Monday, April 11, 2011

The Problem of Brunner II

    By now you have noticed, I would at least like to think that you have noticed, I have taken a little bit of a hiatus from posting on this blog about my reading of Brunner. There are two reasons for this, and I think the second reason is the most important. My life has been changing for the better rapidly since I started dating a wonderful woman and this has thrown off my desire to delve deeper into Brunner's thought a little. But this is not the main reason. The main reason is Brunner's work.

   There is a problem of getting burned-out trying to read approximatively fifteen hundred pages by the same author in the span of a little over a month. I have grown tired of Brunner and his thought. Brunner's thought, as I hinted at in an early post, does not stand the test of time. His project is important, and we can learn from it. Yet, like all work, it is historically situated and some of the problems that he is addressing has been addressed by others in better ways. Plus, we have lost the desire to be Existentialists, and have stopped listening to them. Their concerns are no longer our concerns.

   Also, I find Brunner's theology problematic. He is trying to return to a state of "pure Christianity" through the writings of Paul and the first revelations about Jesus Christ. However, this purity has never existed. There never has been a pure, unified vision of Christianity. When we read the Scriptures we see this. Different authors focus on different topics, and offer different doctrine than the others. (For the best example, see the differences between Paul's writings and James' writings.) Brunner wants a return to the Ekklesia as expressed in Saint Paul's writings, but this Ekklesia has never existed, it is a revisionist abstraction. This revisionist abstraction leads Brunner to participate in Speculative Theology, which he is against while still being unaware of his assent.

   Equally untenable, Brunner is trying to get rid of the traditional understandings of how the church operates. Brunner reduces the Holy Spirit to faith, the Eucharist to a personal encounter with Christ, and Baptism to a personal commitment. Strikingly, Brunner does not have an understanding of entering into a Covenantal relationship with God and the rest of humanity. For Brunner, Christianity is reduced down to a purely individual practice, something that is solely internal in us. It is for this reason, I must abandon Brunner and his thought. There are interesting points, but to hold to his thought, we must reject Faith and only participate in our inner subjectivity.

    I am going to continue to blog about what I am reading even after Lent ends. This project has been enriching, and I thank you for thinking with me. The next book I am going to read and start talking through with you is Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday by Alan E. Lewis. I wish that you continue learning and talking with me.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

The Problem of Brunner

    After recently finishing the second volume of Brunner's three volume work, I thought I would share just a small bit of what I have found to be troubling in Brunner's work. This isn't a detailed critique but just something that  has just been bothering me.

   Now, my specialty in academia is Existentialism. I studied it in college and graduate school, and wrote some major papers on existential themes, including my Master's thesis. Yet, Brunner is perhaps too existential for me. At least, he is too existential to be taken seriously anymore in the realm of scholarship. The problem is that Brunner reduces the whole Christian life down to the personal encounter between an individual and God. In doing so, he has, at least so far, left out the possibility for community. I have not yet gotten to his volume on the church, but it seems to me that the church is just there to show you that you need to have such a personal relationship. I find this highly problematic. The Bible calls us not to be individuals, but to be a body, one body made up of many parts. Brunner's theology does not seem to address this, and I look forward to hearing how he incorporates the Church into faith.

   My other problem is that Brunner seems to reduce the Christian faith down into only a work of Jesus. He seems to be saying that God the Father is the Holy Hidden God where God the Son is the Loving Revealed God. It is then only the Loving Revealed God that we can have relationship with. This seems to me to be short-changing the Trinity. The only real mention of the Holy Spirit in his works so far is that the Holy Spirit somehow points to the Son. I feel like Brunner has a very under-developed Pneumatology and cuts us off from relationship with God the Father.

     I am looking forward to reading the last book of this trilogy and sharing my thoughts with you, and thought I'd take a brief break and share my gratitude to your support and comments and hope that they continue.


                                                                           -Dan

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Problem of Death

   Death, in our culture today, is taboo yet spoken about and seen everywhere. We are surrounded by it, but refuse to speak about it. We show each other images of it in the media that we enjoy, in the nightly news that we watch, in the prime-time tv that we watch, and in the movies that we partake of. Yet, it is still something that we do not speak directly of. We listen to music that circle around it, we read novels that pass over it, poetry that symbolizes it, yet we do not understand it.

   Death is a shock, an awakening to who we are and how we view life. We are defined by it. Death is who we are. Morito, ergo sum, so to speak. We refuse to hold to this, we want to say that our lives are not interrupted by death, yet it is not true.

  The true problem of Death arises when we read the narrative of Christ's death in Scripture. We do not know how to handle it. The Apostles, "needed these appearances (of the Resurrected  Christ) in order to restore their faith in Him, the Christ, which had been shattered by the catastrophe of Good Friday." (pg. 371) Yet, we do not share in the scandal that the Apostles had. We've read the narrative and we know that God died for us, in Christ, and that He arose on the third day. We have turned the scandal into a celebration, and need to bring the scandal back.

   "Jesus did not merely take upon Himself, and drink to the dregs, the biter cup of human suffering" (pg. 365) in His death. If it was only that, we still should be shocked, but it would not bear\bare the full weight\brunt of what happened on Good Friday. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, "He also endured a measure of spiritual suffering, in the sense of feeling utterly forsaken by God, which no other person has ever suffered, and which we can only imagine as a foretaste of Hell - not as the "realm of the dead" but as the horror of being seperated from God." (pg. 365) 


   We need to at this point abandon Brunner. He continues "the article of the descensus ad inferos in the Apostles' Creed, is above all that it calls our attention to the fact that the point of the deepest humiliation of Christ is at the same time the beginning of His exaltation, of the Resurrection." (pg. 365) Brunner here makes an error that I feel most Christians make, and I made growing up. We gloss over the deep humiliation of Christ, and change it into a victory for ourselves. We too quickly pass over the Christ died part of "Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).


   We need to dwell on the absurdity of Death, and we do not. We gloss over it, we make it routine, we do not acknowledge it's power. And we run into  a grievous theological error when we forget the torment and agony of our Saviour. That is what Lent is, taking serious the Death of God. If we do not do this, we fail to understand our faith.
 

Monday, April 4, 2011

The Problem of Scripture Reading Part II

    "We believe in Jesus the Eternal Son of God because the Bible testifies that this is who He is." (pg. 341) This is the answer a lot of contemporary Christians will give when asked why they believe in Jesus. They believe because they are told to believe. (We have all probably sung the children's song, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.")  If Scripture tells us to believe in Jesus, then we will believe in Jesus. This is because "We believe in Jesus because we first of all believe in the Bible." (pg. 341) The Lutheran scholar Johann Gerhard, in his Loci theologici,states that faith in the Bible is an "axiomatic presupposition of all the articles of faith." (pg. 341) That is, to believe in anything, one must start with the Bible.

    Yet, this is highly problematic for Brunner. For when we make the Bible our starting point, "The authority of the Bible precedes the authority of Jesus." (pg. 341) Instead of deriving our faith from the Revelation we derive it from what is revealed. When looking at "faith n the New Testament sense as "meeting (or encounter) it rules out this...conception of faith. According to the Biblical conception of faith we believe in Jesus as the Christ not because it is taught to us by the Church or in the Bible, but because He, Jesus, the Christ, meets us as the true Word of God in the witness of the Scriptures." (pg. 342) When we believe in Christ because we are commanded to by the Bible, we are believing in an idol, according to Brunner, as we can only believe in Christ because we have encountered Him.

   The text of Scripture is dead but the Word of God is alive when believe in Christ-through-encounter. This does not mean that we do not need Scripture, but that we need to put Scripture in it's proper place. "The Bible is not the authority on the basis of which we believe in Christ, but the Bible is the means, which shows and gives us the Christ." (pg. 342) Brunner continues that "The disciples of Jesus did not believe in Him on accord of any doctrine that Jesus was the Christ. Because God, through His Spirit, opened their eyes, they "discovered" Jesus as the Christ." (pg. 342) 


   "That disturbing mystery of the Person of Jesus which even unbelievers feel, becomes evident to faith as the mystery of the unity of the divine and the human Subject in the action and speech, in the suffering and in the death of Jesus." (pg. 342-343) When we read the Scriptures in a modern, academic or disinterested way, we never encounter the disturbing mystery of God. We only encounter some wise sayings, some moral standards, and e have to dis-regard the rest. But when we meet Christ, He disturbs our slumber, and reveals Himself not to be a speaker of words, but as The Word. When we fail to read The Word, we fail to read Scripture. That is the problem of Scripture Reading.

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Problem of Reading Scripture

   "In the beginning was the Word...And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:1, 1:14, NASB) In our day, the Word is no longer allowed to be flesh, to be incarnated. We have taken the life-giving spirit out of it, turning it into dead words. We enter into a mis-understanding when we have a "rationalist view of the "teaching" of Jesus as something which can be understood apart from the Person (of Christ) altogether." (pg. 276)  We reduce the words of Jesus into mere words by rationalizing them and saying that he was "one of the many religious teachers who proclaim eternal religious truths." (pg. 276) or that Jesus "was "the first" to perceive and to teach or "the first" to do so "in power and purity"." (pg. 276) 


   Even though in the Evangelical Church today we do not want to admit that Jesus was just the first to say such things, we want to run His sayings through a rationalistic rubric and figure out if they hold any validity in the world today. We do this also by transferring His words into a "doctrinaire kind of theology." (pg. 278) We become "concerned with an "ethic of Jesus", a system of requirements, which exist in themselves in timeless validity." (pg. 278) In short, we make the Christian Faith about Morality and Law, what we have to do to fulfill a Divine Categorical Imperative, so that we can have a "better righteousness" (pg. 278) or more piety. 


   However, when we read the Scriptures, we should not try to extract a truth, an ethic or a system of morality. We should read the Scriptures as a personal communication of a Person. "No saying is based -as in the case of "eternal truths" - in itself, but every statement is related to Him, the Speaker." (pg. 277) And not only did the words of Jesus "not only proclaim this coming Kingdom of God, at the same time He inaugurated this new age and represented it in His own Person." (pg. 298-299) 


   When we try to extract "eternal truths" or wisdom from the Scriptures, we are extracting God from the Scriptures. It is no longer the Word of God that we are reading, but the word of man.