Beloved Community: Critical Dogmatics after Christendom

By Paul R. Hinlicky

In this scholarly work Paul Hinlicky transcends the impasse between dogmatic and systematic theology as he presents an original, comprehensive system of theology especially apropos to the post-Christendom North American context.

Deploying an unusual Spirit-Son-Father trinitarian scheme, Hinlicky carefully develops his system of theology through expansive, wide-ranging argumentation. He engages with other theologians throughout the book and concludes each major section by discussing an alternate perspective on the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467442633

Paul R. Hinlicky

Paul R. Hinlicky is Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia. His previous books include Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity.

Book preview

Beloved Community

Critical Dogmatics after Christendom

Paul R. Hinlicky

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2015 Paul R. Hinlicky

All rights reserved

Published 2015 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hinlicky, Paul R.

Beloved community: critical dogmatics after Christendom / Paul R. Hinlicky.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6935-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4303-6 (ePub)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4263-3 (Kindle)

1. Theology, Doctrinal — History.

2. Dogma, Development of. I. Title.

BT21.3.H56 2015

230 — dc23

2014041180

www.eerdmans.com

In Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary

of the Posting of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. . . . Away then with all those false prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,’ and there is no peace. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘Cross, cross,’ and there is no cross. Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death and hell; and thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace

and

dedicated, in loving esteem,

to the apple of her father’s eye.

Contents

Author’s Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Prolegomena

1. The Knowledge of God

The Discipline of Theology as Critical Dogmatics

A Note on the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus

The Theology of the Word

The Interpretation of Experience

How Critical Dogmatics Is Critical and Dogmatic

The Cognitive Claim

Contextual Considerations

After Christendom

The Continuity Thesis

Neither Univocity nor Analogy

A Note on the Triadic Structure of Theological Knowledge

A Note on Gendered Language

Excursus: Perpetua and the Fatherhood of God

2. Preliminary Clarifications

Odd Questions — I

Excursus: Augustine, Luther, and the

Critique of the Sovereign Self

Odd Questions — II

Is God Possible?

Is Christ Necessary?

Does Faith Justify?

Excursus: On the Three Lutheranisms

Are the Scriptures Holy?

Part Two: Pneumatology

3. The Theological Subject

The Natural Man (1 Cor. 2:14)

John 20: Hearing Is Believing Is Seeing in a New Way

Sinfulness

Early Christian Baptism

A Note on Apocalyptic Demonology

Baptism as Rebirth into the Ecclesia — I

Excursus: The Jeremias–Aland Debate on Infant Baptism

Baptism as Rebirth into the Ecclesia — II

Luther’s Baptizatus sum!

Menno Simons on the New Birth

Karl Barth’s Second Nein!

Concepts of Theological Subjectivity

On the Plane of Immanence

4. Creator Spiritus

Toward the Ecumenical Doctrine of Baptism

The Way to Ecumenical Convergence on the Spirit

Tritheism?

The Paraclete of John 17

The Spirit as Unifier of the Sign and the Thing Signified

Overcoming the Western tendency towards modalism

Sanctification: Holy Secularity in Fulfillment of Creation

The Spirit’s Mission to the Nations

The Ministry of the Church — I

Excursus: The Ordination of Women

The Ministry of the Church — II

An Alternative: Ephraim Radner’s Brutal Unity

A Note on the Eschaton of Judgment

Part Three: Christology

5. The Objectivity of Faith

Historicizing the Eschatological?

The Theotokos and Her Child

Excursus: On Jewish Perplexity

as a Principle Internal to Christology

A Note on the Modern Marian Dogmas

Modalist Confusions in Christology

Realignment: The Christological Division of the Divisions

New Testament Objectifications

Stuhlmacher against Bultmann on Pauline Christology

Marcus’s Commentary on Mark

Schnelle’s John 6

The Truth of the Incarnation

Eucharistic Controversies regarding the

Objectivity of Christ’s Presence for Faith

6. Christology

Toward the Ecumenical Doctrine

of the Eucharistic Meal

The Unity of Christ’s Person

Excursus: The Deity Has Withdrawn

The Christological Way between Schleiermacher and Barth

Salvation in Christ

The Prophet of the Reign of God

The Intercession of Christ

An Alternative: Marilyn McCord Adams’s

Christ and the Defeat of Horrors

A Note on the Parousia of Christ

Part Four: Patrology

7. The Audience of Theology

Conscience and Theology

God after God

The Faith of Jesus in the Heavenly Father

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .

Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as in heaven . . .

A Note on the Faith of the Historical Jesus

Formulated in the Lord’s Prayer

Thy kingdom come . . . ! — Continued

Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.

God Surpassing God

Missio Dei

A Note on Islam as the Judgment of God on Christendom

8. The Almighty Father

Toward the Ecumenical Doctrine of Confession — I

A Note on Pastoral and Liturgical Theology

Toward the Ecumenical Doctrine of Confession — II

A Note on Creation Faith and the

Scientific Understanding of Nature

The Almighty Agent of Eschatological Creation

Genesis as Promise

God’s Time, Created Time, and the Divine Decree

Problems of Evil

Structures for Justice and Love

Whether God Exists . . .

Divine Being

Doxological Analytic of the Holy Existence

An Alternative: Brueggemann’s Conflicted Yahweh

The Theodicy of Faith

The Circle Spirals

Conclusion: Doxology

The Eternal Trinity and the Life Eternal

God Is the Eschaton of Judgment

The Co-­Equal Trinity in Anticipation of Glory

Eternal Life

Works Cited

Index

Author’s Preface and Acknowledgments

I am filled with gratitude for this opportunity to present to the reader my system of theology, though it is not a seamless system but rather, as discerning readers will no doubt detect, beset with the aporia that I call the theodicy of faith, which must accompany theology this side of the Kingdom’s coming. Calling it my system is accordingly both a confession of sin at the idiosyncrasies, known and unknown, that afflict the presentation and a plea nonetheless for grace on the part of the reader in recognizing the work’s ecumenical intention — a term that was in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the pre-­confessionalistic motive of the Augsburg Confession (to which in the ecumenically intended sense this author freely and joyfully subscribes). In any event, what I now lay before the reader is a life’s work of reflection on the troubled state and future prospects in Euro-­America of the message that improbably emerged out of ancient Palestine two millennia ago and is still on its journey through the nations on the way to the coming of the Beloved Community of God. Along the way, that message found a remarkable spokesperson in a talented and troubled being, Martin Luther. While I have found many other teachers of the faith, as will be amply evident in what follows, this work manifestly stands in the tradition of theological reflection within the Western Catholic Church that arose from Luther’s witness to Jesus Christ. I mention these things by way of acknowledging in a preface that none of us jumps out of our own skin; we can only live in it, and through it by grace move forward to that better world which is coming, where in loving God above all, we love all of God’s creatures in and under God in the Beloved Community — a notion supremely to be credited to Augustine of Hippo, in whose tradition Luther stood.

I have some more contemporaneous acknowledgments to issue here. In writing this book, I have enjoyed the criticism and discussion of a number of theological friends. Robert Jenson graciously gave his imprimatur to the interpretation of his work in Chapter Two. I hope that he receives my dissent from his affection for German Idealism as a worthy attempt to sustain his own pioneering effort in systematic theology. Carl Braaten patiently and persistently read through a very rough first draft of the whole and supplied me with numerous detailed suggestions, occasionally with passionate dissents, and many illuminating and helpful suggestions for improvement. I trust that he will see his influence in much of what follows as well as the missiological and eschatological themes of his own theological work everywhere at work. Christine Helmer and Dennis Bielfeldt provided important encouragement at an early stage in the composition, and my bishop, James Mauney, did likewise at a late stage in the process. R. David Nelson engaged mightily with Part Two of this work and lent me his expertise on the subtleties of Eberhard Jüngel’s sacramentology and semiotics. Joe Mangina made incisive comments on Chapter Five that turned into a helpful discussion of a broader range of issues at play in this work. I hope that he finds his own work honored in the Conclusion to this book. Rob Saler read the entire draft with charity and demanded clarity in a number of obscure places; he also provided excellent bibliographical suggestions and connections, and made many useful editorial suggestions. I trust he will see the influence of his feedback throughout. It was especially gratifying to work with these younger scholars as readers and respondents during this book’s composition. My Roanoke College colleagues, Gerald McDermott and James Peterson, both offered useful comments on excerpts for which I asked their opinions. My student assistant at Roanoke College, Ms. Tiara Mehic, carefully proofed the draft — though I may have added errors since she completed her work! I am grateful to all. Whatever faults remain are the author’s entirely.

I recall reading somewhere in Käsemann that the entire ministry of the Apostle Paul (for whom my parents named me) was a struggle for recognition. In this respect, I can certainly identify with my apostolic namesake, even as the apostle’s declaration of personal independence coram mundo on account of slavery to Christ in Galatians 1:10 has played a decisive role biographically in this author’s formation as a theological subject. I have tried in this respect to be an imitator of the apostle. Alas, that has also meant that like Paul the Apostle I have published my theology over the years, piecemeal and haphazard, in service to the more or less immediate needs of the church communities I have served, in various, sometimes obscure places. It is an extraordinary grace to be able, now, to retrieve various fragments of my emerging system and integrate them here into the presentation now set before the readers. Accordingly, I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint (all or in part and in altered form) the following: Paul R. Hinlicky, Law, Gospel and Beloved Community, in Preaching and Teaching the Law and Gospel of God (Delhi, NY: ALPB Books, 2013), pp. 91-114; Problems of Evil: For Julius Filo on His Sixtieth Birthday, in V Službe Obnovy: Vedecký zborník vydaný pri príležitosti 60. Narodením Dr. h.c. prof. Th.Dr. Júliusa Fila, ed. M. Jurík and J. Benka (Bratislava: Evanjelická bohoslovecká fakulta, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislava, 2010), pp. 65-74; A Lutheran Contribution to the Theology of Judaism, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 31, no. 1-2 (Winter-­Spring 1994): 123-52; Theological Anthropology: Towards Integrating Theosis and Justification by Faith, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 34, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 38-73; Paul R. Hinlicky, The Spirit of Christ amid the Spirits of the Post-­Modern World: The Crumley Lecture, Lutheran Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 433-58; Review of Johann Anselm Steiger, Jonas Propheta: Zur Auslegungs-­ und Medien­geschichte des Buches Jona bein Martin Luther und im Luthertum der Barockzeit, Lutheran Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 453-55; Paul R. Hinlicky, Sin, Death, and Derrida, Lutheran Forum 44, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 54-59; Whose Church? Which Ministry?, Lutheran Forum 42, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 48-53; Christ’s Bodily Presence in the Holy Supper and Christology, Lutheran Forum 33, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 41-44; Christ’s Bodily Presence in the Holy Supper: Real or Symbolic?, Lutheran Forum 33, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 24-28; Paul R. Hinlicky, The Doctrine of the New Birth: From Bullinger to Edwards, Missio Apostolica 7, no. 2 (November 1999): 102-99; Resurrection and the Knowledge of God, Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 226-32; Grace and Discipleship in the Kingdom of God, Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 356-63; The Presence of Jesus the Christ, Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 479-85; Quaternity or Patrology?, Pro Ecclesia 23, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 46-52.

I have twice enjoyed presenting lectures before the enormous audiences of the annual Lutheran CORE/NALC Theological Conference that were later published in the above-­referenced ALPB Books and are reworked into this book. I am grateful for this work of Lutheran CORE/NALC that sustains Lutheran theology with an orthodox and ecumenical intention on a narrow pathway between predominating alternatives of fundamentalism and liberalism. Though sorely tested, I remain a member of the ELCA and accordingly, the bulk of the material in Chapter Two was first presented as lectures to the Washington, D.C. Metro Synod, ELCA, gathering at Williamsburg, Virginia, October 23-25, 2012. I am grateful to Bishop Richard Graham for his invitation and the gathered pastors and other church workers for their interest and hospitality on that occasion. Since I have conceived my books of recent years as a series of studies leading up to this system of theology, I have not repeated here the detailed argumentation that backs up some of my more controversial claims, but regularly referred the reader to those texts.

With respect to inclusive language, I endorse gender inclusivity, but not gender eliminationism, with respect to our common humanity by the strategy in English of alternating the nonspecific third-­person personal pronouns between he and she, him and her. With respect to the divine, I defer to the primary language of faith in the Scriptures and the ecclesiastical terminology based on it that is useful for articulating the strong Trinitarian personalism advanced in this system of theology. Those whose way forward may be blocked by an obstacle here are urged to skip ahead to the Note on Gendered Language at the end of Chapter One and the Excursus following on Perpetua and the Fatherhood of God. My intention throughout is hardly to idolize the masculine gender but to signal a specialized usage in theology for the God who is the Father of the Son in the Holy Spirit by capitalizing Him or His when pronouns are used in reference to the Trinitarian persons. The divine nature, being nothing but a conceptual abstraction from the Three who are the Beloved Community, could be referred to in the neuter gender, as an It. But such an alienating innovation makes too much of a pseudo-­problem that is for the most part an unfortunate distraction from relevant matters, such as the strong ecumenical case for the ordination of women made in the excursus in Chapter Four or the indication of co-­humanity in marriage as the structure of love working for justice in the world argued in Chapter Eight.

I am grateful to Dean Richard Smith of Roanoke College for granting me sabbatical leave in academic year 2012-13 for work on this project. As usual, the Roanoke College library and particularly Mr. Jeffrey Martin of the Interlibrary Loan Service performed magic on my behalf with efficiency and grace. I am once again happily indebted to Norman Hjelm for his work in bringing this work to the light of day and for the vote of confidence William B. Eerdmans Jr. invested in me. I am grateful to David Cottingham for his work in copyediting the book, and Jenny Hoffman and Linda Bieze of the Eerdmans staff have been a pleasure to work with. My delight of forty some years has to my delight not been entirely gracious about her husband’s absentminded preoccupations during the time of writing this book. I am very happy now to render to her my public thanks for her patience. This book is dedicated to my daughter, Sarah Ellen Hinlicky Wilson.

Christmas 2014

Paul R. Hinlicky

Abbreviations

ANF Ante-­Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979).

BA Paul R. Hinlicky, Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013).

BC The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000).

CD Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 volumes, 13 parts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1974).

DC Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

HD Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, complete in seven volumes, bound as four, trans. N. Buchanan (New York: Dover, 1961).

LBC Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom, with a Foreword by Mickey L. Mattox (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

LW Luther’s Works: The American Edition, 58+ volumes (St. Louis: Concordia / Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-­).

NPNF Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, ed. Philip Schaff and H. Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979).

PNT Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Theology from Luther through Leibniz (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

RPTD Brent Adkins and Paul R. Hinlicky, Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze: A New Cartography (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

SF Dennis Bielfeldt, Mickey Mattox, and Paul R. Hinlicky, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).

Jenson, ST Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 volumes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Pannenberg, ST Systematic Theology, 3 volumes, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991-98).

TCT Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 volumes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

Tillich, ST Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

WA D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Bohlau, 1883-­).

Introduction

Almost twenty years ago Robert W. Jenson boldly attempted to reinvent the discipline of systematic theology by calling attention to a profound anomaly: theology, the knowledge of God in the Body of Christ, becomes impossible in a divided church. For divided knowledge is no longer knowledge but the clash of partisan opinions. Consequently, theology in any form that is conceived for the purpose of perpetuating (or that even out of mere habit de facto perpetuates) the contrastive identity (Radner) machineries of sectarian Christianities is to be rigorously repented and purged. So far as possible, theology is now to be undertaken in a counterfactual act of faith that anticipates the eschatological unity of the Body of the risen Lord; theology ceases to be denominational or confessional or contextual and becomes radically ecumenical as also eschatological in intention.¹ In today’s hindsight of the ecumenical winter that set in just about the time when Jenson’s Systematic Theology appeared, his initial proposal itself seems paradoxical. How is one to know that the Body of Christ is in fact divided, if the knowledge of God, by which one would make such a judgment, has itself become uncertain under the conditions of the divided church?

The difficulty in view here is the same one evident at the heart of the 2003 Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, a document sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology under the directorship of Jenson with his colleague, Carl Braaten. In calling the churches back to the doctrinal discipline of the undivided church of the post-­apostolic era, we read the following diagnosis: In every separated community the temptation has been to base the community’s life on its ‘distinctives,’ that is, on the features of its faith and life that differentiate it from other Christian communities. The apostolic faith confessed in the ecumenical creeds, intended to differentiate the church from truly spurious ‘Christian’ communities, is pushed to the margins of communal self-­description.² Truly spurious? The petitio principii contained in this statement is obvious: How do we discriminate the truly spurious from the authentically Christian without continuing in theology by way of critical judgments on Christian identity, as instantiated in the very ecumenical creeds to which appeal was here made? In that case, however, must we not ask whether semi-­Arian Origenists and Marcellian modalists, Nestorians and Monophysites, were not victims of the classical theological way that made judgments? Were not putatively Christian communities divided on the basis of ecumenical or orthodox distinctives that on examination are just as partisan as the presumably less worthy denominational distinctives that are dividing Christian communities today? On the other hand, if for the sake of the gospel and the true unity of the church in the gospel, we cannot in fact avoid making such divisive judgments of doctrine, then or now, must we not discover in, with, and under the sinfully divided church (then as now) access to the knowledge of God by which to make such judgments? If so, the question for the project of reinventing systematic theology that Jenson attempted is only whether we can do just this work of discriminating judgment better than we have heretofore. That requires much greater clarity today about the epistemic access of the theological subject than has been the case, even in self-­consciously orthodox and ecumenical circles, heretofore.

Owning up to this difficulty, the present effort continues in Jenson’s project. Indeed, the reasons that moved him then are still pressing, if not more so today. Yet this system of theology continues in the project at the cost of revisions from the way Jenson conducted his experiment, which may make it doubtful that what follows is continuous with his own endeavor. Specifically, it is not the case, according to the present effort, that theology in the tradition of Luther³ either would deny the name of church to all but [those of] his or her own allegiance or desecrate the theological enterprise.⁴ And because this is not true of theology in the tradition of Luther, it is also not true of any theology that intends orthodoxy, that is, teaching that walks true to the gospel (Gal. 2:14) whether in the tradition of Calvin, or of Augustine or of Thomas, or of Athanasius and the Cappadocians — even as I shall try to show (at least representatively) in what follows, of a Menno Simons or a Theodore of Mopsuestia. Jenson, if I may put it this way, got ahead of himself (and many others) with too draconian a cleavage between the broken churches as in simple and obvious contradiction to the one, true (just so, eschatological) church that is the total Christ. Readers will recognize how much the present work derives by way of intention and example from Jenson’s Systematic Theology. This makes our differences — few though they are (aside from differences of style and intellectual orientation that arise from being separated by a generation) — interesting and perhaps also significant.

The conflicted discipline of systematic theology today is torn between two epistemic requirements: one is the rational demand for a truthful acknowledgment of historical and contextual particularity, and the other is the equally rational demand for systematicity, i.e., internal coherence as also coherence with other truths to which theologians hold. Dogma and system are terms that correspond to these two demands respectively; each term has a correspondingly suspect aura in the eyes of the other. Dogma denotes the positivity of the particular, no matter whether we take the particular in theology as revealed truth (the deposit of faith) or facts (the historical Jesus) or contextual requirements (Bruce Fairchild Barton’s 1925 The Man That Nobody Knows, contextually rendering Jesus as Salesman to a gilded age, if I may use this admittedly flippant example). System denotes the general, the essence of the phenomena, or the logic by which ideas relate coherently to each other, again, no matter whether we take the system in theology as God’s self-­knowledge revealed and shared with creatures, or the pattern of development discerned in the history of salvation, or an agenda for humanization set by the progress of secular history. At worst, dogmatics revels in the chaos of pure experience according to a preference and selection from its manifold that can only be subjectively asserted, not warranted; systematicity, equally at its worst, forces all evidence, biblical and experiential, into the Procrustean bed of its own privileged insight or a priori scheme or totalizing logic. Ironically, both end in cul-­de-­sacs — the first in dogmatism, the second in ideology. In either case, theology suffers rigor mortis. The first demand leaves the world to the devil for the sake of purity and erects strong borders against the outside world. The second resolves the faith into the existing world for the sake of the unity of truth. Neither side succeeds in walking true to the gospel’s claim to truth (Gal. 2:14). The would-­be purity of the positive is always betrayed by hidden acts of selection that arbitrarily privilege some over other items and so construct its dogmas; the unity of truth aspired to in the system is likewise always betrayed as someone-­in-­particular’s unification of truths. The question of epistemic access is left in obscurity in either case. It is to be stressed in the debased climate of today that both so-­called liberal and so-­called conservative theologies can fall on either side of this fault line. Indeed, the binary liberal-­conservative in this respect is itself highly misleading. Conflicts in theology between locals trying to preserve community against the acids of criticism and cosmopolitans trying to force idiosyncratic forms of life into an assigned place in a conceptual totality and universal language alike betray theology into purposes that are not genuinely theological. The purpose of theology is to know God. Critical dogmatics, as this author conceives his own reinvention of systematic theology, is an intentional effort to leave this debilitating syndrome with its accustomed binaries behind.

Two little notes already now, then, by way of introduction about the kinds of argumentation found in what follows. First, newcomers to systematic theology are often put off by what reads to them as but strings of apodictic assertion, that is, lofty announcements abstractly asserting identities and relationships by means of the verb to be. To make up an example that only slightly caricatures: "God is unknowable. But to know God as unknowable is itself to know something important about God. What we know is that God is beyond objectification, so we cannot make an object of Him and use Him for our purposes. That God does not let Himself be used for our purposes is itself a revelation of the true deity of God. But as a theological formulation, even the insight that the true God is unknowable is in danger of being treated as a piece of objective information like other information. . . ." So an argument in theology seems to circle back around on itself in the end; it then goes on to repeat the same circle in ever-­growing subtlety. Yet the newcomer is well advised to get used to this kind of argumentation and to understand what is going on in such apparently vacuous circles of predication, lacking any action verbs, when it proves fruitful and illuminating. What is going on, if we do not lose sight of the thing in the world under discussion, is analytical argumentation, i.e., argument that works to unpack dense and apparently nonsensical assertions about something in the world from the tradition of theological discourse (such as, God is unknowable) by teasing out its implications (we know God as unknowable) by patient, hence also tedious analysis. Much of systematic theology operates in this argumentative fashion, making explicit what lies packed within the dense assertions of faith received from the Bible and Christian experience.

Second, there is another feature that often puts off newcomers to systematic theology, namely, its technical vocabulary. Because systematic theology receives its material in the form of the aforementioned dense assertions from the Bible and Christian experience, like, say, God is the Father almighty, or His Son is Jesus Christ our Lord, or the Spirit who is holy is the Spirit of the aforementioned Father and Son, it inherits also its own long tradition of in-­house technical language that developed in order efficiently to analyze the material and debate the problems given with it. Of course, some of this traditional ecclesiastical terminology may encode profound error and may prejudice inquiry in misleading ways. The terminology provides at most a normed norm (norma normata), subject always to the test whether it illuminates the thing itself (the norma normans, the norming norm), namely, the gospel of God. On top, then, of acquiring literacy in Scripture, this ecclesiastical vocabulary with its questionable utility must simply be mastered to achieve fluency, let alone competency in theology. Just like law and medicine in the Western tradition, this specialized theological dictionary is composed of Latin terms and phrases, as just illustrated;⁵ these technical terms are used in what follows, with an English translation provided in parentheses upon the first appearance of any term or phrase.

Upon reading a systematic theology, the reader should be left hungering and thirsting for more. That is so for two reasons. First, systematic theology is largely concerned with putting a toolkit together for knowing God in the practices of Christian life.⁶ While theology is also a practice of Christian life, so that knowing God occurs in the study of theology, theology is rightly focused on epistemic concerns that cannot, and should never be thought to, substitute for the holistic practices of Christian life, such as hearing the sermon as from the Lord, or joining the Eucharist to commune with Christ and His saints, or pastoral conversation and mutual consolation, or prayer, personal and communal, that is bold to address the King of the Universe as our Father, or works of mercy, or lives of love at work in structuring justice in hope for the world, and so on. Systematic theology seeks to clarify and better enable such practices, but learning about them is no substitute for practicing them. If systematic theology succeeds, it makes readers hungry to use its tools for better living the Christian life in these manifold ways of knowing God.

Second, the production of a system of theology, it seems, can intend one of two purposes, depending upon the assessment of the spiritual situation in a missiological context. Either it intends a consolidation of existing perspectives and practices, or it intends a paradigm shift in the discipline that institutes a series of practical reforms and provokes a new research program. As announced above, in following Jenson’s lead, the latter is the intention of the present endeavor. Jenson’s great innovation was totally to dispense with the traditional rubric in systematic theology, De Deo (concerning God as such). He regarded consideration of God as such the Trojan Horse of the unbaptized deity of Greek metaphysics making its way undetected into Christian theology that ought instead arrive at its conception of this most basic and important term in theology, God, strictly and rigorously from the gospel by which God introduces Himself to human beings as the Father of the Son in the Holy Spirit. The present effort continues in Jenson’s path here in that it offers no special chapter, not only regarding God as such, but also on the Trinity as such (unless we take the Conclusion of this book as such a chapter).

There are two reasons for this. First, Trinity is an abstract term for, a conceptualization of, the Father of the Son in the Spirit whom we meet in the gospel. The danger of treating the Trinity as such is the danger of turning this abstraction into a thing in itself. This is a danger for a number of reasons. In terms of the organization of a systematic theology, it is a danger because when we treat the Trinity as a thing in itself, the chapter on it in the system does, as it were, all the work in settling upon a concept. The ironic result is that we then go on in other chapters to discuss other topics, leaving the Trinity behind. Rather, we intend that the doctrine of the Trinity permeate the whole presentation so that the whole range of topics discussed in theology should be formed and illumined by it. That means in turn that the entire work is a presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity. This system’s doctrine of the Trinity can only be understood in taking it in as a whole, culminating, then, in the concluding chapter. Second, there is at work in what follows another decision arising for similar reasons as the first, namely, to treat the Reformation’s chief article of Justification by Faith in the same way. In this presentation, Justification by Faith does not get a separate chapter (nor does its cognate doctrine, the proper distinction of Law and Gospel). The reason is that this teaching should be (1) integrated with the doctrine of the Trinity, so that (2) it too is at work through the whole range of the topics discussed in theology. The separated treatment of the article on Justification, which forces an abstract polarization between imputative and effective righteousness, in other words, is part and parcel of the contrastive identity machinery of divided Christianity. The decision, then, to treat Justification integrally leads to the chief innovation of presentation in this system of theology, namely, to begin with the Third Article of the Creed and its provision of epistemic access and move, so to say, backwards to the First Article so that it is clear from the outset all the way to the conclusion that it is faith, that gift of the Holy Spirit (Luther) that forms the theological subject to know Jesus Christ and confess Him as the Son before His Father who is in heaven. In this formulation, moreover, the integration of the doctrines of justification and of the Trinity is succinctly indicated.

Tedious discussions of theological method, to be sure, have done more to destroy interest in theology than any other invention of academic theology. But so also have the traditional theological polemics of the brutal (Radner) Christian past and present that our modern preoccupation with method arose to overcome, already with scholasticism as we shall discuss in detail in connection with Anselm of Canterbury. One must grant this much to the modern preoccupation, tedious as it is: methodological self-­consciousness in theology aims critically to disallow irresponsible talk about God, of which the religion-­weary world is all too full. Even so, as a young theologian once confided to me: I decided to study theology to learn about God, but all I was taught was what other theologians thought and how they thought — not even necessarily about God. Necessary evil in this respect that discussion of method is — thrice removed from the matter itself as systematic reflection on the practical reflection organic to the Word of God received in faith in its mission to the nations — the reader who is urgently and existentially interested in the matter of theology in distinction from its method may well defer the reading of Chapter One and proceed at once to Chapter Two. But that reader might also brave reading from Chapter One the subsection The Cognitive Claim, which for heuristic reasons succinctly foreshadows the work as a whole by exploring its basic thesis or claim to truth. That reading may provide enough theological meat to fortify resolve for the continued slog through the methodological discussions in the remainder of Chapter One. One will in any case eventually have to return to these preliminary questions. For theology today must give an account of what hope survives after full post-­Christendom acknowledgment of the brutalities of our hitherto fractious unities (Radner). In just this difficult way, theology takes responsibility before our neighbors, and before God, for the manifestly dangerous act of speaking of God. That is what is at stake in discussions of theological method.

Regarding theological polemics, however, one must sharply distinguish between ad hominem, i.e., personal, attacks that substitute for an argument by distracting from evidence and logic given in support of a claim to truth with attacks on persons, and critique, the best of which rigorously advances the argument about the claim to truth by a profounder appeal to the common matter that is of concern to all in an argument. Ad hominem is not only a logical fallacy; it is sinful and a disgrace upon the matter that concerns theology, the coming of the Beloved Community.⁷ Because in theology it is not only a matter of an author’s scholarly reputation, however, but also religiously of what Paul Tillich called one’s ultimate concern, it is not always easy in the thrall of theological passion to respect this important distinction in practice, as George Lindbeck famously illustrated with his parable of the Crusader who yelps Jesus is Lord as he lops off the head of the infidel.⁸ As responsible talk about God (Jüngel), theology cannot suffer such fools gladly, who speak irresponsibly and hence destructively of God; but neither can it suffer another kind of fool, the coward who remains silent when testimony of God is required. Thus theological science is and must be critical dogmatics (precisely not dogmatism) in that the subjectivity of repentance and faith can never be taken for granted but must constantly be questioned and put to the test, as it is the very place in the world of theology’s epistemic access; indeed, when repentance and faith are taken for granted as the secured possession of a human habit, theology transforms into religious ideology and becomes blasphemous self-­justification, no matter how orthodox it claims to be. The method of theology (Part One) in the acquisition of theological subjectivity (Part Two) to know the object of theology (Part Three) in timely confession in the world before the audience of theology (Part Four) thus structures the presentation of this system of theology.

Finally, by way of introduction, let us now sketch out in advance the course that lies before us. Part One of this work treats the problem of the knowledge of God and the nature of the theological discipline in two chapters. In Chapter One theology is defined as critical dogmatics; this terminology intends to locate the present proposal on knowing God beyond the characteristic modern alternative of arbitrary and authoritarian dogmatism on the one side and the loss of classical and substantive content to the demand for systematic rationality on the other. It achieves this new location for theology by arguing that theology as critical dogmatics sustains a single cognitive claim regarding the identification of God for the interpretation of experience on the way to the Beloved Community. This claim to truth is provisionally warranted by the principle of parsimony in that it accounts for the greatest data with the simplest and thus most elegant explanation. Contextual considerations — themselves constructed by the foregoing claim regarding the knowledge of God and in turn reinforcing its plausibility — depict the spiritual and intellectual situation in Euro-­America today. The claim here is that theology is undertaken in a complex and uncertain situation that may be described as both post-­Christendom and postmodern. How this difficult situation provides a new opportunity for theology to retrieve and advance the scriptural, patristic, and Reformation legacies is explored in Chapter Two. It develops preliminary clarifications of basic terms and concepts in theology taken up already in Chapter One. It asks a series of questions about the possibility of God, the necessity of Christ, the faith that justifies, and the power of the Scriptures to sanctify. This inquiry establishes the sense of certain usages peculiar to this system of theology and also of traditional notions deployed in sometimes-­unfamiliar ways.

The treatment of the doctrine of the Spirit in Part Two of this work likewise divides into two chapters. The first inquiry into theological subjectivity requires select but detailed probes into the history of this controverted topic in order to establish the thesis that it consists not in baptismal signification alone nor in religious experience as such, but in baptismal union with, and so conformation to, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. This union occurs by the Spirit’s unification of watery tomb and the Word concerning Jesus’ cross and resurrection. The second chapter in this part on the Spirit as Creator God permits more succinct and systematic argumentation for recognition of the Spirit’s work in rendering theological subjectivity as that is grounded in the Spirit’s immanent role in the life of the Three as the Unifier in love of the Father and the Son, the Sealer of their Beloved Community.

The Holy Spirit in time unifies the sign, the man Jesus of Nazareth, with the thing signified, the eternal Son of God, the Christ of Israel in order to create repentance and nurture faith in God the heavenly Father in those to whom, and for whom, Jesus comes in the Word and sacraments concerning Him. This work of the Spirit first becomes manifest in the anointing of Jesus at His baptism that he perform faithfully His messianic calling, although it was intimated already from conception by His birth from Mary Theotokos (bearer of God). As anointed in the Spirit, hence as the Anointed One, the Messiah of Israel, Jesus is the subject of faith. It is He who in the power of the Spirit believed in God the heavenly Father on behalf of those to whom, and for whom, He came. The faith that forms the latter as a believer thus comes by the same Spirit through baptism into Christ’s baptism of the cross and resurrection; in this way the Spirit creates the theological subject to live the life of Jesus by believing the faith of Jesus. Thus baptism by water and the Spirit is the unification of the believer with Spirit-­anointed Jesus as faith in His vindicated faith. As baptism is a union of water and the Word by the Spirit, the theological subject is itself a union of sign and thing signified by the Spirit in a variety of connections: of sinner and the new birth, of believer and the Body of Christ, of this groaning earth of the common body and the coming of the Beloved Community in the redemption of our bodies.

The Holy Spirit unifies the sign and the thing signified in the world, whether for faith or for offense, on the way to the coming of the Beloved Community. The Spirit fittingly performs this work in time and space, in that within the divine and eternal life the Spirit unifies in love the Son, who is the image and expression of His Father, with the Father, who is His origin and prototype. While this personal unification in love by the Spirit comes naturally, so to say, that is, spontaneously within the eternal and divine life, the incarnation of the Son by the Spirit into the likeness of sinful flesh precipitates a crisis in the life of God that, if the gospel is to be believed, the same Spirit at length resolves and conciliates by the resurrection of the Crucified Son from the dead. In His temporal and spatial coming from the Father and His vindicated Son, accordingly, the Spirit in mission to the nations unifies the sign and the thing signified in the justification of the ungodly by faith, the new obedience of justified sinners, the gathering of the ecclesia from the nations in and for the mission of the gospel, and at last the resurrection to eternal life at the eschaton of judgment. Until the eschaton of judgment, this unifying work of the Holy Spirit to sanctify the profane conflicts with unholy spirits that would separate what God joins together. Until the eschaton of judgment, the Spirit who is holy is only known in this mortal combat of the Word incarnate against pseudo-­prophets and false messiahs that are false in separating what the Spirit unites.

As with the previous two parts of this work, Christology divides into two chapters. The first inquiry into theological objectivity requires select, but detailed probes into the history of theological objectivity to establish the thesis that it consists not in the ultimately vacuous affirmation of real presence, let alone the unintelligible affirmation of symbolic presence, but consists in the bread of the Eucharist as the body of Christ, when and where the Spirit unifies the sign and the thing signified for repentance and faith (or negatively, for offense in the manducatio indignorum — the eating of the unworthy). The second inquiry in Chapter Six undertakes systematic argumentation for the Christological thesis of a Cyrilian Christ for Augustinian humanity. Jesus Christ can be for us the unity of the sign and the thing signified in the world on the way to the coming of the Beloved Community because within the divine and eternal life the Son is the image of His Father, who is His origin and prototype. The Son corresponds to the Father in receiving His being from Him and returning to the Father the filial sacrifice of thanksgiving that in turn acknowledges the Father as Father. The correspondence of the Father and the Son in the Spirit is the dynamic unity of love that as such constitutes the one being of the Three as an eternal becoming in relation. So it is true to say that the Son incarnate for us is the objectivity of divine love and thus the object of faith to which the theological subject adheres. As this kind of objectivity — of the person who receives and returns love in community — the Son of God’s coming in the flesh inaugurates the Beloved Community and works the creation’s redemption. In this temporal and spatial advent, He comes as prophet who proclaims the imminent reign of God. He comes as priest in the decision of the man Jesus Christ to take responsibility for us before God. His earthly obedience grounds the justification of the ungodly just as His heavenly intercession works the faith and new obedience of justified sinners in the gathering of the ecclesia from the nations that is becoming the righteousness of God in the world. At the last Christ comes as judge of the living and the dead and king of creation. Until the eschaton of judgment, this work of Jesus Christ the Son of God battles structures of malice and injustice, not with sword of steel, but by Word and Spirit.

As previously, Patrology divides into two chapters. The first inquiry into the audience of theology requires a theological exposition of the faith of Jesus in the heavenly Father, given in the form of the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer, it is argued, forms the conscience of theology. But this conscience before the Father who sees in secret is not to be understood in moralistic fashion, like a Freudian superego. As faith in the reconciled God of Hosea 11:9, as faith in the Father, then, who is personally God surpassing God, it is the conscientious faith of Jesus in His own messianic mission as the Son sent from His Father to bear away the sin of the world that love might prevail in creating a community of love. The faith of Jesus is faith, we may say, in the conscience of God that will be revealed in His judgment of mercy at the eschaton of judgment. The second inquiry of this part in Chapter Eight turns to systematic argumentation for the Patrological thesis of God surpassing God in the work of creation destined for redemption and fulfillment.

As formed by the Spirit, the theological subject who knows the object, Jesus Christ the Son of God, publicly acknowledges or confesses this event before the Father on the way to the coming of the Beloved Community. This acknowledgment takes place in the world but before the Father, who is the audience of it. Confession of the faith is the church’s first and foundational act of conscientious responsibility to God for the world. Theology itself is fundamentally misunderstood when these relationships are reversed, however, as if theology were responsible to the world for God. Not only is the latter pretension quite impossible ontologically, in the hubris of such an attempt theology can only end in despair, as may be observed in the deep agnosticism and creeping atheism penetrating the churches of Euro-­America today. The shrill stridency of reaction testifies to the same anxiety, that somehow theology must justify God, or Christian faith in God, when in reality authentic faith justifies God in His judgment, as the eschaton of judgment, and in this spirit of penitence knows that its own talk about God must be justified by God, hence ventured conscientiously. Confusion on these relations is the deep reason why a division of the existing divisions is coming to purify the remnant of Christianity in Euro-­America. Karl Barth’s claim that the "first and basic act of theological work is prayer"⁹ limns this division of the divisions that is coming in that it makes theology accountable to the Father of Jesus Christ, which accountability or its denial is precisely what is at issue in the conflicted discipline of theology today.

In any case, prayerful and conscientious responsibility to God for our speech about God in and for the world in obedience to the divine command not to take the name of the L

ord

in vain is possible because in Jesus Christ God the eternal Father has become our Father too. He becomes so by speaking to us by His Son’s resurrection from the dead for us and sending the Spirit of the resurrection to re-­form us accordingly. Theology that is not such responsible speech about God has no warranted claim to a hearing in communities that would claim the name Christian. Such theologies do not intend orthodoxy.

As God the Father is the eternal origin of the Son and the Spirit, He is also the goal, Omega as well as Alpha.¹⁰ In the Spirit the Son eternally returns to the Father giving Him the praise of His deity and the glory of His self-­surpassing, merciful, and compassionate paternity.¹¹ As this kind of audience — of the person who freely sends and then joyfully receives love’s return in community — God the Father is the eschaton of judgment that makes all things new in the coming of the Beloved Community. In the temporal and spatial beginning from the origin by the divine decree for the sending of the Son to sow, and the reaping of His harvest in the Spirit, God the Father originates the world in a word of command and blessing. This divine command and blessing remain as both a holy demand against usurping structures of malice and injustice and as inviolable promise that continuously issues in creative works of love in justice already now. Until the eschaton of judgment, the Almighty Father makes His rain to fall upon the just and the unjust alike. This hiddenness of His reign is the deep trial of faith in history.

God the Father is God surpassing God, the font of divinity within the eternal life who gives His own being in generating the Son and breathing the Spirit, infinitely to become Father in receiving the Son by the return of the Spirit in personal love. The Son and the Spirit form with the Father the whole to which the Father as person belongs and to which He also answers. The Father is responsible to the Son in the Spirit, thus for sending the Son into the world and anointing Jesus at His baptism with the Spirit to bring near in merciful words and deeds His own approaching reign against its usurpation by structures of malice and injustice. The resurrection of the crucified Son Jesus Christ from the dead, as the Father’s self-­surpassing transit from the wrath of love to the mercy of love, is the conscientious deed of the Father, who recognized His own love in His Son’s love for the world fallen into sinfulness, dead and buried in solidarity with the ungodly. Resolving Athanasius’ divine dilemma, the conscience of God the Father resolves for mercy and by mercy to prevail over wrath to bring about the Beloved Community. In conclusion, the Beloved Community is exposited as the Day of Judgment that forever excludes the excluders and separates the separators; that reveals the co-­equal and eternal Trinity; and thus communicates to each, as harmonized with all others, a place in the eternal life of the eternal Trinity.

That suffices by way of prolepsis in a series of dense assertions to sketch the whole course before us now to be patiently elaborated in what follows.

1. Jenson, ST 1, p. vii.

2. In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 39.

3. I have tried to show how this revision of Lutheran confessionalism is possible in SF, pp. 1-10, 134-52.

4. Jenson, ST 1, p. vii.

5. An invaluable aid is Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1985).

6. For a rich survey, see Inquiring after God: Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Ellen T. Charry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

7. See the Appendix, The Problem of Demonization in Luther’s Apocalyptic Theology, LBC, pp. 379-85.

8. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), p. 66. See SF, pp. 182-83.

9. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), p. 160.

10. It will be noted that in making this claim I am breaking from Jenson’s idealist interpretation of the self-­consciousness of the Trinity that makes the Spirit God the goal of His own being.

11. On this matter, with Pannenberg on the kingdom of God (ST 3, pp. 527-646), even though his case is not patrologically specific enough, and against Jenson’s idea of the Spirit as the imminent futurity of God, as Omega to the Father’s Alpha (e.g., ST 2, p. 339), although his reason for this speculation in the idea that there are a whither and whence, that is to say, a sequence as well as alterity in the divine life, I emphatically affirm.

February 27, 2015 9:21 AM

Part One

Prolegomena

To know God is to enter by repentance and faith into the self-­donation of the Son by the self-­communication of the Spirit for new life before the self-­surpassing Father of the Son on whom he breathes the Spirit.

Chapter One

The Knowledge of God

The Discipline of Theology as Critical Dogmatics

Ostensibly theology is about God and about all that is not God, taken as God’s creatures and created, as Martin Luther taught in the text that best represents his own systematic teaching,¹ in order that God might redeem us and make us holy . . . [by] his Son and Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself.² Such a conception of theology is at once critical and dogmatic: critical because it must, and dogmatic because it can, discern the creative, redeeming, and fulfilling actions of God at work in the world. Yet such a conception of theology cannot be taken for granted today. Perhaps it could never have been taken for granted. While the term theology means knowledge of God, historically speaking theology is a contested discipline that like philosophy³ (or perhaps as part of philosophy!)⁴ is always arguing about its nature and task. And perhaps this is so because any substantive proposal in theology inevitably ventures a claim about the discipline itself, about its task and method — and vice versa, any claim about theological method betrays substantive dogmatic commitments.⁵ In such a contested, not to say conflicted situation, any theology that wants to be responsible to critical readers has to launch its presentation by locating its proposal in the whirl of controversy, old and new, that attends any who dare to speak before God in the world about God in relation to the world. That is the supposition and task of these initial chapters of Part One on preliminary considerations (prologoumena) in systematic theology, or, as I prefer to put it, critical dogmatics.

Judging from the literature, it can seem today that Christian theology is metaphysics or art. That is, theology is presented as putative knowledge of the protological conditions for the possibility of the visible world, as in metaphysics, discovering the divine arche (principle of origin).⁶ Or theology is presented as the construction of symbols giving expression to human experience of the ineffable ground or holy source, as in art. Certainly Christian theology shares a common world — or more primitively, what I will call in the following, a common body — with such metaphysical and aesthetic inquiries. Thus, theology as a discipline bears family resemblances to their claims and corresponding disciplines. For, like the metaphysical quest for the principle of origin of the cosmos or the religious need to figure the sacred grounding of human existence, Christian theology also speaks of the origin when it thinks of the eternal Father of the Son in the Spirit who becomes the Creator of all that is not God in the act of initiating and continuing our time-­space as His creation.

According to the present proposal, however, ecumenical Christian theology in its substantive intention is not only, or even primarily, focused on origins and grounds, but rather pragmatically⁷ and hermeneutically⁸ on the identification of the God of the gospel for the purposes of public confession of and knowing collaboration in His approaching reign.⁹ "We do not in any unmediated way have the gospel that we are to speak; we have it only as we receive it. . . . Theology is an act of interpretation: it begins with a received word and issues in a new word essentially related to the old word. Theology’s question is always: In that we have heard and seen such-­and-­such discourse as gospel, what shall we now say and do that the gospel may again be spoken?"¹⁰ Jenson characteristically spoke of the identification of God in the maelstrom of experience. What follows next attempts to bring out not only the acknowledged hermeneutical method but also epistemically pragmatic features implied by it (in some critical distance from Jenson’s more idealistic proclivities).

Pragmatism here designates an epistemic approach that is rigorously located in the middle of things, barred from seeing (Greek: theoria) either origin or eschaton, but proceeding step by step from the unknown past into the unknown future with the best, i.e., most comprehensive and coherent, account of experience from across the broadest possible spectrum. Hermeneutics here means a style of argument that, while not despising but rather appropriating the logical rigor and precision afforded by more analytical modes of reasoning, holds that theological discourse as historically mediated by tradition from the inaugurating event in time and space can neither be appropriated, understood, critiqued, nor extended apart from probing inquiry into the history of the debate that the cognitive claim to truth has inaugurated. Since any contemporary understanding is itself historically situated, motivated by the concerns of the conscientious interpreter both for the truth-­claim contained in the legacy and for its intelligible transmission and application in the present, tradition is just this debate, what MacIntyre once called an embodied argument.¹¹ Only dead traditionalism presents its material as a fixed, finished deposit to be preserved from the erosion of time. Thus the form of argumentation in what follows will involve selective, but at times extended probes into the history of doctrinal topics as matters of contemporary theological import along the lines of David Friedrich Strauss’s observation that the history of doctrine is its own criticism.

The notion of interpretation calls for further initial comment here. Hegel demonstrated in the opening chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit that any act of understanding that would go beyond reporting sheer sense certainty to say something to others involves the construction of an object by the aid of acts of memory organized in language that enable recognition of the phenomena in the sequence of time transcending the moment of sense certainty. In this way the object of sense is taken to persist through time despite the momentary evidences of its perceived movements and relations; thus its future can be projected. Such acts of memory presuppose, however, communities formed by language by which this construction is made; hence cognition has a