The Bible Reconsidered and a Divided Church

Last updated on: September 28, 2016 at 9:44 am by Robert Hunt

The Bible Reconsidered and a Divided Church 2016-09-28T09:44:23-06:00 Robert Hunt

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It may not seem controversial today, but I suspect that a single idea, heilsgeschichte, has led to an important divide in contemporary Christian theology.

On one level this German term simply means “salvation history” and can be taken to refer to what is easily noted in reading the Bible. Some biblical authors had a strong sense that God’s saving activity was being worked out in history. What else would account for the vast historical narrative that makes up half of the Jewish Scriptures if not its role as an exposition of God’s plan for Israel? In the New Testament Paul in his letters, and the books of Luke-Acts equally make use of “salvation history” as a means of elucidating the meaning of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

In short, as a means of reflecting theologically upon God’s relationship with the world salvation history has been around a long time.

But using the German term heilsgeschichte isn’t just a theological conceit. In the 19th and 20th centuries German scholars, followed by those in the English speaking world began to use the term heilsgeschichte as a fundamental organizing principle for interpreting the Bible. And this in turn leads to a shift in understanding both God and salvation.

To see this we might begin with Calvin’s Institutes, which preceded the idea of heilsgeschichte by three centuries. Calvin organizes the institutes around the four affirmations of belief in the Apostles Creed: 1. I believe in God the Father Almighty, 2. And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, 3. I believe in the Holy Spirit 4. I believe in the Catholic Church.

To the extent that Calvin drew on the Bible it was as a system of doctrine discovered within its various literary forms. The static creed which provided their organizing principle was itself derived from particular demands of reading and understanding the Biblical witness that prevailed in the early centuries of Christianity. And those in turn were based on the cultural ways of knowing through which those Christians comprehended their experience of Jesus as the Christ and proclaimed the good news to others in their cultural milieu.

These ways of knowing were not, it must be noted, necessarily indigenous to the books of the Bible. The various genres of literature identifiable in the Bible represent different ways through which people over a variety of cultures and ages have known God. And the canon of the Bible itself wasn’t formed on the basis of a single way of knowing that unified these books, but on the basis of their presumed origin in the witness of the apostles.

Nonetheless, once the creeds were in place as a primary means by which Christians understood their faith, the Bible would be read through the lens of their doctrinal assertions. And in the time of Calvin and later with the rise of modernity this tendency was greatly strengthened as Christianity conformed to an epistemology based around logically related propositional statements. Christian theology would become propositional and systematic.

However, with the discovery of heilsgeschichte in modern theological assessments of the Bible, a new organizing principle for the Biblical witness emerges. And this allows a new way of interpreting the Biblical presentation of the nature of God, creation, and humanity. Instead of describing God primarily in terms of static qualities such as omnipotence, omniscience, and holiness, the Bible read as heilsgeschichte shifts to focus on relational qualities such as love, mercy, wrath, and grace, qualities that are revealed through historical interactions rather than logical inter-relationships. The two understandings of God are not necessarily incompatible, but they are different.

Similarly humanity is described less in terms of static attributes such as sinfulness or free will and more in relational terms such as alienation and freedom. And following this salvation is described less in terms of an eternally valid transaction completed once for all; terms such as justification and imputed or imparted righteousness, and in more historical/relational terms such as liberation and sanctification.

As importantly God’s nature comes to be seen through the teleological lens of God’s desire that all creation be renewed and all humankind saved. God’s sovereignty is exercised through history toward its fulfillment rather than beyond history through predestination and the restoration of creation’s original holiness.

In short heilsgeschichte can become a new governing sensibility about how humans understand themselves in relation to God, and how they understand God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This understanding is not necessarily in conflict with the dogmatic propositions of the creeds. After all, at the core of the creeds is God incarnate in human history. The experience of Jesus Christ and its articulation has never been simply a-historical.

Yet there is a difference between a faith whose self-understanding is articulated in terms of unchanging beliefs, and a faith who’s self-understanding is lived out as a participant in a divine drama that is still unfolding. One will tend to be, as the long history of reformed theology has proven, conservative; constantly seeking to maintain the social and cultural framework within which belief is most thoroughly integrated. The other will tend to be open to and even welcoming of cultural and social change and difference as the necessary result of God’s ongoing engagement in human affairs.

From another angle what the concept of heilsgeschichte does for the working pastor/theologian is provide an alternative way of conceptualizing the unity of the Biblical witness and thus the way in which the individual parts fit together in a coherent whole. A big narrative has plenty of room for a variety of different literary genres. On the other hand a coherent dogmatic framework leads to forced and even impossible hermeneutics in many Biblical genres. What do you make of a book about God that has books in which God isn’t even mentioned? In a divine drama the main character doesn’t always need to be on stage, but God’s absence in books whose supposed purpose is to elucidate the character of God is harder to explain at a popular level.

It seems to me that this distinction is playing out in the divisions found in the Christian church today. Almost any American pastor trained in mainline seminaries from the 1960’s onward was exposed to the concept of heilsgeschichte and the possibilities it offered for placing individual Biblical texts in the larger context of an overarching Biblical narrative. It provided an approach which, relative to static orthodoxy, seemed refreshingly attuned to the rise of narrative constructions of human personhood and progressive understandings of human history. And perhaps most importantly it suggested creative new approaches to worship and preaching.

So it appears to me that the difference between living as a participant in a divine drama and living as a believer in divine truth is, if not necessarily a distinction, a potential fork in the road for Christian self-understanding. And it equally appears that the great movement of at least popular Christianity has divided at just that point. Whether today’s theological engineers can bring these divergent paths together, or whether they even wish to do so, remains to be seen.

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