The Christian Faith

A Creedal Account

Schwarz, Hans

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441245878
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This reader-friendly primer offers a concise yet thorough overview of the Christian faith. Hans Schwarz, one of the major Lutheran theologians of the last half-century, covers the Christian faith from creation to the final fulfillment of life. He gives his account of the major points of Christian doctrine, always moving from the biblical text to the unfolding of the faith through the centuries to contemporary significance. This brief systematic theology will appeal to professors, students, pastors, and educated lay readers who want a quick but profound and biblically grounded overview of the Christian faith.

Part 1
Presuppositions for the Faith

Three presuppositions are essential if we want to understand the Christian faith: theology, revelation, and the Bible. In contrast to Islam, the Christian faith is not a faith that requires foremost obedience. As we can gather from the story of the conversion of the court official of the queen of Ethiopia, Philip did not ask him, “Do you believe what you are reading?” but rather, “Do you understand what you are reading?” (Acts 8:30). The Christian faith is not an obedient faith but a discerning faith. Therefore it is necessary that we espouse our faith in a logically coherent manner without any contradictions. This is exactly the task of theology. The Christian faith is not an assortment of ideas according to one’s gusto. It presupposes that God has made known God’s self to us. This self-disclosure of God, not our own ideas, is the presupposition for our faith. Only when we have been exposed to this self-disclosure of God are our thoughts about God in order. Furthermore, we are not the first Christians. There is a long history of God interacting with humanity. This history has been reflected in the Bible, so to speak, as a faith witness. If we want to talk about our faith, we must compare it with this scriptural witness and correct our faith accordingly, lest we advance our own ideas instead of the historically validated Christian faith. But now let us first turn to theology.

1
Theology

As with many concepts of the Christian faith, the term “theology” comes from the Greek language, since Greek was the dominant language in the Roman Empire during the time of nascent Christianity. In this language, theology first meant a (mythical) narrative of the gods. This explains why Greek poets such as Homer (ca. 800 BC) and Hesiod (ca. 700 BC) were called theologians. A few centuries later Aristotle (384–322 BC), who was the most famous student of Plato (428/27–348/47 BC), wrote in his Metaphysics that there is a scientific philosophy that comprises all knowledge. He called this science “theology.” For the Christians, therefore, theology was the science of the all-encompassing meaning of God.

Consequently, one can refer to the authors of the Gospels and to Paul as the first Christian theologians. But this designation would not fit these authors. They composed their writings to convince people of the truthfulness of the Christian faith and not primarily to espouse the Christian faith in a logically coherent fashion. They were most of all interested in proclaiming this faith. This is even true for the so-called apostolic fathers of the second (Christian) century, such as Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215) and the famous Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna (ca. 69–ca. 155).

Beginning and History of Christian Theology

Theologians in their own right appear only with the early Christian apologists of the second century, such as Quadratus (d. ca. 130) and Aristides of Athens (d. ca. 125). The apologists attempted to defend Christianity against various attacks and tried to show that the Christian faith is no superstition but can be presented in a reasonable manner. This strategy of defense became necessary since in the second century more and more people accepted the Christian faith and the secular authorities became increasingly suspicious. Aristides, for instance, attempted to portray Christians as a new race that led humanity from its decay to new life. Justin Martyr, who died in Lyons in 165 during a persecution of Christians, showed in two apologies that the Christian faith is the true philosophy in contrast to the pagan philosophies in which one cannot sense God’s Spirit at work.

The most important apologist of early Christianity was Origen of Alexandria, Egypt (ca. 185–ca. 253). Around 246 Origen attacked the eclectic Platonist Celsus, who had claimed that a reasonable Christian theology is a contradiction in itself because Christianity is hostile to all human values. Origen defended the Christian faith as intellectually credible and showed that Christians are at least as decent a people as pagans, or even better. While Christians at that time did not serve as soldiers of the pagan state and refused to function in various public offices, Origen emphasized that they helped the country by offering prayers and by teaching the people to lead honest lives. His work On First Principles was the first Christian systematic theology. In the introduction he showed that the apostles had rendered only that which was necessary for salvation, while the rest was up to later theologians to expound. Origen was convinced that the Christian faith offered a new and comprehensive understanding of the world that was superior to that offered by Hellenistic culture, but it was not necessarily opposed to that culture.

What Origen endeavored to do for the whole church was accomplished five centuries later by John of Damascus (ca. 650–749/753) for the Orthodox Church with his Fountain of Knowledge. In part three of this apologetic writing, John presented An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which is often printed separately and contains a systematic exposition of the whole theological tradition. It gained virtually normative status in the Greek Church. John’s intention was not to introduce new teachings but to answer—with the help of the church fathers such as Gregory of Nazianzen (ca. 329–390) and Basil the Great (ca. 330–379)—the most important questions about faith during his time. John’s work is still influential for Eastern Orthodoxy.

Looking at Western Christianity, we must mention Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius in present-day Algeria. In his voluminous work The City of God he demonstrated the superiority of the kingdom of God over the worldly kingdom, a notion that in the Middle Ages furthered the struggle between the emperor’s and the pope’s supremacy over Christianity. The reason for his book, however, was the pagan claim that the sack of Rome in 410 by King Alaric and his Visigoths was due to the wrath of the ancient gods over the conversion of so many people to Christianity. Augustine showed that the devastation of Rome was rather the result of God’s wrath over the moral depravity of the pagans. As we saw in the introduction, Martin Luther learned as an Augustinian monk that one can obtain eternal bliss only through God’s undeserved grace. As a sinful human being, one can only expect God’s rejection. For Augustine it was important that an individual Christian always be part of an ecclesial community, the only institution through which one could hear about a gracious God. The Christian faith is not a private thing but is nourished and strengthened through the Christian community.

One could name many other theologians who contributed to an explanation of the Christian faith in an intellectually acceptable fashion. In the Middle Ages we must at least mention two, Anselm of Canterbury (ca. 1033–1109) from northern Italy and Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) from southern Italy.

Anselm is still well known today because of three slim books. In his Monologion he deals with an issue still bothering many people today: how God’s wisdom and justice can be reconciled with the existence of evil in this world. In his Proslogion, addressed to God, he deals with the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. Anselm starts with the notion that God is the most perfect being and concludes that God’s perfection entails God’s existence, otherwise God would not be perfect. This kind of reasoning has often been misunderstood as an actual proof of God’s existence. Yet Anselm confesses at the conclusion that so far he had only believed in God’s existence, but now he understood that God must indeed exist. In this, Anselm wanted to show that God’s existence can be intellectually credible. In his already mentioned work Why God Became Man, Anselm develops the so-called theory of satisfaction to show why God became human. Since a human can never do what God requires of a person, someone else must make up for that person’s deficiencies so that those deficiencies can be equalized before God. Yet such a feat can never be accomplished by a human being but only by God’s own self. Therefore God must become human so that this work can be attributed to a human person. From these writings we see that Anselm’s whole theological work is dedicated to the intelligibility of the Christian faith, but not to replacing faith by reason. The point for him is that what one believes, one must also be able to understand.

The Roman Catholic Church holds Thomas Aquinas in highest esteem as a theological teacher and declared him at Vatican I (1869–70) to be the principal theologian of the Church. Thomas spent nearly ten years on his most important work, the Summa Theologica, in which he offered a comprehensive and clear exposition of the Christian faith in the framework of questions and answers. He achieved a reasonable exposition of the Christian faith with the help of Aristotle’s philosophy. God is understood as the rational cause of the universe toward whom humans strive. The Summa is divided in three parts: (a) God, creation, and anthropology; (b) ethics; and (c) the person and work of Christ, which includes the sacraments. An envisioned fourth part concerning eschatology was never finished by Thomas but was by a later theologian.

Following Aristotle, Thomas considers God as the unmoved, or prime, mover and then arrives at five proofs for the existence of God: (1) God as the unmoved mover brings the world into existence. (2) As the necessary first cause of all things, God is the first cause of the chain of causes and effects. (3) As an absolutely necessary being, God endows all not-necessary beings with existence. (4) All imperfect beings are dependent on God as the absolutely perfect being. Finally, (5) God is the reasonable architect of the world. One can rightly ask whether such an unmoved mover is identical with the Father of Jesus Christ or only a lifeless construct. This and similar questions were raised by Martin Luther, often in direct contradiction to Thomas and Aristotle, whom he always called “the pagan.”

Luther himself was not a systematic theologian who wrote a treatise on the Christian faith. His writings were occasioned by the problems people encountered in daily life or were a defense of his Reformation principles against attacks of his opponents. It was Luther’s coworker Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) who wrote a textbook containing the theology of the Reformation. His Loci (general points of theological matters) was first published in 1521 and reworked several times. The doctrine of God and of humanity is only briefly noted. The salvational emphasis becomes clear when Melanchthon states at the beginning of his treatise that to know Christ means “to know his benefits and not as they teach to perceive his natures and the mode of his incarnation.”1 With this verdict he significantly reduced the medieval proliferation of theological items and the often minute distinctions and obscure applications. Important for him is what Christ has done for us.

John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, Switzerland, composed the Institutes of the Christian Religion. First issued in 1536 and reissued until 1559 in various improved editions, the Institutes is an attempt to explain the Christian faith. More than a thousand pages long, this treatise starts just like the Apostles’ Creed with God the creator and Christ the savior and covers all significant aspects of the Christian faith. Calvin emphasizes the sovereignty of God as well as God’s activity in history, which can be gleaned from the Bible. Through his activity in history God affects salvation for his people, whom he has chosen and even predestined. Calvin’s emphasis on salvation through God alone and not through human cooperation shows that he is in line with the Lutheran Reformation.

Before we come to the present situation of theology, we must mention two important theologians of modernity. The first is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a Reformed theologian active at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the Enlightenment period in which Christian religion was often reduced to morals, Schleiermacher argued that religion “is neither thinking nor acting but intuition and feeling.”2 Religion touches the inner human being and must be cultivated in the communion of a person with the universe. Humans have a capacity for religion, and in contemplating the universe one has the feeling of being touched by the infinite. Schleiermacher was influenced by Romanticism and also indebted to the Moravian piety in which he had been educated. In his dogmatics, The Christian Faith, he shows that the Christian self-consciousness issues from salvation achieved by Jesus. In Jesus of Nazareth the absolute dependence on God becomes visible in an unbroken way, and we become cognizant of our own dependence on God, a dependence strengthened by Jesus. The Christian faith is founded on Christ alone. Schleiermacher is often called the father of Protestant theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Schleiermacher was often too liberal for Karl Barth, since, according to Barth, he did not emphasize God’s Word strongly enough, Barth still had Schleiermacher’s picture hanging over his desk.

The Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whom we have already mentioned, is the second important theologian of modernity. He is famous for his Church Dogmatics, which comprises more than six thousand pages and, like Thomas Aquinas’ Summa, was never finished. He is also the founder of the so-called dialectic or neo-Reformation theology. In contradistinction to the liberal theology of the nineteenth century, and similar to Søren Kierkegaard, Barth emphasized the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity. If we want to know something about God, he argued, we cannot obtain this knowledge through reason, but through God’s Word alone. Therefore any talk about God as expounded in the religions of the world is a human fabrication and sinful. In his theological writings Barth attempted to strictly delineate his insights from God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ. Since this was also the concern of the Reformation, the designation of this movement as neo-Reformation is fitting. The most important Protestant theologians of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926) from the Reformed tradition and the Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg (b. 1928), took God’s self-disclosure as the starting point for their theological deliberations.

But where was Lutheran theology during the past few centuries? In Germany, one must think of the nineteenth-century Erlangen School and its founder Adolf von Harless (1806–79). In this school of thought, theology has to be related to the church. Contrary to Schleiermacher’s view, theology is not a discipline for church governance, since it has its origin in the faith experience within the church. Therefore true Christian theology must stem from the ecclesial faith of the Christian community. Under Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810–77), Erlangen theology reached its climax. In his most well-known publication, The Proof of Scripture: A Theological Investigation, he attempts to establish a biblical foundation for the Christian doctrine. The starting point for him is “Christianity, the communion of God and humanity, personally mediated by Jesus Christ.”3 Theological assertions can be attested to by the personal experience of a theologian. This theology is also called the Erlangen theology of experience, a movement that cannot deny its pietistic influence. Outside of Erlangen one must mention Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69), the guardian of Lutheran confessional identity. A son of a Reformed pastor, he embodied ever more strongly a Lutheran theology. As editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (Protestant church gazette), he exerted significant influence on church and theology. Influenced by the awakening in northern Germany, he endeavored to stem the tide of an alleged pantheism caused by Schleiermacher and representatives of a rationalistic theology. His main strength and his merit were in a critical apologetics and in showing that the Old Testament was an actual disclosure of God, in contradiction to what one often heard from rationalistic exegetes.

But now let us return to the twentieth century. Jürgen Moltmann in the second half of the century wrote his seminal publication Theology of Hope (1964), in which he refuted Karl Barth’s approach. For Barth, God’s self-disclosure occurred, so to speak, vertically from above, resulting in a static understanding of history. According to Moltmann, however, God is a history-making God, and therefore history is always directed toward the goal predestined by God. With his emphasis on the future-directedness of God’s activity, Moltmann rediscovered the eschatological structure of the Christian faith. He continued this approach in numerous publications, always emphasizing the social relevance of the Christian faith. As a result, he became one of the most influential theologians of the World Council of Churches.

When Wolfhart Pannenberg published in 1961 his “Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation,” he immediately received the attention of the theological world. Pannenberg argued that God’s self-disclosure had not occurred in a historical salvation ghetto but in the context of world history and therefore must be accessible to anybody who has eyes to see. With this approach he freed the Christian faith from the ecclesial ghetto of pious people into which Barth had steered that faith. While Barth had emphasized the opposition of worldly knowledge and faith knowledge, for Pannenberg there is only the commonly accessible arena of world history since faith and reason belong together. Faith does not mean to believe certain things or certain statements, but to trust that the God who has proven to be trustworthy in the past will also be trustworthy in the future. Pannenberg has also had a decisive influence in the ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, since in Roman Catholicism the congruence of faith and reason has always been important.

In addition to the theological approaches discussed above, there are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Presuppositions for the Faith
• Part 2: God the Creator
• Part 3: Christ the Redeemer
• Part 4: The Holy Spirit as God's Efficacious Power
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover