Orthodoxy: You Cannot Return by that Door

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 9:25 am by Robert Hunt

Orthodoxy: You Cannot Return by that Door 2016-04-29T09:25:26-06:00 Robert Hunt

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Steve Rankin, laying out an agenda for scholars concerned with orthodoxy says this: “First, we need to examine our metaphysics related to specific topics. Is the world a system closed to divine action and divine speaking or do we really think that God is actively involved in our world? If so, how do we recognize divine action? Is God available to us in this natural world, or should we be wholehearted deists? What divine actions do we believe are possible?”(https://umorthodoxy.org/2014/09/19/why-united-methodist-scholars-for-christian-orthodoxy/)

This agenda item is hardly new. Immanuel Kant “Copernican revolution in philosophy” and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s addresses to the cultured despisers became known and began to influence Protestant theology in Europe and North America the question of whether and how God can be active and reveal God’s self in our world has been a burning issue for Christians. Fundamentalists and their close kin Evangelicals defined themselves as proponents of “supernatural” Christianity as opposed to modernism with its location of both revelation and miracles in the immanent realm of human affections. Indeed Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism were born out of a defense of the Bible as an infallible/inerrant/supernatural revelation and with it the truth of the miracles of Jesus.

By the 20th century in Europe Barth thundered in his Dogmatics for an orthodoxy centered on the sovereignty of God and God’s presence in the world through the Word. But one need not read the whole 7 volumes. His introduction to Feuerbach makes clear what he sees at stake between his theological vision and that of post-Schleiermachian liberalism. And Bultman answered with a call to demythologize the scripture so as to expose a kerygma beneath the cultural accretions of a pre-modern world, to disclose a proclamation credible in a post-Enlightenment era. Because the cultured despisers of religion were still abroad, and growing in number.

I cut my theological teeth on these issues as youth in a UM church that like so many had a liberal clergy and an evangelical Sunday School. So we heard preaching on Tilllich and Niebuhr and met Hal Lindsey and Josh McDowell in Sunday School while we read Lewis and Chesterton at home. And yes, at UT I took a class under Hartshorne and classes with Ogden at Perkins. I even read Carlos Castaneda. It was all about metaphysics.

And that was now 5 decades ago. Nor were things significantly advanced during the years that I taught in evangelical seminaries overseas. There we read more F.F. Bruce, J.I. Packer and John Stott than Carl F.H. Henry, but we still preached and taught “Between Two Worlds” and worked and wondered amidst questions of where and how they met. And in the center of it all, coming again and again, was the question of authority. Still unresolved.

The real problem, how can you pry apart the human articulation of revelation and the human interpretation of revelation, is epistemological not metaphysical. And you must find an answer before you can meaningfully address metaphysical issues.

In any case the metaphysical question has been beat to death and no flaming phoenix has arisen from its corpse to illuminate the church of Jesus Christ. Rankin knows where he, and his scholars, stand on this issue. They are believers in good old fashioned “supernatural” Christianity. And they, and better theologians than they, can show that it is a coherent metaphysical view if you believe. What they have not shown with any convicting level of credibility is that it adds one iota of information about how to be human and what it means to be human to those who don’t believe.

I don’t belittle them for this. Jesus himself and his spirit-filled apostles couldn’t muster the arguments to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, and the Jews at least lived in their same cultural world and understood their arguments! The world of the modern West has grown so far from its Christian antecedents that the language of supernatural Christianity is barely comprehensible. (The great thing about being a missionary for 20 years among people who were not American, or Christian, and didn’t speak English, is that I learned how to not take for granted that anything I said was actually being understood. I’ve recently published research on just that in the Handbook of Popular Spiritual Movements in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Takeaway: what the catechumens learned wasn’t necessarily what the catechists were teaching.)

Saint Augustin may be a better evangelist for a modern non-believer than Billy Graham and his successors. At least he wasn’t gathering in the last dead wood from the ancient forest of belief in hopes of lighting a fire, but was seeking out seedlings limber enough to transplant into God’s own woods.

If a UM Orthodoxy is to emerge as a credible system within which to believe and witness to contemporary society it needs to face a far deeper challenge in our culture than metaphysics and authority.

As Charles Taylor puts it, our current secularity, “consists of new conditions of belief; it consists in a new shape to the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief; in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed.” . . .”The main feature of this new context is that it puts an end to the naive acknowledgment of the transcendent, or of goals or claims which go beyond human flourishing. . . . Naivete is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever.” (loc 364-369 Kindle Edition, A Secular Age)

Taylor goes on to point out that we still have a yearning for that naivete, that sense that we are yearning still to be enveloped in the great chain of being that lies golden around God’s feet. We wish, at least sometimes, that our lives were porous so that the invisible forces of the transcendent realm flowed through and within us. We wish that we could have that old time religion that was good for Paul and Silas and would be good enough for us. We wish that we could slip through the wardrobe door.

But we can’t. It is unavailable. Between us and God is a barrier of constant buffered self-consciousness. Indeed, the very act of scholars gathering to discuss the creeds and try to reconstruct for themselves and the church something called “orthodoxy” tells us that what was once given by faith has become an intellectual task. Where once the church spoke the creeds; and in speaking believed and in believing spoke we now find ourselves forced to think, to interpret, and to place ever more words between ourselves, God, and our fellow believers. Because our minds ever interpose themselves between the words and their meaning.

As with the Biblical witness, now buried beneath a thousand layers of critical reflection, we have become archaeologists, trying to recover and resuscitate a standpoint and a stance that will rise from the graveyard of modernity within which the old orthodoxy has been buried.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Not all of us of course. We are not all moderns. In a tiny, ancient church in Macedonia, overlooking one of the world’s most ancient lakes, I observed as our tour guide, the group having slipped outside into the sunlight, slipped quietly back inside and lit three candles in front of an icon of Mary. When she turned and saw me in the narrow door way she said. “For my mother.” I asked, “Is she still living?” “Of course,” she replied. “She was baptized.”

Of course. For her the icon was a window into a world that through a thousand such windows, and the wisteria twining on the ancient stones, and through her own subtle hopes and dreams, would always make itself known at a level beyond and beneath all rational thought. Her mother, and the Virgin, and all the saints, and Christ himself were present there for her.

I could see them only reflected in the light in her eyes. And my group, alas, were too busy asking about ancient wars and symbols and the gruesome details of martyrdoms to see even that.

It is worth remembering that at the root of doxy is doxa, glory, or praise. The doxology in modern worship isn’t a creed, it is the praise of the Triune God. And before orthodoxy meant “right belief” or “correct doctrine” it meant “right praise,” the true glorification of the living God.

It seems to me unlikely that getting our metaphysics right will give us a standpoint from which we can see a path out of the the wilderness, or better, the dungheap of modernity. That has been tried for a century, and has failed. Within our irreversible secularity the very process of metaphysical reasoning turns every icon into a mirror in which we see only the reflection of our own minds at work.

Better, I think, to embark on a different kind of pilgrimage, to seek an altar long forgotten, to light three candles, to say a novena for our own souls, and then wait silently for God to open the window once again.

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