, and discover also the place of exit. Where then should the power of the Spirit be displayed, if not in the action of God by which He makes us participate in the sufferings of Christ (vi. 5) and thereby brings us within the sphere of the freedom and glory of the new man? The sufferings of the present time cannot, therefore be compared with this glory. In Christ Jesus they have indeed been compared and have been shown not merely to be characteristic of our life in this world, but actually to mark the frontier where this life is dissolved by life eternal. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time, the time when glory is manifest in suffering. So clearly does God manifest His glory in the secret of suffering, that, so far from shrinking for His sake from the contemplation of suffering, it is for His sake that we are bound to gaze upon it, to see in it the step, the movement, the turning point from death to life, and to apprehend it as the place which Christ is to be seen. To overlook suffering is to overlook Christ. To ask the question why there should be suffering, is to fail to hear that the same question is addressed to us. To answer that suffering is unintelligible to us, that we cannot bear it or master it or turn it to any good account, means that we are deaf to the divine answer which is given precisely in our inability.
[My bold]

[The rhetoric is deafening. The confidence and bluster catches the reader - this man must know what he is talking about. Where else could such passion and articulation come from?]
[Is this the most profound thing ever written ... or a hoax, which simply restates Kant's position on our finitude with some wishful thinking that God is actually smiling upon us behind the curtain of transcendence?]

Saturday, March 18, 2006

"I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh

From Romans 6:19:
Ἀνθρώπινον λέγω διὰ τὴν ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκὸς ὑμῶν.

Barth, Epistle to the Romans, paperback edn 1968 (London: OUP, 1933), p. 220-221.

I say, 'ye are' and 'ye stand'. I contrast freedom and slavery. In using such language, however, I speak after the manner of man. We know that all such direct and non-paradoxical descriptions of the invisible and existential human status are definitions of the indefinable. We know that, in daring to use such language, we are entering the twilight of religious romanticism, in which sin and grace, faith and unbelief, take concrete form and become things which some men 'have' and others 'have not'; which some men 'are' and others 'are not'. But we know that the passage from death to life by the power of the resurrection, the freedom from sin and the service to righteousness, may be assigned to no known person. We know that the names of those who may validly be thus described are written only in the book of life. We know that the domain of grace has no existence or non-existence that may be observed; that it is not the property of this or that man; that it does not belong to Children or to Socialists or to the Russian Nation or to the German People, or to Dostoevsky! or to Kutter! And yet we boldly employ this language, the language of romanticism, because it is impossible to describe the immediacy of divine forgiveness except by means of parables drawn from human immediacy. Owing to the infirmity of the flesh, since men's ears are inadequately tuned to the truth, any avoidance of such words as 'existence' or 'possession' necessarily obscures and weakens understanding of the reality of forgiveness. Men must not be permitted to remain spectators, otherwise they will be unable to apprehend the con-version which God effects. It is vital that the possibility of an objective knowledge of God should be wholly eradicated from our minds, because it is only when the perception breaks upon us that we ourselves--each one of us--has been forgiven by Him, that it is proved that we can neither know sin nor commit it. We think we know what we are about when we dare to use this direct language. It is a necessity for the preacher, but it lays him open to very severe criticism. Broken men, we dare to use unbroken language. We must not forget that we are speaking in parables and after the manner of men. We must remember that what is spoken in faith must also be heard in faith, and that grace must be both proclaimed and received as grace, that is, as the observed but invisible establishing of men in God. This warning must be carefully borne in mind when we come to the words which follow.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Bultmann and Barth

So I learned this morning, the whole of Volume 4 of Church Dogmatics can be viewed as a 6000 page, 10 years in the making, response to Bultmann.

That should keep me busy.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Kerygma and Myth: The Final Word :)

Rudolf Bultmann, 'New Testament and Mythology', in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. by Reginald H. Fuller, "Volumes I and II combined with enlarged Bibliography." (London: S.P.C.K.,1972). pp. 1-44.

Mythology

The first part of Bultmann’s essay identifies mythology in the New Testament as a problem. It is ‘incredible to modern man’. Amongst the unacceptable content is the three storied view of the world; the intervention of spirits in the affairs of this world; the miraculous; and a grand climax to history at which the dead will rise. Bultmann’s language regarding this mythology is unabashedly dismissive. However, it is still his intention that this content can and should be interpreted.
This content can be interpreted anthropologically as ‘the powers which man supposes he experiences the ground and limits of his world’, using the understanding of myth popularised by the history of religions school. The Jewish apocalyptic and Gnostic imagery can thus be dispensed with so long as we retain the claim of faith hidden in mythology that man ‘is not lord of his own being’ and that in his ‘state of dependence’ he can be delivered from the forces at work in the visible world. This interpretative scheme of Bultmann is given by him the probably unhelpfully negative sounding name, ‘demythologization’.

֑Existentialism and the Kerygma

The second part of the essay addresses what Bultmann takes to be the saving act of God proclaimed in the Kerygma. He asks the question, ‘to what extent is the description of this act in the New Testament conditioned by mythology?’. Indeed can one speak at all of an ‘act of God’ at all, given ‘the modern understanding’ of a ‘self-subsistent finite universe’?
Bultmann believes that ‘self-understanding’ is the purpose of the Kerygma. The negative assessment of ‘fallen’ humanity’s state in Paul is paralleled by existentialism. The New Testament goes further, however, when it speaks of the event of redemption in which the believer discovers he is loved and is freed from the bonds of his past life in order to obey. This event is a mixture of the historical and the mythical. It consists of the cross of Christ and the Resurrection. The cross is an historical (historisch) event happening which has historic (Geschichtlich) significance for the believer in the present. This latter significance cannot be arrived at via the historical study of the Gospels but can only be found in the Kerygma. The Resurrection is not simply a proof of the cross but is part of the eschatological redemptive act. Bultmann refuses to talk of the historical event of the Resurrection because the Resurrection may not be understood as a miraculous proof: ‘you cannot establish one article of faith by invoking another’. All one can talk historically about is ‘the rise of faith in the risen Lord’. And so, the Resurrection is an eschatological event which is ever, but only, present in the preaching of the Kerygma.
Bultmann’s conclusion is that it was in the fully human figure of Christ that the transcendent God was present. Bultmann is thus asserting the agency of God in the world through a human mediator.

Conclusion

We will briefly consider here mythology, existentialism and Christology.
It is first worth stressing again the positive intent of Bultmann’s agenda. Bultmann is driven by the preacher’s desire to explain the meaning of the text to enable people to believe today.
Having said this, does Bultmann’s agenda effectively eliminate from use much of the text which the Church takes as authoritative? This is done on the basis of Bultmann’s conviction that he knows what it is really saying. But the text must remain authoritative, not Bultmann’s understanding. The Church must continue to live with mythology, however it interprets it, because this is the earthen vessel in which God has chosen to give us his treasure.
Bultmann’s treatment of myth stems firstly from his understanding of the ‘modern’ idea of the world as an enclosed space where cause and effect reign supreme. Secondly, Bultmann wishes to preserve the sanctity of faith. All attempts to make God immanent are condemned as inherently mythological, an attempt to expose God to ‘proof’, and a threat to justification by faith. Bultmann thus commits himself to a world in which God cannot intervene or at least one in which humans cannot know that he has done so. Bultmann still believes, however, in a Kerygma which tells of the saving act of God in history. This insistence by Bultmann on the historical act of God in Christ would appear to undermine his certainty regarding the ironic sanctity of the creation from the influence of its creator. We have simply moved from the concept of intervention to that of supervenience. Was it really necessary to be so dismissive of so much of the language of the New Testament?
Bultmann claims that his commitment to existentialism is consistent with the New Testament’s self-critical understanding of the Kerygma. However, it is surely to go too far to insist that this is the only valid philosophical framework within which to interpret the New Testament. Much of Bultmann’s work has thus been shown to be precariously allied to a passing philosophical trend.
Given the above criticisms, we have hopefully gained ourselves some space in which to criticise Bultmann’s Christology without automatically being accused of the abuse of mythological language. Bultmann’s existentialist understanding of Christ's historic (Geschichtlich) significance restricts what he can say about Christ's resurrected life. This is the only way Bultmann believes he can speak intelligibly of transcendent reality. However, it has been traditionally no small part of Theology to assume that the risen Christ exists in his own right and is the object of our faith. To assert anything else is to endanger the kerygma by removing its content which is the living Christ. I conclude with two of Karl Barth’s comments which are self-explanatory.

'He is not allowed any life of his own after he rose from the dead.'

'How can we expound the New Testament if we relegate God's saving act which is the foundation of Christian existence to a secondary position? How can we do it if we understand God's saving act only as a reflection in the mirror of Christian existence?'

Friday, March 03, 2006

Kerygma and Myth 10: Karl Barth, 'Rudolf Bultmann - An Attempt to Understand Him'

Karl Barth, 'Rudolf Bultmann - An Attempt to Understand Him', in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. by Reginald H. Fuller, (London: S.P.C.K., 1972). vol. II, pp. 83-132.

Barth's analysis is perhaps what you might expect. He does not share Bultmann's existential philosophy and thinks that this has caused Bultmann to arbitrarily cut up the New Testament. He feels that the New Testament should be approached with more openness, in order that one might be confronted by the Word. Barth seems to be sceptical of Bultmann's dread of the supernatural, although it is not this that he concentrates on in his critique. Primarily he wishes to assert Christology. He sees that Bultmann only has room for this in so far as it is derived from soteriology. Christ is alive - not in a kerygma, but in the flesh! This is the living object of faith.

***

Barth uses the phrase 'once for every Now' to describe the eschatological (timeless?) event of God's word, as understood by Bultmann. It carries the significance of the two parties involved in action of God's word. (p. 85)

Barth takes exception that Kerygma produces primarily 'self-understanding'. 'How can I understand and explain my faith, of all things, unless I turn away from myself and look to where the message I believe in calls me to look?' (p. 86) The essential complaint here is that Bultmann's language, at least, looks dangerously like navel-gazing. Of course, Bultmann is driven by his conviction that there is no object for us to gaze upon other than as he is at work in us and meets us in the Kerygma.

In contrast to Bultmann's desire to demythologise and interpret radically, to perform sachkritik, Barth wants us to meet with Christ in the text. 'Does not what the New Testament says in its particular historical form, or rather, does not he who meets me as I read it, stand out in almost every verse, in gigantic proportions? Does not it - or he - continually cry out for a new enquiry about himself?' (p. 87)

Bultmann is only able to perform such radical surgery because of his confidence of what is in the New Testament. In other words, he already knows what it is he wants us to translate. (p. 88)
[What if he is wrong?]

Next Barth turns to Bultmann's subjectivism. 'First, as hearers of the message, we experience ourselves as we were and are, and as we ought to be and shall be. Next, through faith in the message, we experience ourselves in transition from the one state to the other. Finally, we experience ourselves in the process of this transition as objects of God's saving act, or concretely in our being in Christ.' (p. 91) 'But does the New Testament begin with man's subjective experiences, with man as the recipient of its message? ... Is this not this reversing the New Testament? ... The contours of New Testament thought are often different from and even the reverse of what modern man is used to.' (p. 92)
[So, demythologise it. :)]

'For in describing sin abstractly, apart from what God has done to remove it, he is, by and large, following the line of orthodoxy.' (p. 93)
[I'm not sure Barth is being complementary here.]

To describe the Christian life as 'detachment from the world' is 'formal, legalistic and cold'. (p. 94)

'How can we expound the New Testament if we relegate God's saving act which is the foundation of Christian existence to a secondary position? How can we do it if we understand God's saving act only as a reflection in the mirror of Christian existence?' (p. 94)

'That Christ is the kerygma is what the New Testament appears to say, not that Christ is the kerygma.' (p. 96)

'Is the kerygma, thus conceived, a gospel - a kerygma in which nothing is said of that in which or of him in whom its recipients are to believe? What is it but a new law? ... How far does this kerygma really speak, as the kerygma is intended to speak, of an act of God? How far does it speak rather of an act of man (strictly speaking), of the transition which man achieved by his own obedience - though he is supposed not to be capable of it?' (p. 97)
[Slightly ungenerous. It is fair to say that Bultmann thinks no salvation is possible outside of this act of God, although of course there is no work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration.]

Bultmann presents the cross as of cosmic significance: 'But I do not see why it only acquires this significance by being taken up into the kerygma and evoking the obedience of faith. On the contrary, it seems to me that the New Testament describes the cross of Christ as an event with an inherent significance on its own. It is just because it has this inherent significance that it can become significant in the kerygma and for the faith of its recipients.' (p. 98)
[Bultmann's philosophy simply will not allow him to make such 'mythological statements'. They are meaningless to him.]

'For the New Testament asserts that in faith the believer attaches himself to something which is wholly and entirely outside himself, something without him and in spite of him, something which took place for him on God's initiative in the death of Jesus Christ.' (p. 99)

Bultmann (p. 41): '"The saving efficacy of the cross is not derived from the fact that it is the cross of Christ: it is the cross of Christ because it has this saving efficacy." ... I should find it difficult to expound it in any sense consistent with the New Testament message.' (p. 100)

Of Christ's 'raising into the Easter faith': 'Nothing can be said about it as the foundation and content both of faith and of the kerygma. And, therefore, nothing can be said about the risen Christ as such. He is not allowed any life of his own after he rose from the dead.' (p. 101)

Barth is quite frank about physical resurrection. He speaks of 'space and time' and of the risen Christ's teaching of the apostles. Christ's resurrection must come before our raising to new life in him, because ours is entirely dependent on his prior act.

Bultmann does emphasise that the act of God is the history of Christ, but is he then being inconsistent? Can an act of God be anything other than mythological in his understanding? (p. 102)

Ironically: 'For it is historical analysis which provides him with the clue to the common features in these various elements.' (p. 105)

'Let me repeat that he does not deny, eliminate, or expunge them from the kerygma, except those elements which are untranslatable, such as the three-storied universe, Satan and the demons, the angels, the virgin birth, the empty tomb and the ascension [Is he being sarcastic?]. He interprets them.' (p. 105)

'The New Testament message ... is a mythological expression of a distinctive human self-understanding.' (p. 106)

'I wonder what voice from heaven it was that led him to choose this crude definition of myth.' (p. 109)

'Is the demythologized kerygma allowed to say anything about God's having condescended to become this-worldly, objective and - horror of horrors! - datable?' (p. 109)

'I cannot deny that this demythologized New Testament looks suspiciously like docetism.' (p. 111)

p. 112 contains a wonderfully sarcastic description of the convenience of finding that both myth and message of the New Testament permit, indeed demand, anthropological interpretation.

Barth is suspicious of the enthusiasm for Heidegger which underlies much here. He does not hate the philosophy, but simply cannot see it as universally encompassing. Yes, Augustine was a Neo-platonist and Aquinas an Aristotelian, but is really this philosophy the philosophy par excellence of our day and age?
[Not of this day and age, that's for sure.]

Does existentialism make us too 'narrow-minded' when we read the text? (p. 126)

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Kerygma and Myth 9: Austin Farrer, 'An English Appreciation'

Austin Farrer, 'An English Appreciation', in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. by Reginald H. Fuller, (London: S.P.C.K., 1972). pp. 212-223.

An online version here.

[Highly pragmatic. Farrer seems to find himself in disagreement about most things. There is a subtle belittling of Bultmann's elitist agenda - 1 in 5000 might be able to understand him; an insightful categorisation of the different reasons offence might arise from mythology; a plain disagreement on the subject of miracles with an assertion of a particular example from the century; and a cautious consideration of the implications of transcendence for analogical language.]

[Farrer seems far less concerned about the implications of relativity which come from historical criticism. He is confident that faith can arise from historical evidence without 'proof'.]

'I will first say how the different German papers strike me, and I will begin with Dr. Bultmann’s initial article. I do not find that it makes much attempt at consistent statement or accurate definition, nor do I suppose that it was designed to do so.' (p. 218)

[It's good to hear this. The beginner fears he is being bamboozled by intense intellectualism. Infact that is only partly so!]

'Without going outside the requirements of the question we may usefully make certain distinctions between the refusals of the modern mind. We will classify them as necessary, accidental, lamentable, and factitious. (1) The established, or virtually established, positions of science and history give rise to necessary refusals, as when we refuse to believe that the world was created eight thousand years ago or that the sun stood physically still for Joshua. (2) The things which modern men happen not to pay attention to give rise to accidental refusals, in the case (for example) of industrial workers who have a blind eye for imagery based on the procedures of pre-scientific agriculture. (3) Accidental refusals become lamentable refusals when they involve the atrophy of a spiritual function, for example, the sense for poetry. (4) Factitious refusals are those that arise from a philosophy or attitude which men either embrace or swallow Communism, physical materialism, or economic utilitarianism.' (p. 214)

'Now, obviously the sort of respect we pay to these four sorts of refusals is not the same. Our respect for factitious refusals is the respect of the physician for the disease; if he respects the fact it is that he may abolish it. Lamentable refusals are likewise to be cured so far as they admit of cure by the cultivation of the atrophied function. Accidental refusals can be overcome by the imparting of information, but it is often not practicable nor worth our while to attempt it. About necessary refusals nothing can be done or ought to be done. They must be accepted.' (p. 215)

'If, therefore, men cannot understand a "mythical" language because they are dogmatic materialists, it is a case of factitious error, and the direct target of our attack. If because they have lost their sense for poetical expression and living metaphor, it is lamentable and we ought to sustain and augment whatever rudiments of poetical sense remain. If because the Biblical images draw on unfamiliar fields of experience, it is accidental and must be met largely by the substitution of familiar images, not (if you like to say so) by demythicization but by remythicization. But if it is because of a real conflict with the way in which any decent modern man is bound to think, then indeed it is time to talk about removing the offensive elements from the Biblical story by radical translation into harmless terms.' (p. 215)

'When Bultmann suggests that the modern problem can be illustrated from the "three-decker universe" he is surely indulging himself in the pleasures of rhetorical effect. Our actual problems are more subtle. It will suffice to name two of them, the problem of miracle and the problem of transcendence.' (p. 216)

'The problem of miracle is this. Are alleged historical events like the virginal conception of our Savior in Mary’s womb examples of myth in the sense we have just defined, or are they not? Bultmann appears to beg the question. He writes as though he knew that God never bends physical fact into special conformity with divine intention; the Word never becomes flesh by making physical fact as immediately pliable to his expression as spoken symbols are. Bultmann seems to be convinced that he knows this, but I am not convinced that I know it, and I cannot be made to agree by the authority of the truism that symbolism ought not to be mistaken for physical fact. For it still ought to be taken for physical fact, if and where God has made it into physical fact.' (p. 216)

'The problem of transcendence is more general. It arises wherever we find ourselves asking to what reality symbolical descriptions refer.' (p. 216)

'An angel may be talked of as though he were a luminous and filmy man, but when we have decided that such images are mere parables, then to what are we to refer the parables? Are they parables about a non-luminous and non-filmy not-man? About a conscious and voluntary finite being of indeterminate species? About an impression made in the senses of a visionary by God himself?' (p. 217)

'Lohmeyer says boldly that God and the things of God are simply outside our scope, except in so far as they make themselves known through symbols or parables which they arouse in our minds and which express them figuratively. There is no saying what that is for which the figures stand except in further figures, and so without end. Lohmeyer’s position is certainly not an explanation, but the statement of ultimate philosophical paradox. But at least it shows a grasp of the difficulty.'Lohmeyer says boldly that God and the things of God are simply outside our scope, except in so far as they make themselves known through symbols or parables which they arouse in our minds and which express them figuratively. There is no saying what that is for which the figures stand except in further figures, and so without end. Lohmeyer’s position is certainly not an explanation, but the statement of ultimate philosophical paradox. But at least it shows a grasp of the difficulty.' (p. 217)

'However transcendent divine things may be, we are neither going to be silent about them nor to spin fantasies about them at our own sweet will. We shall make serious affirmations about the invisible, but only in so far as it makes itself visible to us. Well, the invisible as such does not become visible, being by definition the side we do not see, like the back of the moon: but it must show us a visible side. We affirm the invisible side of the medal only when the visible is open to our apprehension, and otherwise not.' (p. 218)

'Bultmann insists that the divine in Christ can be acknowledged in our present existence only, and never revealed by historical research; and there is a sense in which that is true. The techniques of historical scholarship cannot establish that God lived in man, but only that certain things were done and certain words were said. But of course the work of historical scholarship may bring me face to face with what will awaken faith in me. Suppose I am historically persuaded that Christ preached himself as Son of God in the words of the Gospel, I may believe Christ then and there, and without waiting to hear Dr. Bultmann preach him to me from the pulpit. Or again, if I did hear Dr. Bultmann proclaiming the faith of the Church, I might not believe him until I had had leisure to search the Scriptures. What turned the scales might be the historical persuasion that the seeds of the Church’s faith were not only in the Gospels but in the historical fact behind the Gospels.' (p. 219)

'And so, when Dr. Bultmann undermines the testimony to the saving miracles by alleging conflict between the witnesses, I allow the relevance of his argument. What I disagree with is simply his interpretations of the texts he refers to.' (p. 221)

'It may be that the real first step of Dr. Bultmann’s whole plea is the exhortation to embrace existentialism or drown, and that everything else is a mere corollary to that. But in fact many of us are not, and are not going to be, existentialists of the Heidegger school, and so we try to see what Bultmann’s position amounts to if we leave the dogmatic existentialism out.' (p. 221)

'The miracles of the saints never cease: a hundred years ago the sainted CurĂ© d’Ars multiplied bread and healed the sick and lived himself by a continuous physical miracle, nor has he lacked successors since.' (p. 222)

'Dr Bultmann seems to have no difficulty with the belief that personal existence can kick off the body and survive: his unbelieving existentialist teachers would hardly follow him there. To others of us it is vital that we have in physical miracle a token from God of the power which can adjust spirit and nature to a new and happier union: as when he bodily raised our Savior from the dead.'

'When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God. The crucifixion of the images in which God is first shown to us is a necessity of prayer because it is a necessity of life. The promise of God’s dealing with us through grace can be set before us in nothing but images, for we have not yet experienced the reality. When we proceed to live the promises out, the images are crucified by the reality, slowly and progressively, never completely, and not always without pain: yet the reality is better than the images. Jesus Christ clothed himself in all the images of messianic promise, and in living them out, crucified them: but the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is very God and life eternal, whereby the children of God are delivered from idols.' (p. 222-3)