Faith in the Age of Reason: Navigating the Journey of Modern Theology 📜🧭

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Roger E. Olsen. He's the author of a book called The Journey of Modern Theology From Reconstruction to Deconstruction, and he is emeritus Professor of Christian Theology at the George W. Truett Seminary at Baylor. And so we're going to be talking about theology today. We're going to be talking about what modernity means and sort of the journey the theology is taken through time. And so I'm excited about this one. And Rob, I really appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for being here.

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Speaker 2: It's good to be with you. Thank you yeah.

00:01:05
Speaker 1: Absolutely, talk a little bit about what drew you to this topic. Why did you feel like this book needed to be written?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, this book has a story, so I'll tell it briefly. Stanley Grin's was my friend and a well known evangelical theologian, and in nineteen ninety or nineteen ninety one he contacted me. We were friends, and he said, I'd like you to write a chapter or two for a book I'm editing friends of Varsity Press, called Twentieth Century Theology. And I hadn't written anything in book form before that. I'd written some articles and chapters for books, but never written a book. And I said to him, well, why don't you and I just write it together. We'll co author it. And he jumped for that idea right away, So over the next year or two we wrote Twentieth Century Theology, which caught on and was a textbook used by many professors and colleges, universities and seminaries, and won an award. I can't remember what award it was right now, but it was a pretty big deal at the time. And stan died in his sleep in two thousand and five at the age of fifty five, and after that the publisher into Varsity Press, came to me and said, we'd like a revision of twentieth century theology, and we'd like you, that is, me, to write it, and we'd like you to add some chapters, especially nineteenth century theology. So we'll give it a new name. And they asked me to come up with the name. Well, I've always been interested in modern contemporary theology. I taught that subject at Bethel College in Minnesota, and I taught it at Truett Seminary at Baylor University in Texas, and in my PhD program at Rice University, I specialized or focused on modern theology, both Protestant and Catholic. So I said, I'll be happy to and I wrote the book. I incorporated a lot of twentieth century theology into it, but I rewrite the whole book, the twentieth Century Theology book. I completely rewrote it, so it's not like it's just in the book. But I started with twentieth century theology and then rewrote it and added many chapters, and it got longer and longer as I was writing it, and I remember saying to the publisher, maybe this should be two volumes, one on nineteenth century theology and one on twentieth and they said, no, we're not afraid of big books. I said, well, how big can it be? And they said how big do you want it to be? They said, well, I just want to finish it. So I finished it and it's seven hundred and some pages long, which I'm sure does has not helped its sales at all.

00:03:40
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it so out of it and I've.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: Never been had it to I've never had an interview about it, So thank you for doing this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no problem. I you know, part of what I try to do on the podcast is sort of bring academic theology and make it more accessible for folks. And so, you know, we won't get through all seven hundred pages of your book today, but I think it's important that folks really understand why they might go out and pick up a seven underd page book. And I think what you've done is you've traced the major trends through theology, you know, after and we can talk a little bit about this, but modernity starts. You trace it all the way through really to post modernity. So maybe we could start with what are the major periods? Am I understanding? You right, like you do pre modern modernity and then postmodernity you know as those major categories. But what are some of the characteristics maybe at the beginning of modernity that are starting to drive and influence theology.

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Speaker 2: So the big change with the beginning of modernity from what went before, from pre modernity is the idea, a couple of ideas. One is that only what can be proven can be counted as knowledge. We call that. The Enlightenment began with a philosopher by the name of Renet Decard who was actually a Christian, but wanted to know what could he know for sure without any doubt? And that was, of course, I think, therefore I am his own existence. And then he went on to build on that, and he actually thought he could prove the existence of God from his own existence and so forth. And so I wrestle with that throughout the book. What is knowledge? And is knowledge more or something else than can be proven in modern secular terms, And of course my answer is no. The second theme of the beginning of modernity is you know that science is the arbiter of truth, and that anything that science doesn't prove and know really can't count as knowledge. So it's kind of up at the other side of the same theme knowledge proof, what counts as knowledge and so forth, And science is a major player in that. But then philosophy comes alongside that, and philosophers like Hegel and others in the nineteenth century say, well, no, there are other ways of knowing than just through science. So I take the idea of modernity, and throughout the book talk about how Christian theologians have responded to all the major emphasis of modernity. How do theologians answer the issues of modernity? And some have accommodated to it, and some have rejected it entirely, And so there's a lot of variety, a lot of diversity in Christian theological responses. Now, why should someone buy and read the book well to understand their world, to understand themselves in their world. We're all affected by modernity. We can't escape it. Even Christians really can't escape it. I know some have tried by going off and living in an intentional community apart from the rest of the world. I have friends who've tried that, but I notice when I go out to their commune, they're even influenced by modernity by rejecting it, And so that's really the theme of the book is theological responses to the challenges of modernity. And I start the book with science and philosophy, what we call the Enlightenment, beginning in the late sixteen hundreds through the seventeen hundreds, and then I jump into what we call liberal theologies with Fridrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology, or modern liberal theology at least, and a German theologian. Most people have never heard of him, but he just completely revolutionized theology by basing it on human experience rather than on divinely given revelation. And so I talk about various liberal theologians, and then I talk about the opposite, orthodox theologians and even the precursors of fundamentalism, evangelical theologians, especially the Princeton School of theology. Then I talk about mediating theologians who try to discover a via media, a way between accommodating to modernity and rejecting modernity. And that was something in the book I was really proud of, because most books of this kind don't talk about these people. American by the name of Horace Bushnell, who was very important. What I would say, you know, among the top five American theologians of all time, although he's been largely forgotten unfortunately, but his influence is trickled down. So I just mentioned they're my trickle down theory of theology. That people are affected by theologians they've never heard of. So that's something that the book does. This tells them how that's true. And then I talk about bart and Boltmann and Nieber and kind of lump them as dialectical or charigmatic theologies. They really don't fit together very well, but some have called them all neo orthodox theologians. Definitely not liberal in the way that the nineteenth century liberal theologists were liberal, but at least, you know, I certainly think Rudolph Boltman counts as a liberal theologian, but very much different from the optimistic nineteenth century theologians. And then I talk about chastened liberal theologians who accommodate to modernity but with a more pessimistic view of the world and of history, Paul Tillik and theologians. And then I go on to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gets his own chapter. I think he's the only one who gets his own chapter in the h and then some theologians who look to the future with hope, and those who would be Jurgen Moltmen and Wolfhart Pannenberg who I studied with in Germany and I knew Jurgen Moltmann, and then liberation theologians, and then Catholic theologians Karl Rauner, Hans Kohn, Hans orzvon Baltazzar, and then evangelical theology. And that's just one chapter, but I talk about the main prototypes, the movers and shakers of mid twentieth century of evangelical theology, people like Carl Henry of course, yeah, and then postmodern theologians Stanley Howard Wass and John Caputo deconstructions.

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Speaker 1: So that's the book talk a little bit about because that I think what I want people to sort of walk away from from that overview is these are all the theologians that you would study in seminary in you know, like I did an MD of another Master's Scream, then a PhD. And so I've read most of these, I would say, Bushnell, I had not read until I read your book, so I picked up some of this stuff afterward. But yeah, you're right, he'd been kind of lost from history, but you can see how he's sort of weaving things through. But I think it's just important for people to understand these are sort of the markers for theologies you go through. These were some of the people who wrote the may your works of theology that began to shape the understanding of the theological world and or provide thlash points for other theologians to react against. And so these are really people who are part of the conversation. What I want to circle back to just a couple of terms. When people hear liberal nowadays, they usually hear left, you know, or opposite of conservative liberal in the Schleiermachian sense, and the way you're using it here is slightly different.

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Speaker 2: Yes, yes, So I also wrote a book more recently called Against Liberal Theology, in which I try to explain that liberal theology is a tradition. Now in that book Against Liberal Theology, I focus on American liberal theology, not European. So it really began in Europe with Schleiermacher and Dietrich Ritzel in Germany. But in America, liberal theology is a tradition that goes back to the late nineteenth century. Bushnell is sometimes considered the American father of liberal theology. But I really try to explain that's not really accurate. He believed in the supernatural, he believed in miracles, he believed in the duty of Jesus Christ. But he's lumped into liberal theology sometimes because he had a different view of the atonement than traditional evangelical theology. But he didn't accommodate to modernity. I don't think anyway, certainly not in the way liberal theologists do. So that's the definition of liberal theology is theology that begins with modernity and says, now, what can we believe? What can we still believe in light of the acids of modernity.

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Speaker 1: So it'd be fair to say to what they're doing is they're saying, Okay, here's this modern framework we've developed in a set of criteria that's going to determine what can and cannot be proven, and thus what we can and cannot really act on and order our lives by. And that then narrows. You would look at in scripture and say, no, no, Scripture is the final authority for life and faith. We can look at all of this and have a gauge for what we understand. They're just sort of narrowing that down. Although it's not through a selection of texts per se that happens, but it's really through this framework and great a philosophy, if you will, a world view whatever we want to call that, that is in and of itself narrowing. Am I correct on that?

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Speaker 2: Yes? The definition given by a Yale University theologian in Claude Welch was the liberal theology is maximal accommodation to modernity.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

00:13:39
Speaker 2: The theologian liberal is a theologian who says we can no longer believe in miracles, for example, at least not in the way that medieval theology did previously did so they redefine everything. So they still talk about Jesus Christ as a revelation of God, might even talk about him as God in some sense, but not in the traditional sense of the incarnation or the two natures of Jesus Christ. They reject classical Christology, but still try to hold on to Jesus Christ as someone unique and special, but onto logically only a man, so not God in substance. He was just a man, but he was a unique man. The spirit killed man something like that.

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Speaker 1: And to understand how they do that. My understanding of Schleiermacher is that he would that's where he focused on personal experience, So he's losing all the you know, Like, let's just take Christ, for instance. We would believe today that he is God and man. But if you jet Us in the god part and you still want to hold onto Jesus, you've got to have something more than just some guy. And so Schleiermacher said, no, it's the sort of way that this idea or a notion of Jesus animates within me and change, but it's not an ontological reality out there that I can touch and feel. Is that a fair snippet of Schlierrockers.

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Speaker 2: I think Schleiermacher was very inconsistent. He was very confused.

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Speaker 1: He's hard to read. I know that he.

00:15:17
Speaker 2: Sure was, and he was struggling. He was struggling to be both to have one foot in modernity as it was developing in Germany and Berlin in his time in the early eighteen hundreds, he was part of what was called the Romantic movement, which was saying, look, the Enlightenment has been too focused on reason. We need to bring emotion back into knowledge, so we can call some things knowledge that are based on universal human feeling. For example, gotcha okay? He would say of Jesus Christ that he was the most self sorry, the most God conscious man that ever. I see. Ye, God consciousness was perfect and ours is not, but it can be elevated through the Church and its communion with the living Christ. But he did not believe in the incarnation, the pre existence of Jesus as the son of God in heaven or anything like that. You catch it?

00:16:19
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, I was going to say, you catch a similar tone in some of the folks who today are sort of popular in the public sphere. I'm thinking somebody like a Jordan Peterson, let's say, who for a long time I think was talking and I haven't listened to him in a while. But he would espouse the value of religion, but he espoused it from the perspective that it did good things for society, that it gave people a purpose and a meaning, not as an ontological reality. Like he wouldn't affirm that God was real or something like that. He would just kind of say, no, it orients you, and in that orientation you see goodness. It's kind of a similar feel to it.

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Speaker 2: Social fire Maker was very much influenced by some philosophers of his time, and so is Jordan Peterson. He's influenced by Carl Jung j U n g. Yeah, with psychologists who us the student of Freud's but then broke away from Freud. And Jordan Peterson, like Carl Jung, is really big on archetypes. Yes, that our lives are shaped by archetypes and we need to find the right archetypes and live by them the right way. And for him, I think Jesus is the ultimate archetype.

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Speaker 1: Archetype. Yeah, very good. That's helpful. With liberal theology, I think that makes good sense. When we kind of move down your list here, you've got you know, conservative Protestant theology, I think we kind of understand what that is. That would be a theology in contra addiction to the liberal theology we just described that is really holding on to that old orthodoxy. That is there anything more really to be you want to add there?

00:18:00
Speaker 2: I could say so much more about it. So in that chapter I choose to jump into conservative theology with Charles Hodge, who was the principle I sink this title of Princeton Seminary for many many years and famously said at the fiftieth year celebration of his being the leader of the seminary, he said something I'm paraphrasing. I'm proud to say that during my fifty years leading this seminary, there has been no new thought here and somber quote after what we call Protestant orthodoxy. Not necessarily Luther and Calvin, they were the Reformers, but what happened after Luther and Calvin a strong emphasis on rational Christianity, beginning with the Bible and deriving from it principles that can be directly rationally fleshed out in doctrines and dogmas of the faith that need to be held on. So a very confessional, very conservative orthodox emphasis, including the inerrancy of the Bible, that became a standard for many conservative evangelicals, especially in the Reform tradition, not only but especially and they were Hodgen after him, Warfield at Princeton.

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Speaker 1: Were right right. So when we get to these mediating theologians after that, because I mean, when you say like that, when you say you're deeply rooted in rationality, there's part of me that says, Wow, that seems like it's great, but also problematic. You know, like you can see, it go both ways depending on how that rationality works itself out. So the mediating theologians trying to push retain a sufficient amount of rationality that things can make sense, but also release this open and say, but we do know God through experience, we do under you know there is something more here than just our intellectual rational way of understanding the world.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, let me back up to Hodge. So Hodge famously said that he was in favor of rationality, but not rationalism, okay, whereas he thought that the Enlightenment and liberal theology had fallen into a rationalism that was alien toodox and living Christianity that had killed Christianity. But by rationality he meant we are completely right and justified in beginning with the Bible as our foundation. Just like scientists start with nature. We start with the Bible and derive from it all these principles and truths, but very very big doctrines being rational from there on. In other words, they have to cohere. Yes, no coherence, and there's a tendency there to minimize mystery. Though I wouldn't say Dodge were filled to ever denied mystery in the faith, but they were uncomfortable with mystery, trying to resolve paradoxes, you know, and I don't think they would say they were trying to. I think they were saying the Bible does.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

00:21:14
Speaker 2: So here's how I describe it for them, as appears to me anyway. The Bible was for them a not yet systematized systematic theology.

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Speaker 1: I like that, Yeah, it kind of and it really does kind of make sense. I mean, I think, you know, I came up more biblical studies than theology, and so you do see the biblical theology movement doing some interesting things with this, almost I wouldn't say desystematizing the Bible, but moving outside the boundaries of the normal systematic theology categories to develop coherent understandings of these different themes within the scriptures. And it just strikes me that that's part of the way it has to cohere. But it all so creates than these tensions because those now we have to ask ourselves, well, how does this theme with this theme, you know, how does all how do all these puzzle pieces go together?

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Speaker 2: Right? Are there missing pieces to.

00:22:10
Speaker 1: The are they missing pieces?

00:22:12
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:22:14
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah.

00:22:15
Speaker 2: So here's how I view that. It's important to talk about this because a lot of conservative evangelical theology still considers Hodge the norm yes theology, and he's he's been used for one hundred and more years at the Conservative Seminary, says the main textbook, and so forth. I think it was David Wells at Gordon Conwell's Seminary who wrote an article in Christianity Day called the stout and persistent Theology of Charles Hodge. And so this then causes some reactions among evangelical theologians who are more leaning into an experiential kind of Christianity, like my friend Stan Gren's. He was really big on spirituality being part of theology and that there are mysteries and so forth, and so on. Well, we don't have to flesh it all out in detail, but I think that's the essence of what I treat as conservative orthodox theology as the reaction to liberal theology in the labeenth century.

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Speaker 1: And would you say that as a reaction right When you say that, it feels to me like some of this really is as a reaction that you almost have You're going to have difficulty within a given time period of moving in one direction or another because you've got this sort of powerful influence of a theology you disagree with and that you find things wrong with on the one hand, and you have to sort of create a boundary and stick to it so that you're not eking into their what you would consider their bad method.

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Speaker 2: And almost always also overreacting to some degree.

00:23:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, pendulum swing the other way.

00:23:58
Speaker 2: The way you understand philosophy and theology, but I think you could apply this to psychology and others. To other disciplines is a series of pendulum swings. Yes, and every important thinker is reacting to something. Nobody sits down and says, I'm just going to write a book for no reason, writing a book for a reason. I wrote this book and the one before at twentieth Century Theology, because I had tried many textbooks of modern theology and didn't like any of them, and so that I got to write my own. And I think that's the case of my books, is having used other textbooks and so. But I'm also in this book reacting to you know, what I would consider mostly liberal treatments of modern theology that exclude evangelical theology, orthodox theology and so on. I found that most of them said almost nothing about the Princeton theologians, Hodge, for example, Ordolical theologians. It was all just considered, Yeah, they're not worth studying, you know, they didn't contribute anything. So I wrote the book and reaction to that. But you brought up the mediating theologians, and they were reacting to Schleiermacher, but also at the same time saying he wasn't completely wrong. He had some good things to say.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: Right.

00:25:21
Speaker 2: An example would be for Bushnell, experience enters into theology. We can't just exclude spirituality from theology. And he had his own dramatic conversion experience that came out of fighting the Bible and the British philosopher and poet Coleridge. And so I bring that out in there. How each of these theologians is influenced by somebody before them or alongside them. And so the mediating theologians I like because and I'm not saying I'm one, but they're trying to say, well, can we bridge this gap between modernity and liberal theology on the one hand, and orthodoxy in the Protestant scholastic kind of way. Right, Princeton theologians, Hodge and bush Nell had this awful relationship of reviewing each other's books and tearing them up in their reviews. And that's sad, I think, because bush Nell has some really good things to say, but Hodge went after it in a really harsh way for not being like him.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, more more conservative, He's trying to be a little bit more progressive. The neo orthodox theologians are probably the ones I'm most familiar with, just largely because of Carl Bart, but also Ryan Hold, Nieber, and so talk a little bit about I know, you kind of lump them together Bart, Boltman and Neber, and I actually didn't find that odd. I think it it made some sense to me having read all three. I know they had their different emphasis and you know, different areas, but all three are doing something that is fairly, in my mind, quasi similar, and so I kind of appreciated the grouping. But talk a little bit about that chapter and maybe this time period.

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Speaker 2: So in the period after World War One, it was hard to be optimistic in Europe with the liberal theologians. Now, it wasn't until after World War Two that that pessimism really hit in America. But after World War One, these European theologians, and after World War Two, especially American theologians, discovered Soren Kirkigor, the melancholy Dane father of existentialist philosophy. And you know, it just irks me when I hear people talk about him as a philosopher because he was a theologian. He had a doctor in Koreean theology, and he taught theology. He was more of a theologian than a philosopher, But somehow they choose to call him and categorize him as a philosopher. But Soor and Kirkugor influenced all three of them, and that's what they have in common. That is, Boltmannieber, and Bart. I should have thrown in Abel Brunner, a Swiss theologian who I really admire and like. They're all somewhat pessimistic about human the human condition, contrast to liberal theology, which was very optimistic. They all see history as a series of tragedies, and they don't see it as going uphill toward the Kingdom of God dawning on ear if before Jesus even returns, which liberal theologians didn't even believe in the return of Jesus. Certainly Bart did Brunner. Did you know, the one who doesn't really fit very well is Boltmant. But they started out. Bart and Boltman started out as i think co editors of a theological journal and were on friendly terms until Boltman came out with his Well, it was an essay that he wrote got included in a book of essays denying the Resurrection, denying miracles. Now he didn't say he denied the resurrection. He said that he de mythologized the resurrection. Is that it happened but in the hearts and minds of the disciples, not in outer history. Right, So if someone had been there, you know, and investigating it, they wouldn't have found an empty tomb. They would have found a tomb with the body of Jesus in it. And yet the message of Jesus lived on and came alive in the early Disciples. Bart was horrified by that. So at the beginning in the early twenties and throughout much of the thirties, these three had things in common that causes us to kind of lump them together as dialectical theologians, dialectically coming from Kirkigre. And yet even Nieber thought that Bart was too conservative knew Neiber was really an ephicist more than he was a theologian, so he could get away with not telling what he thought about the resurrection for example.

00:30:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, Bart really couldn't get by with that.

00:30:13
Speaker 2: I mean.

00:30:15
Speaker 1: When I read those chapters where I think I resonated most with the commonalities would have been in some of Bart's lesser known works, you know, his books on prayer, divine freedom, those kind of things, and then you read them alongside Boltmann, who you know obviously is demathologizing. Process is problematic in my mind, but you do see some commonalities in the way they're approaching things, even though they come to radically different conclusions. Nieberd, You're right, he would have been the one. The Christian realism aspect, I think is what really separates for me, at least Neiber from Micah Boltmann. I just found that to be sort of fascinating. I mean read back through those chapters, so, yeah, fantastic stuff.

00:31:03
Speaker 2: And then you've got are still alive and well, I mean nieber yes, it's still brought up all the time in all by people that are talking about Obama. For example, when Obama was president, someone asked me his favorite theologian was and I think it was Obama who said Nieber Neieber.

00:31:21
Speaker 1: I believe that's right.

00:31:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Neiber had a huge influence on Martin Luther King.

00:31:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and Stanley howiwas keeps Nebro alive in a lot of ways. I know, you reference him and the postmodern theologians, but he he draws on Nebro a good bit, which makes sense because he's a theological ethicist, and so he you know.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: Ended up saying that Nieber was not a Christian, which I thought was terrible.

00:31:47
Speaker 1: But that's that right. I didn't see that very interesting. Why I want to get into I want to skip over the Chase and the liberal theologies just for a second, because I want to go to Bonnhoeffer. So Bard and Bonheffer were relative contemporaries. You know, they were both involved with Barman Declaration. They're both you know, sort of impacted pretty deeply by World War Two, and they had those connections. And so I'm wondering Number one, I found it interesting that he got his own chapter, and I'm wondering how you saw his experience in World War two, which was different than any of the I mean, Bart went back up to Switzerland. You know, he's not really in the throes of World War Two. Bonhoeffer is, And so I'm wondering if that how you felt like that conditioned his theology.

00:32:35
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I don't know that Bonheffer would even be remembered, at least in the way he is if he hadn't been killed by the Nazis right right at the end of World War two. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners or watchers have heard the story of how he participated on the periphery of a plot to kill Hitler. Now there's still some controversy about that, but I'm convinced that he did participate in it. And so the fact that he ended up dying in a concentration camp, being hanged by the Gestapo and so forth, he just makes him seem like a martyr, which he was. But then they discovered his theology, you know, backwards, because of that. Right after World War Two, one of bon Hoffer's disciples, a man by the name of Everhart Beitka, wrote a biography and translated into English Bonhoeffer's writings, and so he became very famous through Baita. I think that his awareness of Hitler and the Nazi Party as being idolatrous in the nineteen thirties leading up to World War Two, which he spent a lot of the war in prison, so he didn't really experience it accept indirectly, but you know, he felt that this was an idolatrous religion, and there was a group of people called German Christians, they called themselves German Christians who viewed Hitler and the Nazi Party as a new revelation of God. Well, he stood apart from that and helped form the Confessing Church and helped write the Barman Declaration, which is against all of that. And I think that did influence his theology just as it did Bart's theology in many ways. And they were shocked, just absolutely shocked by the German Christians and their attitude toward Hitler and the Nazi Party, and it just convinced them that humans are prone to evil, and you know, that we are not naturally innately good or something like that like the liberal theologians thought. So I'm most familiar with bon Hoffer through his letters and papers from prison and his book Ethics, which are early collections of essays that he wrote, and he would have I don't see him ever having written a systematic theology, so we kind of have to imagine what his theology might have been, like, yeah, yeah, that's about it.

00:35:02
Speaker 1: Okay, well, let's circle back around to at least process theology. Paul Tilliche is somebody that comes up an awful lot when I'm reading, you know, depending on what I'm reading, you hear a lot about Paul Tillage, And I would just say this is sort of an aside for everybody who's listening. Part of the reason this book, I think is so helpful is because it does contextualize these authors, so that as you're reading other things and you see these folks sort of cited some of them make their way into more popular works as well, you have a handle for them. You understand where these people are coming from, and you can sort of re situate some of the quotes maybe that are coming out of their theology, and you have this general idea, maybe even a skepticism or at least a realism, about what this person might actually be saying and whether or not you really are prepared to believe it. And so as we get into sort of process theology, Paul Tilliche, I know, those aren't exactly the same. But process theology seems to me to have made sort of like we talked about with Bushnell. It's influencing things without ever being talked about in my mind. Do you have that same sort of impression or am I an off base there?

00:36:15
Speaker 2: Well, they're talked about very much in theological circles. There's a worldwide Tillic professional Society, the society of theologians all over the world who continue to read and study and talk about Tillic, and so you know, in those kind of ivory tower situations, there's still a lot of interest in Tillic. He is one of the most difficult theologians to read, almost more than any other, I think, and I had to spend a lot of time over the years reading Tillic and books about Tillic and so forth really get a handle on him. But what I say about Tillic is he was trying to deliteralize Christianity and that he was very dependent on Hegel, a German philosopher of one hundred years before him. And I'm right now in the middle of studying Hegel again and trying to get a grasp on Hegel because he had more of an influence than people know. And Tillick wanted to deliteralize, which is kind of like demathologize. So he and bolten were were kind of twins in a way. But Boltman was a New Testament scholar, not a systematic theologian. Tillick was a systematic theologian. But they came out with almost the same conclusions about the resurrection. For example, Tilloic also believe that the resurrection did not happen, but it happens in the believer's heart when they come to realize that the message of Jesus, which was what he called new being, which was the realization that you are accepted, is the essence of Christianity. It's so history doesn't matter to Tillic or Boltman either one. In fact, Tillick said, if it should turn out we found out that Jesus never existed, it wouldn't change the essence of Christianity at all.

00:38:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating to think that through when you read First Corinthians fifteen, for instance, I mean it, they have to dismiss that text. And I don't know that I've ever studied Boltlant enough Ortilic enough to understand what they would do with a passage like that. You know, if Christ was not resurrected, our faith is in vain. That passage there in First Corinthians fifteen. You really have to ignore an awful lot of basic historical reference and hey, this actually happened, sort of statements even within an early New Testament letter like First Corinthians. To get to that point, I don't fully grasp how they get there.

00:38:45
Speaker 2: Well by beginning with the naturalism of modernity. So they're liberal in that sense that they begin I see belief that nature is all there really is except spirit, but that nature is a closed causal nexus and there's no interrupting it. And that includes God. It's not so much that he can't, but he doesn't interfere with the workings of nature. Because if we believe that, they said, then science would be no use to us, because we're constantly being medieval in our thinking about the world and how it works, and we'd be seeing angels pushing planets around and things like that. So in order to go all the way with science, but to hold on to what they thought was the essence of Christianity, they had to reduce Christianity to a subjective set of experiences more than beliefs. But then you're up by the three volume systematic theology, right.

00:39:47
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean those are interesting questions. I think even now, you know, how do we navigate the I'm an Old Testament guy, so you know you you do when you get into those early chapters of Genesis, You're trying to sort of navigate, Look, what's theologically important here, you know, and how do we not get lost in the tedium of discussing how this exactly connects to history, but really get a theological export out of it. But then you also don't want to give up on the history, and so there is a bit of a tension there that we always deal with. I think, just you know, ripping it out and saying, ah, we don't care about history anymore. It's all literary and it's just about this book and the spirit of Christianity. I gotta say it means that would mean nothing to me.

00:40:39
Speaker 2: I couldn't believe in supernatural events, he couldn't believe in miracles. Yeah, to deny the resurrection, but he held on to the crucifixion as absolutely essential, as did Boltman, and they both said, the cross, the crucifixion is God's way of reconciling humanity to himself. But both of them had disciples who said, no, no, no, no, come on, you're being inconsistent. There go the rest of the way. God does not act in history. He only acts in our inner lives, in our psychology, our spiritual experiences, not in history. And they both were so appalled by it, And Tillock's widow wrote a biography of Tillock after he died, saying that he was not an atheist, but the Death of God theologians claimed him as their mentor when they told him that, it sent him into a downward spiral that he died from just a few days later. So she actually blamed the Death of God Theologians the radical of the sixties, for killing him because he didn't think he was an atheist.

00:41:54
Speaker 1: He might have been, well, we're obviously not going to get through all of this, but I think, for one, I think it would be awesome at some point to hear your experience with your moment. Your in moltment is probably one of my favorite theologians to read. Theology of Hope is one of my favorite books. I'm actually using Source of Life. I've got it sitting over here off camera on the side of my desk, and so, uh, it is the Source of Life. It's on the Holy Spirit, yes, ok yeah, the titles of the Source of Life.

00:42:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, called the Spirit of Life too. But anyway, go ahead, Okay, But.

00:42:38
Speaker 1: I'm wondering you sort of to sort of fold this in as we move toward the end of modernity and go into postmodernity, and you've got the post liberal theologians in there, Stanley how Us in there. You know, John Camputo and deconstruction talk a little bit about the assumptions that begin to change with postmodernity. And then maybe let's just clarify post liberal as well. I know there are post liberal political movements, and so those two just want to talk through that transition and then we'll go on from there.

00:43:14
Speaker 2: So I had to kind of cram these two. Stanley Howard wasass as a post liberal and John Caputo as a deconstructionist into one chapter. Yeah, probably deserve their separate chapters. But they have some things in common, and that is, you know, breathing in the atmosphere of a post modern culture, and postmodernity is a hard to define thing, you know, just so much diversity in it. But the essence I think of postmodernity is a reaction against the sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment and of modernity and opening up the realm of possibilities to things that modernity supposedly doesn't allow. So Stanley howerwass of course, Time magazine labeled him America's most influential or the best theologian when he heard said best is not a theological category.

00:44:16
Speaker 1: He sure is fun to listen to. I got to give him that.

00:44:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, Meyer, Stanley, We've got a lot in common. So Stanley is really trying to recapture what he what he sees as or as authentic Christianity. For for him, it is non violence. He's on the ethical side. He is an ethicist, like like a Nieber, not a systematic theologian. But he thinks that especially American Christianity, has really distorted true Christianity with things like celebrating war and so forth. So you know, he's he's a postliberal. That means he may have been liberal at one time, but he chose not not to be anymore. And it's hard, it's hard to define post liberalism. I try it in my chapter. Yeah, John Caputo is really different. Also an ethicist, but a philosopher who became a theologian on his own, you know, without really studying theology, and uh, a deconstructionist, which is kind of a radical form of postmodernity, uh, where he says that Christianity, what it really is, is all about deconstructing oppressive regimes of knowledge, and that we should as Christians be deconstructing, undoing, looking deep within and undoing opening up totalitarian or the other words, escaping me right now. But anyway, claims that are violent are the violence.

00:45:58
Speaker 1: What you like? And I'm just had this little itch in my head for a while, and so I'll ask you, but would you like in liberation theology to that deconstruction. I know, deconstruction focuses more on the knowledge aspect, liberation more on the political aspect. But they seem to have such a you know, a common trend line.

00:46:18
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't remember that I said this in the book, but I did tell my students later as I taught the book that liberation theology really was the first postmodern theology, because they said, all the post all the liberation theologians agree that there is no such thing as purely objective knowing that your social location always influences your thinking. And then they go on to say, you know, and that wealth and power and privilege corrupts your thinking, and that there is a sense in which only the oppressed can really see reality as it really is. And they're talking about social reality, not physically, and so that really does a way for them with the objectivity of the enlightenment and of knowing objectively and proof and so forth, and so yes, they're deconstruction ists very much in that sense.

00:47:17
Speaker 1: Let's end with just sort of giving us a little bit of a glimpse into evangelical theology, probably the sort of theology that both you and I would most readily ascribe to. You know, what were we mean when we say evangelical theology? And why is it important?

00:47:36
Speaker 2: Oh that's a big question when someone asks me if I'm an evangelical and my automatic response is how long do you have to listen?

00:47:44
Speaker 1: Yeah? I hear you.

00:47:48
Speaker 2: So I trace evangelical theology. I mean I could trace it back to the Bible, of course, but what we call evangelical theology in the West today, I trace back to Edwards and Wesley, who are both born in the same year seventeen oh three, and the Great Awakening and the combination of Orthodox Christian belief with revivalism and inner experience and life changing experience conversion, and really, in a sense in recent times, Billy Graham is sort of the standard of evangelicalism in the world. Actually, now I know that the media is using the word evangelical in political ways, I do not ever use it in that way. To me, vangelicalism is not political. It's not uniquely American. It's a worldwide theological and spiritual movement that emphasizes the inspiration and authority of the Bible, conversion as an interchange that can only be wrought by the Holy Spirit Orthodox Christianity. My colleague at Baylor, David Bebington, said there are four marks of evangelicalism. Bible centered or Biblicist, conversionist activist that is changing the world through evangelism and social transformation, and Crucis centrism, and emphasis on the Cross. You know, I think that's changing on the ground, you know, among people who call themselves evangelicals in America to a large extent today, I don't see the Cross being emphasized as it always was among in the past. But I add a fifth, and that is Orthodox belief. So I don't think you can be really evangelical and reject the trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, salvation by grace alone not works, and maybe two or three other wholes of traditional Orthodox Christian belief that are shared by Christians of all denominations in the past. Anyway, So I'm pretty I have a pretty broad definition of evangelical. It's trans denominational. No denomination owns it, No type of theology like Reformed or our Minion owns it. It's trans denominational. It's big, it's broad, but it's not anything and everything. If it were, it'd be nothing.

00:50:23
Speaker 1: Would you say? Those major doctrinal points are fairly well captured in the Nicene Creed, yes, yeah.

00:50:30
Speaker 2: And in the National Association of Evangelical Statement of Faith in the Sun Covenant and certain statements that have been put forward. But yeah, ultimately in the Nicene Creed, which doesn't say everything. And I think we need to add on to that the idea that you can only be a real Christian by being converted, that there is no such thing as simply growing up fully Christian from birth on. Understood, true Christian can always say, even if they can't describe it, I accepted Christ. I made a decision.

00:51:10
Speaker 1: Gotcha.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: Now there are some orthodox Christians who don't believe that and still call themselves evangelical that I have problems with them, understood. I want to name names. No, okay, I'm talking about people who really emphasize infant baptism as conversion baptismal region. Yeah. I think if you believe in baptismal regeneration, you cannot really be an evangelical Christian.

00:51:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's and it's a sacramental and normally an odd way of conferring grace. That is, would you say, sort of reverses the normal relationship between grace and faith.

00:51:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, of course, as a Baptist and Anabaptist, that is what I think. Now most people don't know that, but I have to retirement. I joined a Mennonite, an evangelical Mennonite church.

00:52:09
Speaker 1: Very good, very good, Well, Roger, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you just walking us through a lot of this, and I know, yeah, and for listeners, I really do think this is important. I mean, I wouldn't have done it. This isn't just like hey, I needed another episode. I think these things are crucial because they do influence even contemporary writers. You'll watch contemporary writers cite some of these people, and I mean even for me, like Hans ersp On von Baltazar, right, I have seen him sighted, I've read a little bit of his stuff, but this book really helps me to situate him where he should be and to understand with a little bit more depth how to place him. And so I think it's a really helpful book. It might not be one that you want to sit down and read all the way through just in one sitting, but I have it, and obviously I read a bunch of it and I keep it around now for reference. So it's really helpful. And just so appreciate the work you put into it, which had to have been yeah, a long It had to have taken you a long time to write this, brother, So.

00:53:19
Speaker 2: Actually I wrote it in four months.

00:53:21
Speaker 1: Four months. Wow, that's impressive.

00:53:24
Speaker 2: I was on sabbatical and I knew I only had four months to It's.

00:53:30
Speaker 1: Almost not fair on sabbatical though. Yeah, well, very good, Roger, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate you. Welcome and yeah, and thanks everybody for listening. We will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care everyone. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to life audio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.