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Theological Labels
By George S. Hendry

Theological positions are commonly identified by one-word labels which are convenient, but which can be confusing. These labels are of different kinds. Some, like liberal and conservative, which are the best known, are descriptive of the theologies to which they are applied. A liberal theology is one that feels itself at liberty to address itself to theological problems as they present themselves in a manner that is not bound to traditions inherited from the past; a conservative theology is one that considers itself responsible for maintaining those traditions and conducting its business in a manner that is consistent with them.

I

Theological labels sometimes refer to some theme which is given a cardinal role in the construction of theology. Evangelical (when it is not used as a euphemism for conservative) applies to the theology which finds its central theme in the gospel of salvation through Christ, and which is best exemplified in the theology of the Lutheran Reformation, particularly in the attempts that were made by some successors of Luther to use his favorite formulation of the gospel in the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith as the organizing principle of theological construction. Fundamentalist is a formal example of this type of label; it does not refer to one specific doctrine but to a number of doctrines (five in the original manifesto, not including justification by faith) that were deemed fundamental to a sound theology. Fundamentalism had the curious effect of introducing into Protestant theology, as the designation of its opposite, the term modernism, which has its original home in Roman Catholic theology; but this label does not seem to have survived the era of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies and has been replaced by liberal.

Several labels which refer to a cardinal theme or doctrine are current in contemporary theology: process theology finds in the concept of process, developed by A. N. Whitehead, a means of formulating or reformulating the interaction between God and the world; the theology of hope finds the key to the essence of Christianity in the eschatological perspective and attempts to organize a theological system accordingly; the theology of liberation finds in the liberation from Egyptian bondage

George S. Hendry is Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary. A native of Scotland, he is the author of several books, The Gospel of the Incarnation, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology, and Theology of Nature.

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the paradigm of the action of God in history and seeks to realize it among the oppressed and downtrodden in the world of today.

There are labels which refer to a method. Dialectic was applied to the theology of Karl Barth in its first phase, when the emphasis was on the Kierkegaardian gaarradiction between the Creator and the creature which could only be stated in a dialectic of Yes and No. Empirical is applied to a theology, associated with the University of Chicago, which stresses the importance of empirical reference for theological statements.

There are labels which refer to the person or place of origin of a given theology. Such are Thomist, Scotist, Calvinist, Barthian, etc. When the reference is not only to the original theologian but to the school formed under his influence, the name of the place where it flourished may be substituted for that of the person. The Princeton theology refers to the type of strict Presbyterian orthodoxy that was taught at the Princeton Theological Seminary by Hodge, Warfield, and others. The Lundensian theology took its name from the theology taught at the University of Lund in Sweden by Nygren and Aulen, who sought a way of conserving the distinctive motifs of Christian faith, such as grace and love, without isolating theology from religion and philosophy in the manner of Barth. The Erlangen theology, named from the University of Erlangen in Germany, stressed the importance of the personal experience of conversion and regeneration as a source for theology.

It may be added, parenthetically, that most of the labels that have been used to identify the philosophical schools of ancient Greece are of this type. The Pythagorean, Platonic, and Epicurean philosophies took their names from the men who taught them. Others came from the places in which they were taught (despite the fame of the persons who taught them): the Eleatic philosophy was named from the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy, the Academic, from academe, the grove where Plato taught, the Stoic from the stoa, the portico where Zeno taught. An odd variant is the peripatetic, which refers, not to the place where Aristotle taught (the Lyceum), but to the fact that he and his disciples walked about while he taught. Relatively few of the schools bore labels relating to any feature of their teaching, for example, Skeptics and Cynics.

Theological labels of all these types are convenient and useful for purposes of reference, but they can be seriously misleading if taken as more than that. They resemble baggage labels, which give only enough information to ensure that the baggage reaches its destination, but no description of its contents, which might be needed to recover it, should it be lost in transit. This is true even of labels which appear to be descriptive, like liberal and conservative. The distinction between a theology which holds on to the past and one which feels free to break with the past and move in new directions is so obvious, that the labels almost suggest themselves; and in fact they made their first appearance (in slightly different forms) as long ago as the fourteenth century, when

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William of Ockham set theology on a "modern way" (via moderna), which was opposed to the "ancient way" (via antiqua). But the labels can be misleading if they are allowed to become stereotypes, that is, if conservative theology becomes "conservatism" and is treated as a compendium of doctrines considered to be logically coherent but which may not in fact be held by any conservative theologian. No theology is purely liberal and none purely conservative, and debate between them is bedeviled if conducted in terms of stereotypes. There are conservative elements in every liberal theology, and liberal in every conservative, and these can only be discovered by patient examination of their contents.

The purpose of, this essay is to point to a parallel between the problems that arise from the use of such theological labels and those that have arisen from the application of similar labels to the component parts of the Old Testament canon.

II

The canon of the Old Testament is divided into three parts, which are known respectively as the law (torah), the prophets (nebhihim), and the writings (kethubhim). But the tripartite division has roots which go back several centuries before the formation of the canon. It appears to have been an established fact as early as the seventh century that there were three types of functionaries, each with a distinctive instrument to employ, in the maintenance of the relation between God and the people, the priest who administered the law, the prophet who gave the word, and the seer who dispensed wisdom. Jeremiah quotes his adversaries as saying, at a time when he was proclaiming impending calamity: "Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah, for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word of the Lord from the prophet" (Jer. 18:18). That the three did not always function harmoniously together, though that is not indicated in this passage, is well known. There was recurrent tension between priest and prophet, and the wise man, or sage, who was a relative newcomer on the scene, was resented by the prophet as one who sought to replace the prophetic word with a counterfeit (Isa. 19:12; 29:14; Jer. 8:7-9). Despite these antagonisms, however, the three continued to coexist, and in later times, when the spoken word gave way to the written, three types of writings appear to have been generally recognized. In the Prologue to the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, his grandson, writing about 132 B.C., refers to "the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers." The tripartite division was well established before the rabbis finally determined the canon of the Old Testament at the Synod of Jamnia around 90 A.D.

The law contains the five books (pentateuch) which are ascribed to Moses. The section called the prophets contains not only the books of the (earlier and later) prophets, but also the historical books, Samuel and Kings, which, according to tradition, were written by prophets. The writings (sometimes called the Hagiographa) is a blanket term which

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covers all the rest, the Psalms, the wisdom books, and sundry others of an historical, or quasi-historical nature, such as Ruth and Daniel. The third division was the slowest to gain acceptance in the canon. There was intense discussion among the rabbis over the acceptance of some of the books, especially Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; and even after their acceptance, the books in this division, with the exception of the Psalms, enjoyed a rather inferior status.

The law always enjoyed a preeminence among the sacred writings. Indeed, at the public reading recorded in Nehemiah 8, which marks the point of transition from the spoken to the written word, and which may be regarded as the first step toward the formation of the canon, it is "the book of the law of Moses" that was read by Ezra; no mention is made of the books of the prophets, and the prophets were in effect replaced by the scribes, to whom the interpretation of the law was entrusted (Neh. 8:7). The law continued to enjoy a preeminence when it was coupled with the prophets; it was regarded as the definitive declaration of the will of God, to which the prophets appended the sanctions, especially in their proclamation of judgment.

The priority of the law is reflected in the designation of the Hebrew Scriptures as the "law and the prophets," which had become standard by the time of the New Testament. But though this name continued to be used by both Jesus and Paul (Matt. 5:17; Ac. 24:14), the effect of the new movement was to reverse the order of priority. The traditional order had been predicated on the assumption that the fount of prophetic inspiration had dried up (Amos 8:11f.; Ps. 74:9; 1 Macc. 4:46, 9:27, 14:41), and that the prophetic word survived only in written form-a fact which contributed to its assimilation to law. The new movement saw itself as a revival of prophecy (Mk. 8:28; Lk. 7:16; Ac. 3:22), and this entailed a radical reconsideration of the relation between law and prophecy.

It is Paul who saw this most clearly. He contended that the traditional formulation, the law and the prophets, which gave priority to the law, contradicted the pattern of God's action in history, and in two places he undertook to show from Scripture itself that the prophetic factor (which he calls the promise) has the priority in that action (Rom. 4; Gal. 3). God's dealings with Abraham began with the promise of grace (Rom. 4:13; Gal. 3:8), which is the theme of prophecy and which is fulfilled in the gospel (Rom. 1:2). The character of the divine economy is prophetic-evangelical from beginning to end, and the law plays only a subsidiary part in it (Rom. 5:20; Gal. 3:19). The hermeneutical consequences of the reversal of priorities are made clear by Paul in II Cor. 3, where he describes the different ways in which the law (he calls it "Moses") is read in the synagogue and the church.

In these passages Paul is not merely disputing the propriety of law as a label for the first division of the old Testament canon-though he might have done so; for it is a question whether law conveys a correct impression of the Hebrew torah. The etymology of this term is not

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certain, but it is used for the most part in a general sense of direction or instruction, and in this sense it is applied to the word of the prophet and the counsel of the wise (Isa. 8:16; Prov. 13:14-in both places the KJV has "law," the RSV "teaching"). Such instruction sometimes included laws, especially ritual laws; and the tendency toward a legalistic view of the torah as a whole was intensified when the instructions became fixed in written codes. But Paul is doing more than this. He is disputing a type of theology which the label has encouraged-a theology which thinks of God primarily as lawgiver and judge, and which assumes that its own task is to set forth the truth of God in legal concepts and categories. It has often been remarked that the theology of the Western church has a juridical cast, in striking contrast to that of the Eastern church (which has been characterized as mystagogical). It is no accident that two of the great architects of Western theology were lawyers by training: Tertullian, who did more than any other to provide the Western church with a theological vocabulary, drawing much of it from Roman law, in which he was expert; and Calvin, who was professionally trained as a lawyer-and a French lawyer at that. The legalistic conceptuality of Western theology has seemed to some like armor-plating that made it impregnable; but to some it has seemed to threaten it with suffocation and efforts have been made to escape it.

The most notable of these was the Reformation, which attempted to restore the Pauline priority of gospel over law, but with only temporary success. In the centuries of "orthodoxy," Protestant theology fell back into the legalism it had abjured. The legalistic mentality reached its peak in the seventeenth century and probably received its most characteristic expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith, in which the story of the action of God, which to Paul was one of promise and fulfillment, is presented in terms of a protracted and intricate proceeding in contract law. A conspicuous feature of the legalistic type of theology is a preoccupation with the question of authority. This also is well illustrated by the Westminster Confession, in which the first and longest chapter is devoted to the establishment of the authority of Scripture as the basic constitutional document by reference to which all questions of theology may be resolved.

Legalism in theology derives its sanction from the use of the law as a label for the first (and fundamental) part of the Old Testament canon. But this label itself is misleading, not merely because it singles out one element of these books, but also, as Paul pointed out, because it tears that one element out of its context. For the law does not stand alone; it is an integral part of the covenant-and not the prime part. The prime part of the covenant is the gracious action binding God to the people, and the law prescribes the terms of the reciprocal action of the people. The importance of the covenant as a clue to the story of the action of God has long been recognized. It is registered in the naming of the two component parts of the Scriptures in the Christian church as the Old Covenant and the New Covenant; it was recognized by Calvin, and it

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was built up into an elaborate (and legalistic) system in the federal theology of the seventeenth century. It has also played a leading part in some recent Old Testament theologies.

But the law and the covenant together are still insufficient to describe the contents of the first part of the canonical Old Testament. The covenant is an event which occurred in the course of the exodus, and it has its essential place in that context; for by the liberation of the people from Egyptian bondage God, in effect, took away the identity which they had had (for 430 years according to Paul in Gal. 3:17) and made them a "No-people" (Hos. 2:23), and by the formation of the covenant God gave them a new identity: "I will be your God, and you shall be my people" (Lev. 26:12).

The theme of the exodus has been brought to life again, in a poignant way, in the theologies of liberation, which have become popular among black thinkers and other oppressed peoples. These theologies have revived a genuine and important biblical motif; but if they isolate this motif from its connection with the covenant and the law, they run some risk of prostituting it. Deliverance from captivity is not an unusual occurrence in human history, and there is no need to go to the Bible for it. The distinctive feature of the biblical story of deliverance, which makes it a theological model, is that the beneficiaries are led to find their freedom in a binding obligation. A theology of liberation that has no goal beyond liberation is in danger of losing its identity as a theology, and it is for this reason that it appears to be viewed with reservation by Pope John Paul II.

The second part of the canon, which is called the prophets, presents a conception of God not as the law-giver and judge but as the lord and director of history. This conception is dominant in much recent theology, which makes use of terms like salvation-history and covenant-history. The theology of the Reformation may be regarded as a first attempt to reorientate itself is this direction, but it was unable to escape the powerful drag of the long legalistic tradition, and it became mired in the problem of law and gospel, in which, as the formula itself shows, the law still held the priority: the law had to be preached first in order that the gospel might be heard.

The most determined attempt to make theology evangelical through and through is that of Karl Barth, who reformulated the traditional problem as "gospel and law" and made the law an implicate rather than a precondition of the gospel. Curiously, it has proved difficult to settle on a label for Barth's theology. Americans, who were accustomed to think in terms of the antithesis of conservative and liberal, were at a loss to know where to place him. To conservatives he seemed liberal because he did not share their view of Scripture, and to liberals he seemed conservative, because he sounded as if he did. It is this latter view that was crystallized in "neo-orthodox," which appears to have become the accepted label. But this label is misleading for, while Barth certainly

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conserves the great doctrines of traditional orthodoxy, Trinity, Christology, reconciliation, etc., he sets them in a new orientation toward the future. The main thrust of his theology is eschatological, and this has been intensified in some of his successors. Barth himself seems to have been uncertain how best to label his theology, if we may judge from the titles of his successive presentations of it, but if the title of his last, short summary represents his final choice, it seems that he wished it to be called evangelical. But in order to distinguish it from the type of theology which assumes that name in America, and which has strongly legalistic traits, Barth's theology is perhaps best described as "prophetic-evangelical."

The third part of the Old Testament canon contains a miscellaneous collection of writings which von Rad places under the general category of Israel's answer to the revelation of God in history: "for Jahweh had not chosen his people as a mere dumb object of his will in history, but for converse with him." ¹ They stand, however, in varying degrees of responsiveness to what is presented from the side of God in the law and the prophets. The closest are the Psalms, which have been the most used of the writings in this section, both in the synagogue and in the church. Others seem more remote, especially the wisdom books, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, which form the most distinctive group in this section. The relation of these writings to the law and the prophets has raised persistent problems but for our present purpose we may note some general characteristics of these writings to enable us to see in them the prototype of a recognized type of theology. Four may be mentioned.

(1)The wise men address themselves to questions of living as they are raised, not by the action of God in history (to which no reference is made), but by universal features of the human situation-birth, upbringing, society, marriage, sickness, old age, and the like.

(2)In the wisdom books, the human subject is the individual. In the law and the prophets, by contrast, individuals barely appear; for the most part they are wholly subsumed in the community, of which they are members (sometimes with consequences which are abhorrent to modern sensibilities, such as the notion of corporate guilt, exemplified in Joshua 7). It is the community God elects, with whom the covenant is made, and which is conducted through history as the instrument of God's purpose. The name of Israel is not once mentioned in the canonical wisdom books (except in the titles of their reputed authors, Prov. 1: 1; Eccl. 1: 1 2).

(3)The answers to the problems of living in the world are sought, not in some word of God, be it law or prophecy, but in lessons distilled from

¹Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 1, p. 355.

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the experience of living by elders or members of former generations. There are formal acknowledgments that wisdom of life is a gift of God and that it begins with the fear of God. But its actual content is derived from reflection on common human experience, and the compilers of these books had no qualms about incorporating material from sages who were not of Israel and did not share Israel's faith.

(4)The law and the prophets are characterized by a tone of certainty and assurance. Moses delivers the law with an authority that brooks no question, and the prophet declares the will of God with the force of a devouring fire (Jer. 5:14). But the seer searches and questions and comes at times face to face with impenetrable mystery. The book of Job is concerned with one of the most painful questions of human life, and it barely gets beyond questions. There is in several of the speeches a sense of the exaltedness of God almost above human comprehension (7:7ff.) and enveloped in mystery (26:14). Like Socrates, the wise man is one who is conscious of his lack of wisdom (Prov. 30: 1ff.).

These features of the wisdom literature help us to see in it the prototype of theology commonly labeled liberal. It is a theology which is chiefly concerned with the providential care and rule of God in the lives of men and women, as they face the vicissitudes of everyday existence, rather than with the message of salvation for those caught in the crisis of sin and guilt. It is a theology that seeks to articulate faith in a manner applicable to the universal human situation and consonant with knowledge gathered from reflection on human experience of life. And it is a theology that remembers, even in the light of the revelation of God, that we see through a glass darkly and so cannot lay claim to certainties that are beyond our reach in this mortal life.

It is characteristic of conservative theology, on the other hand, that it not merely presents its doctrines in apodictic form, but it tends to assume that such doctrines are the very stuff of theology and that any theology that lacks them is not worthy of the name. The difference between the two types is most clearly seen in their different attitudes to Scripture. Conservatives tend to resist the application of critical methods to the study of Scripture and to regard such methods as an assault on the authority of Scripture which they locate in its verbal statements. Liberals have been among the foremost practitioners of the critical study of Scripture which they regard not as a direct transcript of revelation but as the literary deposit of a tradition of faith in a revelation of God, which transcends words. This difference, in turn, reflects the difference between the legal concept of God as the lawgiver, who delivers commandments engraved on tables of stone, and the prophetic concept that the course of history is conducted according to God's own counsel. It may be added that both differ from the wisdom concept of God as the one to whom individuals look for guidance as they face the problems and pitfalls of everyday living.

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III

As we compare the three component parts of the Old Testament Canon, we may note a significant difference among them in regard to their attitudes to time and the (explicit or implicit) relation of God to time. There is a general agreement among them that God is eternal, which is (to say the least) superior to time: God is lord of time and, as such, is equally near to (or equally distant from) all the dimensions of time. But within this common agreement there is a difference of accent, which gives each group of writings a characteristic orientation.

In the law, there is a preponderant emphasis on the past. The theme of the law is the mighty acts by which God established a covenant, and Israel is repeatedly called to cast its mind back to those acts; for its very identity depends on fidelity to them. The constant refrain of the law is "Remember"-and, as if a single recounting of the past were not enough, Israel is solemnly called together at the borders of the promised land to listen to Moses rehearse the whole story a second time: "Remember this day, in which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by strength of hand the Lord brought you out from this place" (Exod. 13:3); "and you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness" (Deut. 8:2).

In the prophets, the accent is on the future-not that God's action in the past and its constitutive importance is overlooked, but God's action in the past is only preparatory to God's decisive action in the future:

"For I am the Lord, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, 'My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose'"(Isa. 46:9f.).

For the prophets, the "glory" of the Lord, that is, the definitive revelation of God, in which God will be seen to be God, was to be looked for, not in the past at Sinai, but in the future, when "the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains…and all the nations shall flow to it" (Isa. 2:2).

"And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together" (Isa. 40:4)

In the wisdom books, the accent is on the present. A recurring theme is the importance of learning to recognize the peculiar opportunity, or promise, or challenge, of each moment as it comes: "A wise man knows in his heart the right time and method for action. There is a time and a method for every enterprise, although man is greatly troubled by ignorance of the future" (Eccl. 8:5f.). It is a main feature of the human predicament, as Ecclesiastes saw it, that we are aware of the past and the future, but the present is the only time that we have. And his recommendation is that we should concentrate on the present, and leave the past and the future to God, to whom they belong. The present is

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God's gift to us, and the path of wisdom is to seize it and use it and enjoy it as best we may. "[God] has made everything to suit its time; moreover he has given man a sense of time past and future, but no comprehension of God's work from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing good for man except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive" (Eccl. 3:1 If. NEB).

When we consider the three groups of writings from this point of view, we may appreciate the judgment of the rabbinate in including all three in the canon. A faith that is commensurate with life, whether it be that of the community or the individual, must be one that applies to all three dimensions of time. The God of biblical faith is God of past, present, and future and cannot be confined to one dimension of temporality, and a theology that attempts to do this runs the risk of abridging the Godhead. A conservatism holding fast to God's revelation in the past and treating the word spoken then as final and decisive for all time, tends to miss the true finality of God's revelation and the thrust of the word as promise of things to come. An eschatologism looking to God as the one who is to come, identifying faith with "openness to the future," tends to loosen faith from its foundation which is God's faithfulness in time, past, present, and to come. And a liberalism which looks for the vitality of faith in its "relevance" to the contemporary problems of human life is in danger of becoming a religious utilitarianism defeating its purpose by shutting life off from the full dimensions of the work of God, as it extends from creation to consummation.

When a perspective hardens into a position, the consequence is partiality (and the original meaning of heresy is the assertion of a partial truth as the whole truth). The truth is larger than can be seen from any one perspective.

The tendency of perspectives to harden into positions is encouraged by the use, or rather the misuse, of labels. If this is correct, labels should be used sparingly, for purposes of identification, not for description, and least of all in controversy. A theology that identifies itself with its label is in danger of being locked into a cramped position, and if, in addition, it attacks other positions by their labels, discussion degenerates into name-calling. A label tells us as much about the content of a theology as the writing on an envelope tells us of the content of the letter inside.