Theology Today - Vol 37, No. 4 - January 1981 - EDITORIAL

411 - How Much Is Enough?

How Much Is Enough?
By Hugh T. Kerr

IF THE GOSPEL is God's truth, it must take in everything. That provides the premise for the long history of creeds and confessions, systems and structures of theology that try to get everything together.

But this also creates a tension within theology. Surely the gospel can be stated in simple terms and in brief compass, and yet there is always the temptation to think that longer is better. For many, it is enough to say that we should love God and neighbor, or that "the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." But for others, something more extended and comprehensive is required. The simple statement may leave out something essential; the longer elaboration may say too much. Let us look at some examples on both sides of this dilemma.

The Bible itself can be both short and long, depending on how we use it. As a collection of sacred writings, the Bible is a complex library of diverse, often ambiguous, endlessly fascinating literary documents. If we take the Bible not only as literature or history but declare that it is also the Word of God, then commentaries, homilies, and biblical treatises of all kinds expand what is already a massive, unwieldly resource.

But apart from professional biblical scholars, few of us ever hope to master the Bible as a whole, even in a lifetime of study and meditation. So we make our own canon, shorter and more manageable. We may prefer the New Testament to the Old, the Gospels to the Epistles, the Psalms and Isaiah to Leviticus and Lamentations. Ecclesiastical lectionaries and the seasons of the Christian year can remind us of the wider reaches of the Scriptures, but most of us are content to stick to the familiar stories and historical episodes.

Extensive as it is, the Bible itself recognizes the sheer impossibility of

412 - How Much Is Enough?

including everything under the sun. For example, just to take three items from the New Testament, John, the longest of the Gospels, concludes: "There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (John 21:25). Paul, who knew a thing or two about bending language to his theological purposes, despaired of saying everything that could be said about God's grace in Christ and fell back on a doxology: "Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!" (II Cor. 9:15). The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, recounting at some length the roll-call of the faithful, gives up: "What more shall I say? For time would fail me…" (Heb. 11:32).

Big as it is, the Bible could be bigger. But as the above references suggest, the limitations of space, language, and time require us to settle for less. And we must ask whether we really need anything more anyway. As the old saying has it-"enough is as good as a feast."

To settle for a "short form" of the gospel may be necessary for various reasons (religious education of the young, for instance) even though essential matters may be overlooked. The Lord's Prayer, the Christian model of the perfect prayer, says nothing about thanksgiving. The Apostles' Creed, so succinct and confessional, omits reference to Scripture, the life and teachings of Jesus, and the sacraments. The shortest Gospel, Mark, may be enough, but we would feel severely restricted if there were not three more. The shortest Epistles, say Philemon and Third John, tell us something important about the apostolic church, but not much without the help of the rest of the New Testament. The shorter the statement, the more likely it can be faulted somewhere.

And there is also a peril in store for the "long form" of the faith. If we think mainly of classic systems of theology, it is true that the more volumes there are, the more likely we are to find the system tedious and irrelevant. Who but the professional experts can hope to wade through the multi-volumes of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, or Jonathan Edwards?

There are other frustrations beyond mere length in the extended doctrinal versions of the faith which confront the theologians themselves. Aquinas and Barth, well into their systems, both decided to put up their pens and leave their projects unfinished. It is rumored that Thomas refused to write more after a mystical beatific vision. Barth never claimed any such special revelation, and for one who was always so vigorous, his incomplete work strikes us as inconsistent. Is it too fanciful to wonder whether they stopped because they realized the ultimate futility of their task? In any case, for both Aquinas and Barth, we have plenty enough.

There are other kinds of doctrinal frustrations for the theologian. Schleiermacher didn't want to utilize the traditional trinitarian

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formula, and so he ended up making the Trinity a kind of epilogue to his system. Charles Hodge thought the church did not belong in the sequence of doctrines, so he left it out-with dire consequences. But once again, Schleiermacher and Hodge have given us quite enough.

Sometimes when the system is "finished," it still seems somehow inconclusive. My own view, perhaps not shared by many, puts Book Four of Calvin's Institutes on a much inferior theological level compared with the preceding three books. And I would say the same for the third volumes of Brunner's Dogmatics and Tillich's Systematic Theology. It is as if they ran out of steam just when high expectations were raised by the first two volumes.

We often bemoan in our day the passing of the theological giants. But maybe, with all their comprehensiveness and grandiose endeavors to subsume everything within their systems, they are also telling us that a complete system is an impossibility or at least not automatically better than a short version of the faith that leaves out much in order to say one or two important things.

If enough is as good as a feast, maybe we need more theological gourmets and fewer gourmands, remembering that a lean diet is better for us than an overfilling orgy of multiple courses.

III

This little theological reverie spilled over from a rereading of the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-3 1). Putting aside questions raised by the context and the possibility that the story was addressed to the Sadducees (who denied life after death), the provocative barb of the parable is the word from Father Abraham to Dives who wants Lazarus to return to warn his friends and family of their ultimate destiny: "If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead" (vs. 3 1).

It is as if Abraham (and Jesus who tells the parable) were saying: "How much evidence do you need? What would be enough? If you have 'Moses and the prophets' (plus, for us, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ), what more is needed? How much is enough?"

Can the dialectic tension between the short and long form of faith be applied not only to theology but to the human situation and to individual experience? Writing this at the decisive moment of a presidential election, the choice between hoping for a lot and settling for much less tends to blur our national purposes and blunt our social perceptions.

Those who hope for a comprehensive structure of social justice may easily become frustrated and leave the job unfinished. Those who are willing to limit expansive social goals, in the interests of getting something rather than nothing, may also become stymied simply because there is no satisfactory short form for human need. How much

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is enough when we are dealing not only with government programs and regulations but with social justice and human rights?

But it is at the level of individual human experience where the theological dilemma has its most intriguing parallel. Generally speaking, we might assume that young people tend to look wide-eyed on the future, whereas mature and older people foreshorten their perspective. But the tension between planning great things and accepting with realism what is only possible has little to do with age or experience.

At every stage of life, we agonize, on the one hand, about our all-inclusive plans, hoping to structure our lives according to some grand blueprint. But, on the other hand, we are ready to accept the more existential realities that actually shape our destiny. The two go together, simultaneously, continually, dialectically-whether we are talking about the history of theology, politics and social action, or the individual experience of the human soul. And whether a little or a lot, we must always be asking how much is enough.

Is this what the Apostle Paul was driving at when he declared: "I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me" (Phil. 4:11-13)?