The Modern Theologians

An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918

Rachel Muers, David F. Ford, David F. Ford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118834961
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This popular text has been updated to ensure that it continues to provide a current and comprehensive overview of the main Christian theologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

• Each chapter is written by a leading theologian and gives a clear picture of a particular movement, topic or individual.
• New and updated treatments of topics covered in earlier editions, with over half the chapters new to this edition or revised by new authors.
• New section singling out six classic theologians of the twentieth century.
• Expanded treatment of the natural sciences, gender, Roman Catholic theology since Vatican II, and African, Asian and Evangelical theologies.
• Completely new chapters on spirituality, pastoral theology, philosophical theology, postcolonial biblical interpretation, Pentecostal theology, Islam and Christian theology, Buddhism and Christian theology, and theology and film.
• As in previous editions, the text opens with a full introduction to modern theology.
• Epilogue discussing the present situation and prospects of Christian theology in the twenty-first century.

Part 1

Classics of the Twentieth Century

World War I (1914–18) brought about a major crisis in European culture and society. This was the context for Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans and the explosion of dialectical theology, followed by Barth’s attempt to rethink the whole enterprise of modern theology. Daniel Hardy describes Barth’s development and the theology of his massive Church Dogmatics, traces the variety of responses by other theologians, and addresses probing questions to him.

Barth is an unquestionable name on any list of twentieth-century classics. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s lifetime was less than half that of Barth, and for nearly twelve of his thirty-nine years he was caught up in resistance to the Nazis and did his theology piecemeal outside the university. Yet the publication of seventeen volumes of his collected works has shown the scale of his achievement. Wayne Whitson Floyd (editor of the English edition) shows not only why Bonhoeffer merits classic status, but also his significance for the present century.

Paul Tillich, after his exile from Hitler’s Germany, became perhaps the most celebrated theologian in post-World War II USA. David Kelsey describes Tillich’s lifelong concern for Christianity and culture, and his method of flexibly, openly, and creatively correlating the two. His central achievement is his three-volume Systematic Theology, the conceptual coherence and main content of which is laid out by Kelsey. Tillich’s reputation suffered something of an eclipse after his death, but his work is now being freshly appreciated and stands as the leading twentieth-century classic in what the Introduction to this volume calls “type three” theology of correlation.

Henri de Lubac is unique among the classics selected here in doing his most significant work as historical theology. There is of course much else in his oeuvre, but John Milbank’s vigorous exposition shows him identifying the prophetically crucial importance of questions surrounding nature, grace, and the vision of God, and bringing his massive learning and theological acuity to bear in demonstrating how their historical forms are relevant to key current issues. De Lubac is probably the least recognized of our classics, and Milbank’s assessment of him challenges the “canon.”

Karl Rahner is another theologian whose reputation declined somewhat after his death, especially in his own Roman Catholic Church. Chapter 16 in Part II of this volume illuminates some of the reasons for this decline, connected with the course of Catholic theology under Pope John Paul II. In chapter 5, Karen Kilby is more concerned to correct interpretations of aspects of his theology (and especially the relationship of philosophy to his theology) that allowed some to dismiss him too easily. She retrieves the breadth, variety, and richness of his vast oeuvre, while also asking some hard questions of it.

Finally, the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar came into its own in the aftermath of his death, as one of the theologians most favored by Pope John Paul II. Ben Quash follows the contours of his massive achievement and also opens up a range of critical engagements with it.

One of the marks of a classic is that repeated engagement with it is fruitful. Looking through other parts of this volume it is possible to see how each is affected by these six classics. As might be expected, all are influential in Part II’s theologies of Europe and the USA. They are least significant for theology and the sciences in Part III (though note the contribution of Bonhoeffer to theology and social science), and for most of the global engagements of Part VI (the exception being ecumenical theology). Many particularizing theologies (Part V) have criticized them and called attention to their limitations. But this too is the mark of a classic – that it is unavoidable, even if one wants to reject it. Part I represents the editors’ attempt to select those twentieth-century theologians with whom twenty-first century theologians and others should not avoid wrestling.

Chapter 1

Karl Barth

Daniel W. Hardy

Approaching Karl Barth

Karl Barth (1886–1968) was undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in post-Reformation Protestant theology, perhaps even more so than Friedrich Schleiermacher a century before; and his importance reaches well beyond that tradition. In the context of nineteenth and twentieth-century theology, he – more than any other – restored Christian theology to strength. Although himself at first deeply immersed in the “modern theology” which had begun with the Enlightenment, Barth became the pivotal figure in the transformation of theology during the early twentieth century. He found a critical basis – the “theological object” – by which to respond to the previous era: ever-renewed engagement with this, and from it the building of a comprehensive account of Christian theology, became his main achievements.

His progress with the task advanced through several stages. At first, he issued a call for radical correction; and later he moved toward, and eventually provided, a remarkably full account of the scope of Christian belief which showed the marks of his continuing struggle for truth. Its sharpness on the one hand, and its comprehensiveness on the other, turned the tide of conviction about what Christian theology should now be.

Commensurate with its importance, Barth’s theology has drawn wide comment, but often of such a kind as to content itself with interpreting him without moving far forward with the “further work which is needed today.”¹ In any case, as with the most valuable theology, it is better to read Barth’s own writing. And it needs to be encountered with the utmost seriousness, as testing all aspects of belief and life. That is not to suggest that it cannot, or should not, be questioned: the reader needs also to reach through the particular notions and words used by Barth to recall us to the “theological object” which so much concerned him, the dynamic relation of the divine and the human, and to ask whether he has discerned this fully or appropriately. The very task of “finding the ‘theological object’ ” presumes that Barth and his reader will test each other. What we will therefore attempt to provide here is an introduction to the most central aspects of Barth’s theology in which this mutual testing needs to go on, together with suggestions as to where critical examination might lead.

Biography

Heir to two Reformed theological dynasties, Sartorius and Barth, Karl Barth was the first son of Johann Friedrich Barth, a pastor from the conservative wing of his church and lecturer at the ten-year-old College of Preachers in Basel, Switzerland, who three years later became professor in early and modern church history at the University of Berne. Raised and schooled in the strong affirmations of Christian faith, Barth studied philosophy and theology at the leading universities of Germany: deterred by his father from the pursuit of the liberal theology then prevalent, he began his studies at Berne, but soon went on to Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg, and studied under those most influential at the time: Adolf von Harnack, whose disciple Barth claimed to be at that point, Julius Kaftan, Hermann Gunkel, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Adolf Schlatter. Despite his father’s commitment to “positive theology,” the young Barth became a disciple of the “modern school” of theology that – like so many who followed the adaptation of Christianity to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, other idealists, and the modern preoccupation with history – correlated the history of Christian religion with the human experience of the divine. Under the shadow of von Harnack, this was an uneasy combination, which often made the truth of faith fully dependent on historical research; but Barth worked all his life with the tools of historical criticism, while wanting to surpass it by standing before “the mystery of the subject matter” not merely the mystery of the document. He followed the liberal Wilhelm Herrmann in considering the inward certainty of faith as normative for ethical life.

Following his final theological examinations in 1908, Barth was ordained a pastor in the Bern Münster church, and served briefly as a pastor in the Jura Mountains before staying with Martin Rade and working for two terms as his editorial assistant in Marburg for the influential Die Christliche Welt, then for two years an assistant pastor in Geneva, where he first met leaders of the ecumenical movement. It was in Geneva that he met his future wife, Nelly Hoffmann (they had one daughter and four sons). In July 1911, he became pastor of Safenwil, a farming and industrial area near Zurich, where he remained for ten years; his friend and theological partner Eduard Thurneysen was nearby.

Confronted there by the misery of working people, he found himself responsible for preaching the gospel to them, but his theology proved unequal to the task. Joining the religious Social Democratic Party (led by Ragaz and Kutter), much involved in the labor movement, and deeply disturbed, at the outbreak of World War I, to find that his teachers were among those supporting the Kaiser in making war, he found how bankrupt the theology he had learned was, and how close it was to the ideology of the “cultivated” Europe then tearing itself apart. As a result he broke with the theology in which he had been trained, and rejected any easy linking of social action with the Kingdom of God; now theologically realistic hope for the Kingdom of God became central to his thinking. Finding a new theological basis became a matter of urgency; and he sought to engage with historical criticism while yet looking through it and allowing the Word of God in scripture to come afresh to him, free – he hoped – of accommodation to the culture of the day.

The outward story of his next years is multifaceted but straightforward, though its significance is much debated. It had two decisive strands, the theological and the political, both of them important throughout his life, although we can only consider the theological here. His early public opposition to the prevailing theology, in lectures and papers,² and also in a Commentary on Romans at first published in Berne (1919) but soon much more widely distributed by a prominent Munich publisher, brought him notoriety and an invitation to an honorary professorship of Reformed theology at Göttingen to begin in October 1921. A group sympathetic to the “dialectical theology” Barth advocated also founded a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times); it included Barth, Eduard Thurneysen, and Friedrich Gogarten, with Georg Merz (of Christian Kaiser Verlag) as editor.

When Barth went to Göttingen, without advanced study in theology, he was unprepared for his teaching responsibilities in Reformed confession, doctrine, and church life. He began a time of intensive research into figures he had barely read previously, concentrating on Calvin and Zwingli, Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, Anselm and Aquinas. The task was daunting, but as he faced it Barth began the extended series of engagements with theological tradition that was to be a hallmark of his subsequent theology, a “third party” in Barth’s engagement with the Bible. It was in Göttingen that he also started explicitly dogmatic work, in his case a dialectical re-reading of the Reformed tradition; it began his steady effort to replace the defective theology he was dismantling with a better one.³

In 1925 he became professor of dogmatics and New Testament exegesis at Münster, where he was in close contact with philosophy and Catholicism. There, Barth set about writing what was to be a multi-volume Christian Dogmatics, but only the first volume appeared in 1927; and – closely linked – there were lectures on ethics in 1928.⁴ In 1930, as the West sank into recession, and amid a social and political crisis in Germany, he came to the chair of systematic theology at Bonn, immediately attracting crowds of students. Although he was distracted by intensifying disagreement with the others involved in Zwischen den Zeiten, which eventually brought about its discontinuance, his lecturing continued along the same lines as at Münster. When the full implications of Hitler’s policies became apparent in the early 1930s, his trenchant stand on the predicament of theology, which was simultaneously a political stand, a plea for going “to the heart of the matter,” was widely known; and Barth largely drafted the Theological Declaration of the “Confessing Church” declaring its opposition to the German Church assimilated to Hitler’s policies. In the end, his refusal to take an oath of unconditional loyalty to Hitler resulted in disciplinary proceedings, dismissal, and an appeal after which he was “pensioned off”; further publications by him were banned in Germany. He was called to a chair at Basel, where he wrote his major multi-volume work Church Dogmatics, and from where he actively engaged with the world of theology and society. When in 1962 he retired from the teaching which had given him the contact with students through which all the previous material had been refined, that ended an “essential part of the impulse” of his work. He went on a tour of America, but afterward was hospitalized for some time. Furthermore, he was now without the assistance of the woman who had been his close collaborator through the whole project, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, herself seriously ill. Within the limits of his health, he remained active until his death in 1968.

Content: Barth’s Major Works

Barth himself recognized that his work passed through several major stages, each culminating in a particularly important book: (1) Beginnings, to the first version of the Commentary on Romans in 1919; (2) Dialectical theology, to Christian Dogmatics in Outline, 1927; (3) Dogmatic theology, principally the vast Church Dogmatics (four volumes, 13 parts in all, the last only a fragment [Volume 5, The Doctrine of Redemption, was never written]).

Much attention has been given to the continuities and discontinuities evident in Barth’s lifework, especially the suggestion by the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar⁵ that Barth had shifted from dialectical to analogical theology. Suffice it to say that Barth’s theology never lost its dialectical edge while he also found a full basis for dogmatics of a certain kind, through his theological actualism. His locating of the possibility of theology in the dialectical relation of God and humanity in which the two were united through the actualization of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, received in faith by the grace of the Holy Spirit, precluded conventional views of analogy.

Beginnings, to the 1919 Commentary on Romans

What is heard in the 1919 Commentary on Romans is a passionate and vivid cry – in the form of a careful paraphrase of Paul’s letter – to start all theology from the Reality of God, “complete and whole in itself apart from and prior to the knowing activity of human individuals,”⁶ dialectically distinct from the reality of the world: “World remains world. But God is God.” That required the subordination of all worldly human possibilities – history, ideas, distinctions, and relations, including religion – to the sovereign God as sure and certain reality above them all. But how, if the object of theology was so sharply distinct from the world, was there a relation between these two realities? The answer offered was that through divine decision they coincide in God’s cosmically reconciling activity present in a particular historical event where this world is made new – Jesus Christ and his Cross – in which God’s reign has dawned. There the movement of God in history is actualized, in such a way as to be accessible through participatory, personal knowledge, but beyond access by historical investigation.

Dialectical theology to Christian Dogmatics in Outline, 1927

No doubt the cry expressed in the 1919 Commentary on Romans captured the imagination of a generation confused, empty, and dismayed by the horror of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, rampant inflation, political uncertainties, and immensely difficult living conditions in the traumas during and after the war. But it was also undeveloped theologically, and Barth soon began again, rewriting Romans between late 1920 and mid-1921 before leaving for Göttingen.⁷ His principal question was: “how can God make Himself known to human beings without ceasing … to be the Subject of revelation,”⁸ that is ceasing to be God by subjecting himself to human control. And Barth’s modes of expression were now different – anger, indirect and paradoxical speech – reflecting the condition of crisis, almost tangible at the time. But the actuality of full relationship with God remained, through belonging to Christ as the decisive occurrence of grace for historical human beings as they were enabled to receive it by the Holy Spirit.⁹ The occurrence places human beings in “a final, unavoidable KRISIS”: “there is only life under His judgment and under His promise; there is only life characterized by death but qualified, through the death of Christ, as the hope of life eternal.¹⁰

Although such views were intelligible enough when j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Great Theologians
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction to Modern Christian Theology
• Part 1: Classics of the Twentieth Century
• Part 2: Theological Responses to Modernity in Europe and the USA
• Part 3: Theology and the Sciences
• Part 4: Theology, Prayer, and Practice
• Part 5: Particularizing Theology
• Part 6: Global Engagements
• Part 7: Theology Between Faiths
• Part 8: Theology in Many Media
• Epilogue: Twelve Theses for Christian Theology in the Twenty-first Century
• Glossary
• Index