I.1.ii. The Devolved Definition
1. Following Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), it became universally accepted that reason cannot apprehend the objective essence of anything. Most notably, we cannot know the essence of God, the self, or what he called “the thing in itself.” That latter term comes to mean anything at all as an object, or what Aristotle simply called a substance, but complete with the other nine categories of predication. This is important to grasp because it is sometimes thought that what Kant gave us was a framework for agnosticism with respect to God and other supernatural or metaphysical entities. In reality, if this framework holds consistently, the agnostic principle extends to knowledge of anything at all. For everything is itself and thus has a way that it is. But this essence is precisely what Kant denied to our rational grasp.
2. What followed was the new definition of Friedrich Schleiermacher, that birthed modern theological liberalism. Theology became reflection upon our subjective relationship to God. So the first alternative to an objective science of theology was theology as subjective feeling or experience. Objections had already existed to the scientific character of theology. This seemed to many to reduce God to a passive object of dispassionate contemplation. Today we hear the common reply, “Don’t put God in a box!” The more sophisticated liberal theology in nineteenth century Europe, spreading quickly into the American Northeast, gave what was previously mere sentiment some academic wings.
This was very subtle in the thought of Julius Kaftan, who granted divine authority to Scripture and therefore absolute obligation to believe and obey. On the other hand, dogmatics, especially in its Scholastic format, reduced the knowledge of God to a system to be “possessed.” Bavinck summarizes Kaftan’s clever lament in this way: Evangelical faith is voluntaristic, not intellectualistic. Following Kant, the moral will is the zenith of the mind. The upshot for the new theologian was that, “dogma is not the object but the expression of faith.”1 The difference between a theological science and a truly Christian theology was this: “Scientific knowledge arises from the compelling evidence of facts, but religious knowledge is gained through moral experience by an act of the will and hence is ethically conditioned.”2
3. By the end of the century of theological liberalism, Albert Ritschl had taken the positive side of the Kantian divide and more fully transformed Christian knowledge into ethics. For Kant, while we cannot know what God is, we must presuppose that he is. Why must we do this? The answer for the man who still had his Enlightenment faith was that the eternal things must still exist for the sake of morality.
Thus Bavinck called the continental theologians of the nineteenth century “ethical theologians.” So the second alternative to an objective science of theology was theology as moral action and social progress.
In Kant’s own day there were really two pillars of Enlightenment faith that necessitated the “God hypothesis,” namely ethics and science. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific world was increasingly divorcing itself from any recourse to God at all. The only thing respectable left for the man of religious sentiment was the moral inspiration one could derive from religion.
4. In between those two markers we find the rise of Higher Criticism and the History of Religion Schools in Germany. Partly inspired by Hegel’s attempted recovery of rationalism, the adjective “scientific” in the schools formerly devoted to a religious confession now began to be used as a purely neutral starting point to research. Nothing could privilege the Christian idea of God or the Church’s reading of Scripture. All notions and texts must be reexamined “from the ground up” and liberated from all prejudice. So the third alternative to an objective science of theology was no longer theology at all. Rather, the word “religion” came to be used as an academic discipline.
Whereas theology is the study of God, religion came to be the study of what man says about God, or what man does in relation to God. But all of that is the domain of comparative religion. This is not a cosmetic difference. Bavinck was writing just as theology departments across the West were exchanging the word “theology” for the word “religion.” The word “dogmatics” began to be used as a science. He said, “Dogmatics is thus not the science of faith or of religion but the science about God. The task of the dogmatician is to think God’s thoughts after him and to trace their unity.”3
5. While liberals “went north” with relationship and action, and fundamentalists “went south” with spirit and truth, one attractive middle position to many was the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth. His definition of theology almost attempts to summarize his overall method: “Theology is science seeking the knowledge of the Word of God spoken in God’s work—science learning in the school of the Holy Scripture, which witnesses to the Word of God; science laboring in the quest for truth, which is inescapably required of the community that is called by the Word of God.”4
6. As modern philosophy was coming to its death, the existential and language analysis schools had their own transformations of what used to be theology. I will only mention one such model here. It comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of a “language game.” Postliberal theology, largely in the name of ecumenical dialogue, has understood doctrine and credal statements to amount to the grammar of a community of faith.5 Such beliefs are not transferable in the sense of authoritative over other groups. Historical theology is greatly affected by analytical philosophy as well. Not only in Wittgenstein’s idea but also in J. L. Austin’s notion of speech-act theory. Together these ideas were influential on the Cambridge School historians Quentin Skinner and J. A. Pocock.
Their view is known as contextualism and it reduces the study of the history of ideas to either the intentional act of the historic author with his text [Skinner] or else the overall lexicon of political communication surrounding that author’s use [Pocock].6
While all of this has made historians more sensitive to anachronistic use of words and concepts, and the inflation of “great thinkers,” there is also a negative effect to theology is general. While this may only seem to undermine any normative status for historical theology, it may occur to us that systematic theology becomes historical the moment the ink starts to dry for a present writer. And what exactly does he mean? On what grounds should the same methodology not be applied to dogmatics? This is one more angle into the denial that theology is the study of anything objective about God. Here it happens to be taking the form of reducing any “timeless” truths or “perennial” questions to those sarcastic air quotes that postmoderns have taught us all to start using anytime we want our reader to join us in our reduction of a concept that we are too intellectually lazy to refute the old fashioned way.
7. Conservative Evangelicals (1940s to 1990s), who were anti-confessional, anti-dogmatic, and anti-polemical, undermined the meaning of theology in a more or less obvious way. In the name of fighting a culture way, finer points of doctrine had to be put on the back-burner, in light of our more menacing enemy. It was nothing but the resurrection of what the Puritans called Latitudinarianism, or the flattening of what was essential in abstract terms, on the ground of what was essential in concrete life. Nor was the political side of the culture the only motive for this. The pragmatism inherent to church growth methodology and the rise of the Seeker movement, brought Neo-Evangelical doctrinal reductionism from Capitol Hill to every suburban nook. One consequence of trying to fight a culture war on the cheap, however, is a lowest common denominator of the core. It turns out that some of the things that people fight over at church are actually important.
Indeed some of the things that divide the Protestant groups, and their Evangelical descendants, are precisely the doctrines about God, Christ, Scripture, and salvation. To gut these from the center of one’s cultural engagement is to decenter them from one’s worldview. But then just as the “worldview” concept was coming into its own, those who were its curators had deliberately kept it in orbit without a center of gravity.
But such cheap magic tricks are due for exposure. The non-center could not hold, and the very term Evangelicalism came to be called into question.
Missional Theology (2000s) began to define theology as the church’s reflection upon its own mission. In many ways this was a reaction to the Neo-Evangelical theology’s bifurcation of conservative political engagement and consumerist individualism. The basic problem is that it shifted the object from God to the church on mission. Proponents of this theology had a ready answer in that God was on mission, so that when the church joins him on the missio Dei, it is still fundamentally God being reflected upon. However this still makes something that God is doing ad extra the essence of the divine rather than the divine essence in se.
8. Within the standard texts of the “New Calvinism,” John Frame has defined theology as “the application of Scripture, by persons, to every area of life.”7 Closely associated with this is Wayne Grudem’s definition of doctrine: “What the whole Bible teaches us today about some particular topic.”8 Now if what Frame means is that every truth of Scripture will have many applications, such that theology does not lose its scientific character no matter which angle we approach it from, then we would have very little trouble. However this is not at all what he means. Although he will also minimize the question of order later on in his theological method, what he means to do at the definition level is precisely to dismiss the objective question and indeed to minimize the question of definitions altogether. He says of definitions that, “we should not look to them to find what something ‘really is,’ as though a definition gave us unique insight into the nature of something beyond what we could find in the Bible itself.”9
From here Frame advances the false dilemma of either (a) the language of the Bible is inadequate or else (b) doctrinal formulation is superfluous. It is a bit of a straw man in any event. Must “biblical insufficiency” be a prerequisite to definition? Do we not use such words to clarify our own insufficiencies at grasping the full significance of the truth of Scripture? If not, then why does Frame write at all?
Does he believe the Bible is insufficient at explaining the sufficiency of Scripture? Or is it only a certain kind of theologian whose extra-biblical writings are written because the Bible did not define things well enough? Short of a way to tell which one is which, we can only assume that Frame is guilty of special pleading here.
Now over to Grudem, if only he had defined doctrine as “All of what we believe to be true about any particular topic,” then the truth of that thing would be itself. As it is, Grudem, following Frame’s conception of biblical propositions apart from metaphysical objects, leaves us with a doctrine that can never quite form circles with the biblical propositions, but must stay at the level of the fragmented collection of propositions. The moment they put them together into a system, they are cheating.
9. Why does definition matter? Consider four consequences that we have seen just in our brief survey: moving from defective definition to subsequent corruption to the whole theology so defined. (1) Theology as subjective feeling or experience results is relativism. Whose feeling gets to define? And if everyone defines for himself, in what sense is anything about God objectively meaningful at all? (2) Theology as moral action or social progress results first in moralism with respect to the private sphere, and then finally in collectivism in the wider public sphere. (3) Theology as “religion” implies and descends into secularism. When our study is restricted to what man does in relation to God, rather than what is the case about God himself, we have prepared the mind for the great leveling of all religious claims and thus the insignificance of them all. (4) Theology as the mere application of Scripture results in pragmatism. Hence the definitions of Frame and Grudem at least tend toward a starting point in practice. It is not that we would not find many helpful things in their writings. But they do not provide us with a definition of theology comprehensive enough for a true dogmatic system.
(#systematic #dogmatic #prolegomena #theology #theological #Reformed #ReformedClassicalism)
1. Bavinck. Reformed Dogmatics. I.39
2. Bavinck. Reformed Dogmatics. I.40
3. Bavinck. Reformed Dogmatics. I.25
4. Karl Barth. Evangelical Theology. 49-50.
5. cf. George Lindbeck. The Nature of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984)
6. cf. Mark Bevir, ‘The Contextual Approach’, in George Klosko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2011), pp. 11–23.
7. John Frame. Systematic Theology. 8
8. Wayne Grudem. Systematic Theology. 25; cf. 21 for the same definition given for systematic theology, a definition for which he acknowledges indebtedness to Professor Frame (studying under him at Westminster East in 1971-73). The link between Frame and Grudem will be important again when we come to the doctrine of Scripture.
9. Frame. Systematic Theology. 4
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