Theology Today - Vol 18, No. 1 - January 1962 - CRITIC'S CORNER

506 - This Is My Point of Viewing

This Is My Point of Viewing
By Nels F. S. Ferre

I HAVE been invited to reply to Professor Van A. Harvey's review-article which appears in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY and which makes a basic criticism of my theological perspective as indicated in my latest book. Naturally I am pleased with the attention given my book, and any answer I can give to the review demands preparation in prayer and self-examination in order that the cause of truth and man be served.

It seems strange to me that the reviewer centers his criticism on the charge that I am not aware of the basic distinction between faith and belief, especially with reference to justification by faith. This topic has been the life-long problem to which I have devoted my major attention. Not only does Chapter 4 of my first book, Swedish Contributions to Modern Theology, deal with it, as do Faith and Reason and my forthcoming volume for the Library of Theology to be published in Britain, but most of my writing wrestles in some way with this question. No reviewer can be expected, of course, to be responsible for an author's previous writings, but the volume under review itself devotes the first two main sections to it. A long section on language and truth is followed by one on faith and freedom, wherein the first chapter deals specifically with acknowledgment of God in terms of teachings (notitia) in its relation to acceptance (assensus and fiducia), while the second chapter treats this same topic from the point of view of the individual. In addition, Section IV deals specifically and explicitly with this question in chapters on natural theology, Christian experience, and especially on Biblical hermeneutics. Even the final section on education deals with this question in a chapter on "Higher Education and Values."

Harvey feels that I cannot make up my mind between personal faith and a world view. The fact is that my constant insistence is on their inescapable dynamic interrelation. Every whole response of faith has metaphysical implications. I believe that faith and truth cannot be isolated, neither can faith and knowledge be

507 - This Is My Point of Viewing

equated. We all have to live by some faith, being finite creatures, but we have the obligation to be as intelligent and responsible about such faith as possible. Congar has charged that Reformation faith has reduced its perspective to a matter of thinking "in loco justificationts," indeed that it substitutes this partial perspective for the whole theological field. To a real extent, in conspicuous instances, he is right. To say that contemporary theology is concerned with justification by faith in respect to doctrine is well and good, but when such concern eventuates merely in its understanding of doctrine as presentation and not also as obedience and service, the concern is partial and destructive of faith.

Finitude and sin should be accepted, with repentance as well as understanding, in order for the human creature to prevent as far as possible, by the remedy of God's grace and by his own diligent response, both the distortions and the rationalizations of the sinful creature. But finitude and sin pose the problems for man's receiving revelation; they are not the answers nor can they, in fact, determine the nature of the answers. These must be found in God's will to reveal himself reliably, and in the means of grace and the participating presence of the Holy Spirit.

Naturally I cannot here deal with the whole question, treated in Chapter 2, of Incarnation as the main channel of revelation, with paradox as a means of stressing discontinuity between God and man and analogy as preserving the proper difference even within the main continuity graciously given in the Event-meaning of God's central revelation. Enough that the question of faith and belief with reference to justification by faith is a central concern not only in my main writings, but very definitely in the book under review.

Similarly it seems strange to me also to find myself connected with the defense of Greek metaphysics as the necessary expression for traditional Christian faith. My avowed life task is to show that the Christian faith has been struggling with false problems and has become shorn of its strength as fulfilling truth precisely by its working within alien frameworks of philosophy. Instead, the Christian faith can become amazingly creative and constructively directive when it accepts itself as the basis for the formulation of its distinctive thought. Start with the problem of being and spoil the faith; start

508 - This Is My Point of Viewing

With the distinctive and determinative motif of God's love in Christ, and the opportunities are wide open for ever new service to human knowing and living. Certainly I am not fighting for any historic doctrines for their own sake, but I see the Christian faith all too often being abandoned in favor of a superficial and negative modernity that cannot satisfy the need for faith, truth and life for the Church or the world. Such abandonment can in large measure be attributed to past failure adequately to formulate the central Christian tenets of faith in terms of its own capacities for becoming the creative fulcrum of man's changing knowledge.

Harvey suggests that my two main enemies are neo-orthodoxy and neo-naturalism. On the contrary, I tried to sing a paean of praise for Barth's restoring of the unity of method and message, showing on the negative side only that Barth never understood how God as Love works indirectly for and with man's freedom in history and nature. Barth himself has publicly and forcefully admitted this lack. I also grieve, of course, because neo-orthodoxy in its restoration of the centrality of the Event of revelation, that is, in attacking the primacy of propositional meaning, lost the secondary needful use of statemental truth to judge and to direct human experience. But nevertheless I keep thanking God for the primary stress of neo-orthodoxy!

To connect neo-orthodoxy with Tillich and Bultmann, however, is to see only the less important fact that both groups represent the culture-conditioned theology of today in their common fight against the rationalism and liberalism of yesterday. Neo-orthodoxy is, of course, a vague affair, and many of its interpreters may in fact have surrendered actual classical transcendence under cover of an empty facade of symbolic protestation, but to hold or even to imply that Bultmann and Tillich espouse classical Christian transcendence is to fail to take them seriously at the center of their own message.

Tillich denies that there is any transcendent being; for him there is only transcendent meaning, for all being is conditioned. Often he and I have discussed his thought at this point. But actually he accepts a power for being greater than finite existence, and therefore, in fact, does have a transcendent realm more and other even than the sum total of finite existences and than their merely logical presuppositions. This is an unresolved dualism in Tillich's system, which, by the way, furnishes it with great dialectical power. I have

509 - This Is My Point of Viewing

treated this question with great care in my book in a separate chapter and acknowledge freely that for Tillich this meaning and power for harmony of being are seen uniquely and conclusively in Jesus as the Christ. Therefore I call Tillich's "theology" in this sense Christian. But to call him a theist in the sense of his expounding faith in a personal, living God, the creator of heaven and earth, and the director of nature, history, and man's destiny, is definitely to misinterpret Tillich. Perhaps such faith in the Supreme Being, the personal Spirit, is impossible for "modern man," but let us be clear and forthright in our discussion,

Harvey is especially disturbed by my classifying Bultmann with Tillich. There are, to be sure, important differences between them, as I have indicated, and he has a right to his objection from these points of view. But Tillich and Bultmann are together in their having dismissed, once and for all, as intellectually untenable, the existence of classical Christian transcendence. Harvey labels as false the reducing of Bultmann to subjectivistic existentialism, and he is right. The final section in Bultmann's famous essays on demythologizing, for instance, stresses the need for adequate transcendence. I have emphasized this fact. But such transcendence is a far cry from the acceptance of the living, personal God, the supreme Being who created the world, who works in special as well as in general providence, who himself came conclusively in Christ as Agape, and who will fulfill his work beyond earthly history within the eternal resources of his creative Love! In his Auburn lectures on Bultmann, Tillich himself described how it was just such a "supranatural" God whom both of them decided to abandon as intellectually untenable for modern man; but it is precisely such a Supreme Love, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom I find the secret not only of my fullest trust but also of my most adequate seeing, Such an issue is central and cannot be ruled out as an outmoded way of putting the problem. There is no question of spatialization or cosmology, no question of Biblical literalism or of historicism. Put it any way at all, the question of God in Christ and of his eternal purpose for man and creation is stubbornly at the center of the Christian faith. I believe, however, that we can come closer together if we abandon the question of supreme "Being" and go on to the reality and meaning of supreme personal Spirit.

If Bultmann believes in the eternal personal Spirit, well and good!

510 - This Is My Point of Viewing

If Tillich comes out for such a God in his third volume of Systematic Theology, praise be to God I For a. thesis of one of my most mature graduate students, we went through all of Bultmann's utterances dealing with transcendence lip to two years ago and found them naturally consistent with his main thesis that a false use of myth is the attributing of anything in this world to another world, while a true use of myth is its clarification and transformation of experience. The central Christian myths provide the power for dying to self and of rising to newness of life, once for all experienced in Christ. This power, in Bultmann's thought, is trans-subjective and in no way humanistic, but it is not the power of a personal, living God who hears prayer and acts in history. This is clear. In Manchester, England, my colleagues there told me Bultmann was asked whether such a being could not at least be inferred. His consistent reply was that such a God could neither be denied nor affirmed. What we do have instead is the living power for being forgiven and for newness of life. Such trans-subjective transcendence, I have stated, Bultmann accepts, but to leave the Christian Gospel at that is, for me, to repudiate the fuller question of Christian truth. I believe we need make no apology for the Biblical faith that God is creator and controller of the world. Harvey's claim that I reduce Bultmann's theology to existential subjectivism in any humanistic sense I feel to be too simple and misdirected. I do not do so, but neither do I attribute to Bultmann falsely the classical Christian transcendence of a living, personal God. Such, at least, is my own most careful understanding of Bultmann's theology, but I am finding that, as in the case of Tillich's theology, scholars are increasingly coming to understand and to recognize the real issues involved.

When, however, after writing this volume, I came across a sentence in one of Bultmann's sermons affirming a personal God, I believed it to be honest workmanship to share it with my readers. Even so, when a theologian like Bultmann accepts a certain use of myth it is hard to know whether lie is not also in such instances using it in his own declared way rather than in a return to, or even a lapse from, his standpoint, into classical Christian transcendence. I have no way of judging such isolated statements, and should indeed be happy if Bultmann would clarify his position to mean that he wants to demythologize Christian cosmology but never its central ontology (that is its ultimate affirmation of the supreme personal Spirit, the Father

511 - This Is My Point of Viewing

III

Rightly Harvey points up my objection to the theologies of Tillich and Bultmann because they do not include personal fulfillment after death. I cannot myself see how either honestly or competently one can ever make the central Christian affirmation that the Creator is sovereign Love without affirming, with the New Testament, that in Christ God has conquered sin, law, and death. My own stress is never on personal survival from the human standpoint, but on resurrection reality as alone consistent with the Christian trust in God. All Christian theology should certainly be consistent with its view of God in Christ as sovereign, holy Love. Harvey counters that God might have something better in store! So much the better! It must then include as well as go beyond such resurrection. I am not spelling out the nature of eternal life. It must surely be both sufficiently continuous and sufficiently discontinuous to be worthy of the mystery as well as the revealed meaning of God. But without God's victory in resurrection in the ultimate dimension of man's destiny, the Christian faith cannot be true. This I know.

Harvey thinks that Charles Hartshorne's review of my Evil and the Christian Faith, to the effect that no fulfillment in life after death can do away with or diminish evil in this life, settles the issue. I believe not. Whether or not earthly life is basically pedagogical is a question of central importance. To reduce evil to a finality of disjunct and discrete fact is not to see it in the proper perspective of God's use of nature and history as the pedagogical medium they are, nor to understand his indirect control and teachings of human freedom, nor to see death as itself a possible power of transformation, nor, again, to see the other side of this life as God's continuing of his pedagogy within his eternal resources of time and means. To claim, furthermore, that God must not use pain is to deny the centrality of the Cross as God's means of redemption and to make hedonism an assumed ultimate. Besides, the past as real persists in the present not only in this life but in the life to come and therefore can be cleansed and fulfilled so as to be meaningfully related to present experience. I believe increasingly in the central importance, to the Christian faith and to all knowledge of ultimates, of the resurrection reality.

512 - This Is My Point of Viewing

No human beings, of course, can paint fully what the assertions of Christian faith mean and involve'. We all stand amazed by meaning while still enfolded in mystery. Nor can we "prove" such faith in terms of knowledge. But I believe it can be shown to be reliably real and can meet the live-or-die needs of our present age. I long for the day when theologians together will become creatively concerned with God's love for the world and turn confidently to the constructive side of our task.

I thank Professor Harvey for his concern in challenging my interpretation in Searchlights on Contemporary Theology and the editorial staff of THEOLOGY TODAY for their graciousness in letting me reply to his vigorous confrontation.