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Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies God Death of to I: Hegel Theology ST503 Contemporary - Transcript Rights Reserved Contemporary Theology I: Theology Contemporary Contemporary Theology I: ST503 Hegel to Death of God Theologies LESSON 23 of 24 Death of God Theologies John S. Feinberg, Ph.D. Experience: Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. At the end of my last lecture, I began to discuss Paul Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, and the Death of God Theology that it represents. I want to pick things up where I left it last time and continue to explain his thinking and then to move on to another theologian toward the end of our discussion and see his form of Death of God Theology. But before we do any of that, let’s bow again for a word of prayer. Father, we thank you so much that you are a God who does exist. You are personal. You do care about each one of us. Lord, we know that You love us; we know that You exist, and we are so thankful that we can claim You as our God. Father, as we look at the thought of some who are not sure about who You are and what You are, and whether You exist at all, we are so thankful for the personal relationship that we have with You through your Son, Jesus Christ. Help us now as we study again. May we understand what these thinkers are saying, why they are saying it, and what exactly they mean. We pray all of these in Christ’s precious name. Amen. As we began to look at van Buren’s thinking, we noted that he says we have to realize that the 20th century is a different world than the 1st century AD. We’re living at a different time, we’re living at a different period in man’s understanding of the world, and we just simply have a different mindset than people did at the times when Scripture was written. And the real trick, according to van Buren is to continue to be a Christian and yet to hold on to a belief, a religion which is stated in terms that are foreign for 20th century men and women. And the trick is to figure out how to bring our religion into a contemporary frame of reference so that we can talk about things in ways that are intelligible to modern men and women and yet still remain Christian. You remember that van Buren suggested that we need to learn things from people like Bonhoeffer, people like Antony Flew, people like Bultmann, and specifically he elaborated Bultmann’s Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies 1 of 14 © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved. Lesson 23 of 24 Death of God Theologies thinking and reactions to it, and he told us that we need to adapt and adopt something from all of these thinkers. We need to focus on the emphasis of Karl Barth that says that Christianity has to focus on Christ. We have to, on the other hand, take seriously the concerns of people like Schubert Ogden, who say that we have to state our Christian beliefs in ways that modern men and women can understand. But beyond all of that, van Buren’s specific contribution is to say that we’re going to get an awful lot of help in this whole project if we take seriously the work of linguistic analysts and see what they would teach us about the very meaning of our religious language. As I mentioned to you right at the end of my last lecture, the heart, so to speak, of van Buren’s proposal is in his chapter four, where he takes up the issue of the analysis of theological language and he shares with us in that particular chapter how we should understand our religious and theological language. He begins in this chapter by looking at the problem, specifically, of our religious way of thinking and talking. He tells us that many contemporary theologians think that the problem that confronts Christians as secular men and women lies in the nature of religion and the confusion of religion and Christian faith. But van Buren says he doesn’t think that’s the real problem. He thinks that the real problem lies in the character of the language of faith. The problem, then, is not so much one of a bad religion, as it is a problem of bad or at least he says “unworkable” language. Well, on page 82 of this book, van Buren cites Gerhard Ebeling’s definition of religion as “the attempted enlargement of reality by means of God.” And what this means is that God is invoked to explain, to justify, or simply to fill in the picture of the world that we live in or to fill in our understanding of human affairs so that a religion is an attempt to appeal to God in such a way as to expand our understanding of reality. On the other hand, a religionless posture involves, and again I quote Ebeling’s definition, “Coming to terms with reality apart from God” or at least without use of the God hypothesis. Now, van Buren, after giving this definition of religion, then notes that contemporary theologians from Karl Barth to Schubert Ogden, agree that Christianity really doesn’t conform to this definition of religion at all. They would say that religion is man’s use of God to Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies 2 of 14 © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved. Lesson 23 of 24 Death of God Theologies solve some human problem, whereas the gospel proclaims God’s unexpected use of man for God’s own purposes. So very definitely a difference in the way they understand Christianity as opposed to the way they understand religion in general. Van Buren, having presented all of this, steps back for a moment and says, you know, the problem with all of these definitions is that all of these theologians continue to speak about God, even though, as Ebeling put it: “A considerable proportion of our contemporaries haven’t the least idea of what we are even talking about when we speak of God.” Van Buren then says that the solution proposed to this problem, the solution proposed by existentialist theologians, consists of eliminating all objectification of God in thought and word. Now by objectification he means thinking of God as a distinct being who has objective reality outside the mind. He says, though, that since Bultmann also objects to using the word god simply as a symbol for human experience. Well then, the word god appears to refer to nothing at all. On the one hand, you don’t want to objectify it; on the other hand, you don’t want a nonobjective use of the word god. A nonobjective use of the word of god takes that word as a symbol for something in human experience, maybe a sense of having encountered God, an experience of the numinous, but, of course, in that case, there might not really be something that’s out there. But, of course, even the nonobjective use of the word god allows for no verification whatsoever and therefore it is meaningless. How could I ever prove, for example, that I’m really having an experience of something or other? Well, the moment we begin to use the word god in a qualified sense and van Buren says that a qualified sense would be equivalent to a non-objectified sense. He says that the moment that we begin to use the word god in a non-objective sense, then something happens which is like what happens in Flew’s parable. That is, we begin to kill our assertions by the death of a thousand qualifications and as it turns up, we wind up by making no assertion at all. Well, of course, if there’s a problem of empirical verification of a non-objective use of god as I suggested a moment or so ago; there will surely be a similar problem with an objective use of it as well. In this case, as I say, the objective use of the term god would take it to stand for some being that has reality as an objective thing in the world apart from our mind. But since typically God has been taken to stand for an immaterial being, you can see what the problem is going to be for empirical verification of any sentence Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies 3 of 14 © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved. Lesson 23 of 24 Death of God Theologies that uses the term god in that way. Well, van Buren summarizes the problem of talking of God for those empirically oriented—as modern secular man is—he summarizes the problem as follows, and here I quote him from page 84. He says, “The empiricist in us finds the heart of the difficulty not in what is said about God, but in the very talking about God at all. We do not know what God is and we cannot understand how the word “god” is being used. It seems to function as a name, yet theologians tell us that we cannot use it as we do other names to refer to something quite specific. If it is meant to refer to an existentialist encounter, a point of view, or the speaker self-understanding, surely a more appropriate expression could be found.” Let me interject at this point that these last sentences, to use the term to refer to an existentialist encounter point of view, etcetera would be a non-objective use of the term god.
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