While I do not fully agree with Dr. R.C. Sproul, this entry is entirely indebted to his lectures on contemporary theology.
I am doing a series on the questions that haunt progressive Christianity. Read this introduction.
In classical orthodoxy, or classical Christianity as some may call it, historical events of the Bible happened. More importantly, these Biblical stories or events are not only true, but they have profound significance upon our lives. The problem one faces, of course, is the problem in exegesis, the problem of how one can, in actuality, find the true meaning of a text. For example, an American and SE Asian will have a different interpretation of John 3:16; for an American “eternal life” means live forever in some kind of afterlife. For a SE Asian eternal life is exactly what they are trying to defeat. A SE Asian will see eternal life as a never-ending cycle of rebirth, not a constant state of heaven. Therefore, clearly, just reading the text is not enough to form a correct conclusion about it.
I first started thinking of this problem when I read Death of an Author by Roland Barthes as an undergrad. Barthes makes the point that as soon as someone writes down a message, then he or she, as the author, becomes totally irrelevant because the reader’s perspective takes over. For example, if I write about a tree, you may come along and envision a different kind of tree than I envisioned. The “tree” could be a minor detail of the story, or it could be a major one as my example of SE Asia. Classical orthodox christians, of course, believe this problem can be overcome through rigorous study, and that exegesis is possible. Historical criticism argues that historical knowledge about the author and his or her time is necessary for understanding a text, so the “death” of the author is mere nonsense. And I agree that historical criticism is important. Yet at the end of the day, I still read the Bible as a 20 something white female southern American. I can never read the text outside of the confines of my own mind. And I can never approach the Bible as a blank tablet.
The interesting part about neoorthodoxy (meaning, new orthodoxy) is that exegesis is not only not possible, but it is also unnecessary and a hinderance to spirituality (or this is true of a lot of neoorthodox theologians). We don’t need a blank tablet. We need baggage. We need to approach the Bible with presuppositions. This is what a contemporary theologian named Rudolph Bultmann taught, in a rough summary.
I will now summarize R.C. Sproul’s lecture on Bultmann.
Instead of approaching the text and asking questions, Bultmann would say, we need to approach the text as an existentialist.
Now existentialism is a loaded word, especially as most existential philosophers (like Kierkegaard) predated existentialism, and some out right denied being existential. So I will stick with a crud summary of Heidegger because Bultmann in essence pulled Heidegger’s philosophy into the church, ironically, because Heidegger was an atheist. But what Bultmann is saying is that, going back to Heidegger’s book Being and Time, man experiences a desperate feeling that he exists, and that he is immortal. And unless we as humankind first acknowledge that desperation, then our religion is approached in a way that is utterly meaningless in our moment today.
Heidegger said that man’s experience in its entirety is bound up in time. We are insecure because we are temporal creatures. We only worry about cancer, for example, because we could die. If we were an immortal, immutable being, we would have no worries. But our existence is a race against the clock. Heidegger refers to being with the German word da-sein meaning to “be there.” See, for Heidegger the word being is not a question of whether we do or do not exist. The question is not “to be or not to be?” But the question is, “where to be?” That is, we are temporal creatures rooted in the spot. We are confined to a location. We are not immutable, omnipresent creatures. This is an existential awareness.
So why is this important to the church?
Kierkegaard (who I mentioned above) criticized what we call rationalists for being content to sit around and speculate about the world but not being involved in the struggle. Rationalists, he felt, are great at pointing out the problems of this ideology or that ideology but never bother to participate in the serious problems of epistemology and existentialism (or whatever the problems are of one’s day and age). To me, this is the modern-day fundamentalists, or in many cases the evangelical. These teachers proclaim, “the Bible has no errors” and “God works all things for good,” but avoid the struggle that comes in places like the killing fields where evil did not turn to good for 2 million people. They may speculate about the world, but they remain detached from it. They will ask, “Is Jesus born a virgin as the Bible claims,” but they are unwilling to entertain the idea that faith could go on if Jesus was not born a virgin.
But a true existentialists doesn’t do that. An existentialists throws himself or herself into the struggle, into the unknown, and as he or she involves himself or herself in the struggle of being in time, he or she experiences the existential terror. This unknown produces fear and anxiety. As R.C. Sproul says, this is not a particular fear. This is a nameless fear. For Heidegger, this is a fear of “non-being.” This is a fear of insignificance, that here we are in between being and non-being and regressing back into non-being. Our being here, there, in the here-in-now is bound up in the race of time.
Says Bultmann, when you get that involved, then you are ready for the New Testament. Then you are ready to meet Jesus.
Says Bultmann, religion meets us in our struggle today. It’s not that the Bible itself is irrelevant, but that the ‘truths’ that a person in the early church gleaned will be different from us in a post-existential era.
And I get it. I really do. But then I also ask. Why isn’t the virgin birth relative? What doesn’t historical events matter to us? Whether these events are true or false, why are we burying the love of history in the grave? If church is a social, feel good club where we proclaim to believe in the existence of higher being who holds us together in time and space, and pat each other on the back that we are not homophobic at the same time, then, perhaps the church is doing good. But I personally want more. I want to see and touch god, and I want the blood to represent Jesus’ wounds. But I get Bultmann, too, because the questions of the past are not necessarily related to the crud of today.
And there you have it. Postmodern Christianity. Living in the here-and-now, not in the then-and-there.
Anyone else have thoughts they could add to this?