131 - The Secular Meaning Of the Gospel

The Secular Meaning Of the Gospel
By Paul M. van Buren
205 pp. New York, Macmillan Co., 1963. $4.95.

"The problem of the Gospel in a secular age," writes the author, "is a problem of the logic of its apparently meaningless language." The

132 - The Secular Meaning Of the Gospel

argument of this closely reasoned book stands or falls with the validity of this fundamental premise. It is this which distinguishes van Buren from Bonhoeffer whom he acknowledges but does not follow, on the one side, and the existentialist demythologizers, Bultmann, Buri, and Ogden, whom he criticizes on the other. The secular world, he maintains, thinks empirically and pragmatically. It is formed by the technological, industrial process. Metaphysical and cosmological ideas are inherently meaningless to it. Its way of thinking, speaking, and understanding is reflected in the philosophical method of linguistic analysis. Only in moments of personal crisis does it make contact with the concepts of existentialism; therefore, that school's restatement of the Gospel with its covert religiosity and its "oblique language about God" is not helpful. At the same time the theology of the early Church Fathers, rediscovered and proclaimed by Karl Barth, is locked in a mythology which is simply nonsense to this world. The task van Buren sets himself therefore is "to describe and arrange three pieces of this puzzle: the conservative concern for Christology, the 'liberal' concern with a contemporary way of thinking, and the logical analysis of theological statements." This to be followed by a reconstruction of theology, or rather Christology, in modern terms.

The second half of the book is devoted to this reconstruction, which has two basic characteristics. It is, first, based on a non-cognitive understanding of faith. Statements of faith do not communicate information about external reality; they are declarations of commitment to a way of life which is defined by relation to Jesus Christ. Faith is catching the freedom of Jesus to be for others. Easter or the Resurrection is defined as the moment when this freedom began to be contagious. The only verification of such faith which is possible lies in the lives which result from it. Yet it is not simply the non-objective faith of the existentialists because the history of Jesus of Nazareth and of those chosen and transformed by him is fundamental to it.

Second, this theology is non-theistic. "The word 'God' is dead" and cannot be meaningfully used. It has no content other than that given it by the human historical event of Jesus as understood by such a functional faith as described above. The entire content of the New Testament kerygma, which remains the Christian norm, can be translated into Christological and non-theistic terms without losing any of its essential meaning. Van Buren concludes his book by demonstrating this with regard to Christology, revelation, predestination, creation, sin, justification, sanctification, and the sacramental and missionary life of the Church.

At this point the reviewer is tempted to step aside and allow the

133 - The Secular Meaning Of the Gospel

reader his own reaction, or rather his own reasoned response when he has read the book. For this volume, radical though it is, cannot be ignored by any Christian who recognizes that the communication of the Gospel in the modern ethos is a serious problem. There are elements in van Buren's point of departure which are shrewd insights into the secular attitude of this ethos: his objection to the ontological and the religious and his insistence on a functional and interpersonal understanding of faith. His critique of the radical Bultmann school, both for its violation of the secular integrity of man and for its unfaithfulness to the historicity of the Gospel, is detailed and convincing. He senses and tries to express through all his reconstruction of theology that there is a profound affinity between the dynamic of modern secular man and the dynamic of man in Biblical history, precisely in the humility of both before a personal reality which claims them, but whom they cannot control or capture in structures of thought and being.

The tragedy of this book, and it is a real tragedy just because there is so much careful argument and sound insight in it, is that the premise is, as it stands, not only inadequate, but wrong. "The secular meaning of the Gospel" is the object of all our search, since we have learned from Bonhoeffer and from a fresh understanding of the Bible that God acts in the saeculum and not in a religious realm of experience, being, or ideas. But the secular world is not limited to the definitions of meaning prescribed by Wittgenstein and his followers. Nor is the problem of the Gospel only, or even primarily, its intellectual maladjustment to such a world. In concentrating on the retooling of concepts van Buren has missed the profoundly secular and profoundly Biblical dimension of the very human relations which mean so much to him: the confrontation with another who lays a claim on me, who opposes me, before whom and with whom I live only by some form of forgiveness and grace. The sense of meaninglessness, including the refusal to see meaning in the concept "God," has a twofold source: the desire of secular man to hide from himself the implications of this confrontation with such Another, and the failure of the Church to express the reality of this confrontation in its own life. At one point the author asks whether his exposition has become "merely ethical," having lost the theological dimension. His trouble, I submit, is that his ethics themselves are superficial, basically liberal, and that his intellectual problems are therefore unreal. The circle of self is never decisively broken from without. Van Buren's theology surrenders to a part of the world's a priori ideas of what can be meaningful, and therefore connives in the widespread Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to treat God as if he were dead.

Nevertheless, to discover secular ways of expressing and living the

134 - The Secular Meaning Of the Gospel

Gospel is a matter of life and death for the Christian Church. There is no other way to do this than the way van Buren has gone, through the agony of searching for and discovering the Gospel in the context of secular thought and life. Therefore this book should be read. If the very dissatisfaction which the author's conclusions arouse stimulate similar efforts in the reader, it will have performed a valuable service to the Christian community.

Charles C. West
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey