Seeking to Ward of Modernity...Get it? Ward off?

Perhaps what is most compelling about Graham Ward and his Radical Orthodox counterparts is their courage to allow us to be truly Christian again. Ward unabashedly embraces a project that is truly apologetic; yet, his enterprise is not the silly, fear-driven fideism endorsed by Barth,[1] nor the thoroughly modern “decide-for-yourself” apologetic of 19th and 20th century Evangelicalism. In effect, Ward essentially skips modernity completely as he resents the fact that biblical criticism and recent systematics have so often been captive to modern tools of historiography and scientific investigation, modes of thinking that he contends are no outdated and obsolete.[2] Hence, it is easy to resonate with the Radical Orthodox sentiments and their complete disdain for the trappings of modernity. It is true enough that modernity is no friend to Christian theology, yet its influence is ever-pervasive. But what remains mostly undetected, however, is that modernity robs Christianity of its voice. Once we have become committed to the tenets of modernism, consciously or otherwise, we are literally unable to present and understand the Christian faith as it truly is. There have been some feeble attempts, such as those by postliberals at the Yale school, to overcome the imposing challenge of unadulterated modernism. Yet, for all their talk of “Christian-grammar” and cultural linguistics, they are overwhelmed by the irony of not being able to actually say anything. This is where Ward’s Christological approach becomes so refreshing. It goes beyond the postliberals by presenting a Christology with legs. Ward writes, “The point I wish to make is that Christological reflection was not simply an intra-ecclesial discourse…Christological discourse was born not simply for catechesis but for mission.”[3]
As has been mentioned, to accomplish this missional Christology, Ward passes over modernity completely. Ideally, Ward suggests a return to pre-modern sources (such as the Greek and Latin Fathers) while simultaneously recognizing that an un-nuanced transposing of pre-modern thinking onto a postmodern context is both impossible and unwise.[4] Though a pre-modern philosophical environment can obviously not be simplistically reduplicated, Ward rightly affirms that these sources can be modeled and re-appropriated. Ward points to famed paleo-modern apologists Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria and their efforts to make Christianity “comprehensible, and tolerable, if not attractive” to Hellenistic minds as the archetype for his apologetic efforts.[5] However, the key to his entire endeavor is the asking of different questions. In seeking to construct a truly postmodern apologetic, Ward debunks the concerns of modernity and replaces them with questions that are more savvy to the postmodern context. Ultimately, these are questions of contemporary meaning as opposed to questions of historical reality. It is my contention that Ward’s opening lines set up an overarching hermeneutic by which he reads history, Scripture, and Christology as a whole: “…the Christological question begins not with who is the Christ or what is the Christ; it begins with where is the Christ.”[6]
This question of what Jesus means for us now[7] supplants the questions of Schweitzer, Bultmann, and even Barth. According to Ward, this quest for the historical Jesus is important, but it misses the point. Actually, Ward’s treatment of the question of the historical Jesus is both refreshing and accurate. With a few strokes of the pen, Ward exposes the inanity of the whole inquiry: “It is Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ…the death of Jesus makes no sense outside of historical claim to be the Christ; a claim that the Church accepts as foundational in the manner Peter accepted it at Caesarea Philippi.”[8] Thus, Ward is not afraid to be polemical; his flippant treatment of historical Jesus scholars betrays Ward’s hermeneutic of trust. Again, the question is not who is the Christ, but where is the Christ. This indeed influences his biblical hermeneutics, which Ward concedes may by misguided or misinformed. This hermeneutic, though dubious from a biblical studies perspective, is most evident in his reader-response criticism of Mark. His questions about the text are not historical; rather, they are musings on desire and mimesis, of existential consequence. In my estimation, Ward reads parables as they are intended to be read; as menacing and puzzling questions that plunge the reader into some form of crisis but are ultimately resolved in the metanoia that is Christ himself, the “alternative epistemology.”[9] This results in Ward’s theology of narrative, in which questions of critical time especially are dissolved into the concerns of narrative time. In this brilliant move, Ward contends that historical and geographical time are important, yet, and this is where his hermeneutic comes in, they serve an eschatological time and transcends, but does not disregard, mundane historical meaning.[10] By adopting this ancient yet fresh hermeneutic, Ward is able to truly speak in the postmodern context without fearing or ignoring history. This puts his apologetic ahead of the impotence of Barth, the futility of the Yale school, and the silliness of modern apologetics.


[1] By this I mean that Barth considered apologetics “anathema” because “The world is so lost, so secularized, so ignorant of God that both Christ and subsequently a theology of Christ operate above and beyond such a world, in contradistinction to it. Dogmatics is fundamentally a countercultural activity” as quoted in Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 14-15. This main seem pious on the surface level, yet I believe that Barth’s unconscious commitment/fear of modernity causes him to make statements like this. He flatly dismisses modern logic because he respects it so much; he fears that his Christ will not stand up to the rigors of modern historiography.
[2] “We are no longer bound by Enlightenment rationalism, nineteen and twentieth century preoccupations with subjectivism, psychologism, historical positivism, humanism, ameliorism, liberalism and the pursuit of freedom.” Christ and Culture, 6.
[3] 16-17. The idea of a missional Christology is simply brilliant. You can’t deny it. However, it is debatable as to how missional Ward’s Christology actually is, simply because much of it can only be described as inaccessible.
[4] 20.
[5] 16. Other notable examples could include Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, whose works read more like Greek philosophy than Christian theology.
[6] 1.
[7] This, as it seems to me, comes dangerously close to the silly liberalism of thinkers like Marcus Borg.
[8] 23.
[9] 44.
[10] This is what Ward is saying on 49-51, if I am reading him correctly.

Eliade and Freud are intellectual brothers. I just know it. I can prove it with science.

After reading The Sacred and the Profane, it is easy to see why Eliade has become the Freud of religious studies: both are provocative and influential, both have written seminal texts for their fields, and both draw conclusions based on dubious scholarship. As we shall discuss below, Eliade does indeed offer some extremely fascinating insights into the nature of universal religious experience, especially pertaining to sacred space and time. Yet, stimulating as these suggestions might be, hardly any of them are documented in any legitimate way. It seems that Eliade is examining these cultures in a cursory way, fitting their rituals and practices into his already existing system that he had dreamed up while traveling to exotic locations and scribbling in a journal. With this being said, we must do Eliade the honor of honestly grappling with his ideas, which are indeed important for the study of religious phenomenology.
Eliade’s entire project centers around his understanding of hierophany—the sacred, divine interruption into the mundane and profane world. Eliade exposits the culture of “religious man,”[1] the element of humanity that seeks to enchant the world, taking a perspective that sees the sacred in the profane, even to the point where “The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”[2] Eliade suggests that “religious man” has ordered his civilization around the axis mundi, or “the center of the world.” In terms of physical, ontological experience, religious man sees this center as the point of communication between the sacred and profane realms. More crudely, Eliade contends that this is where religious man is ensured communication with the gods.[3] Thus, religious communities practice a spirituality of proximity, in which spiritual sustenance is gained by orienting oneself and one’s world around this axis mundi in a real and physical way.[4] Because of this need to always live at the center, religious man orders his universe as a microcosm within a microcosm, in order to reflect the true order of things. Thus, living near the center of the world reflects the imago mundi. Therefore, religious man sees any settlement of a new territory as an imitation of the divine cosmogony at the beginning of time. Each new creation—of a community, for example—is seen as a sacred act, a conquering of chaos.[5] Since this reproduction of the divine act is necessitated for any good creation, it must be repeated mythically through ritual each year: ritual is seen as the perpetual recreation of cosmogony, hence the need for sacred, liturgical time. The theme of returning to a fresh, strong creation continually is prominent in the thought of religious man. This requires an eternal return to the “indefinitely repeatable” mythic time:

Hence religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythic present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites.[6]
Liturgical time too plays into Eliade’s main theme of perpetual recreation of the cosmogony, encapsulated in the concepts of templum—the spatial element of the sacred, and tempus—the temporal equivalent. In this way, sacred time fulfills the religious nostalgia for original, perfect creation. To meet this “nostalgia for a paradisal situation,” religious man invokes ritual, a means by which these communities can return to the original state of creation.[7]
This spirituality of spatial and temporal proximity, says Eliade, is what defines cosmic, universal religion. These conclusions seem to make sense, and they are fine conjectures; unfortunately, they can remain only that. In the end, it seems that Eliade too neatly sums up the religious experience of a great many communities, rarely citing any concrete experiences. This, unfortunately, reflects the method of scholarship during Eliade’s time. Ultimately, Eliade shows himself to be captive to the moods of modernism, as his final quote betrays: “Here the considerations of the historian of religions ends. Here begins the realm of problems proper to the philosopher, and psychologist, and even the theologian.”[8] Try as he might, Eliade cannot seem to shed the patronizing and insulting approach to religion, treating it merely as a quaint sociological phenomenon and not a legitimate, real encounter with the divine. This is where Eliade again becomes the Freud of comparative religion. Just as Freud developed his theories of psychoanalysis primarily out of observations about himself, Eliade too, it would seem, arrives at many of his conclusions as remedies for his own personal struggles. This is my take: Eliade is so hopelessly entangled in the godlessness of modernism and, secretly or subtly, he hates it. For example, Eliade routinely bemoans the failings of modernism:

…[the desacralization of the human dwelling] undertaken by the industrial societies, a transformation made possible by the desacralization of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought and above all by the sensational discoveries of chemistry.[9]

This desacralization ultimately culminates in the only feasible fate of unadulterated modernism: secularization, that time “when the sense of the religiousness of the cosmos becomes lost.”[10] With this being said, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the longing religious nostalgia of Eliade’s religious man is really his own desire to undo the disenchanting effects of modernism. Perhaps secretly, Eliade wants religion but his modernistic commitments do not allow him to have it. In this way, Freud’s Oedipus complex and defense mechanisms are Eliade’s axis mundi and liturgical time.

[1] To Terah, Kendra, Danielle, and whomever else it may concern, I am not using “religious man” to be a chauvinist; I merely use it because this is the language that Eliade himself employs.
[2] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1959), 12.
[3] Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26.
[4] E.g. “…our world is holy ground because it is the place nearest to heaven, because from here, from our abode, it is possible to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place.” Ibid, 39.
[5] See 47-48.
[6] Ibid, 70. This mythic time, says Eliade, is rejected by Christianity, which espouses a linear model of history in which real, concrete history is sanctified by the Incarnation of Christ.
[7] Ibid, 92.
[8] Ibid, 213. Heaven forbid the theologian might have anything to say about religion! He should have started with the theologian.
[9] Ibid, 51.
[10] Ibid, 107.

Jenson and a lack of sleep make for quite a headache...

In praise of Robert Jenson’s On Thinking the Human, Robert Wilkin wrote “Jenson’s mind makes stimulating company.” He should say what he means. What he meant to say, I think, was “Jenson’s mind makes for humiliating company.” Or maybe that was just my experience. No one has pointed out the desperate inadequacy of my cognitive capacities more poignantly than Jenson. Even the subtitle of his book, “Resolutions of Difficult Notions,” is a subtle and humbling jab at my intellect. Perhaps Jenson and I define “resolution” differently; because, the last time I checked, resolutions were meant to leave you with more comfort concerning a difficult question than you had before. Mostly, after reading each chapter, I felt not comforted, but dizzy.
This being said, I will humbly submit some of the important theological themes I was able to glean from this challenging and profound book. For Jenson, the resolutions to these difficult notions—death, consciousness, freedom, reality, wickedness, and love—are often much simpler than his maddening cogitations on each topic might suggest. In each case, Jenson does not hesitate to square with the epistemological and existential problems relating to each notion. For instance, treading mental territory that few of us are familiar with, Jenson arrives at the seemingly absurd but in the end obvious conclusion that it is impossible to “think death”:

From my point of view, my corpse is not, as in the third person, the fact of the person’s –my—non-existence. What for me would be the fact of my non-existence would be the absence of my consciousness. But it is precisely the termination of my consciousness that seems impossible to think.[1]

It is exactly this kind of conundrum that has bred a common loathing for philosophy and theology; and yet, it is a vital question of the human experience. It would seem that Jenson recognizes this irony as his writing is flavored with a coy understanding that not everything can be an existential crisis. Sometimes, says Jenson, we just live. Not surprisingly then, Jenson’s resolutions are more often than not rooted in Christian Trinitarian worship and sacrament. And, as we shall see, we often think too hard. The resolution is right beneath our collective nose.
Jenson starts pessimistically, it would seem. After opening with a mind-numbing discussion of the metaphysical possibility of conceiving one’s own death, Jenson offers no rest for the weary as he then delves into the milieu of Heidegger’s thought. However fearsome the philosophical threat may seem, Jenson offers hope in the face of death that is grounded in the fellowship of the Trinity, and more particularly, our participation in it. By virtue of Jesus’ death and Resurrection, says Jenson, the Christian can face death. It is not we who die, but Christ. Thus, death is not death at all: “Thus the cessation of my being for my consciousness is participation in a mutual consciousness in which cessation and being each constitute the other.”[2] What follows is an insightful and trying discussion over the nature of consciousness predicated on Aristotelian understandings of actuality and potentiality. Once again, the question is menacing, but the solution lies in a simple trust in Christ. For Jenson, we can never truly recognize our own consciousness unless we are participants in the divine life—more specifically the communion of the saints, the Church.[3] Perhaps the paragon example for Jenson’s methodical madness—the reduction of dizzying philosophical pontification to refreshingly simple resolutions—is his treatment of free will and determinism. After traversing the thought of both Augustine and Luther regarding free will and criticizing Enlightenment thinking on human freedom, Jenson again returns to the Triune God, without whom we can never truly be free. It is within this context that Jenson can arrive at the fresh perspective about empirical epistemology: our perceptions just are as “We see, hear, touch, and taste what we see, hear, touch, and taste, and that is all there is to be said about the matter; our percepts are not caused by something we do not see, taste, touch, or hear.”[4] Here again is a brilliant example of the theological precision with which Jenson artfully cuts through irrelevant abstraction and philosophical minutia to arrive at the concrete reality of the matter. In similar fashion, Jenson deconstructs the faulty assumptions that wickedness, in Aristotelian terms, must be either substantial or accidental to humanity. As Jenson demonstrates, concluding that wickedness is fundamentally one or the other results in disastrous theological ramifications.[5] Ultimately it would seem that sin is both substantial and accidental, or it is neither, a tertium quid of sorts; thus, the only way that we may be “cured without being eradicated” is, again, by the work of the Triune God.[6] Just as participation in the divine life is the only way that we may be cured without being eradicated, likewise we may only love without killing or being killed through God. Jenson here modifies Buber’s “I/Thou” relation by adding a third party to the equation. By virtue of this intervention from the outside—which, for Jenson, is manifest in the Holy Spirit—we are able to truly love, free from the temptation to dominate and the fear of being dominated.[7] An excellent example of this love, demonstrated through real availability, is Christ himself manifest in the Eucharist. It is this embodied love that constitutes the criterion for not only true Christian experience, but for all of reality.[8] All throughout, worship is essential to authentic interaction with reality.
Though this meager survey does great injustice to its magnificent efforts, On Thinking the Human proves a provocative treatise that demonstrates why Jenson is considered the champion of Pro Ecclesia methodology. He is honest enough to grapple with difficult human notions and existential crises yet wise enough to realize that any hope of resolving these puzzling elements of our shared existence rests in the life of the Triune God.


[1] Robert Jenson, On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 2.
[2] Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 12. This being said, I do have concerns over what Resurrection means for Jenson. Does he mean a real, bodily, ontological resurrection? I am unable to tell. Can anyone interpret the following passage? “Resurrection does not mean that my life starts up again. It means that the life I have lived is eternally presented and interpreted within the community of God, for whom death is no barrier to life, in whom being concluded is no barrier to conscious participation in love” (13).
[3] “…what is it to be conscious? It is either to be one identity of the living triune God or to be one of the community for which this God makes narratively structured space in his life. That is to say, it is to participate in the life of the people of God, remembering that this participation need not be affirmative or immediate” (30).
[4] Ibid, 51.
[5] For a more in depth discussion see 63-65. Jenson essentially demonstrates that a theology that treats sin purely as accidental to human nature results in mainline liberalism, a context in which redemption means little or nothing. Conversely, an overly substantial treatment of sin tends to demonize human nature and body resulting in self-loathing in extreme cases, a phenomenon which has been known to occur in hyper-fundamentalist contexts.
[6] Ibid, 72.
[7] Ibid, 81-82.
[8] Ibid, 57.

As a Mattes of fact...

Every tradition has a centraldogma; that is neither here nor there. For Protestants, justification has enjoyed a place of doctrinal prominence; traditionally, other dogmas have been ancillary, flowing forth from justification which has set at the center of Protestant theological systems. Thus, it must be understood that much of the Protestant theological identity has been defined by the doctrine of justification. Obviously, Luther is the name that we associate with Protestant models of justification, the doctrine on which, says the reformer, the church stands or falls. If we assume then, as Mark Mattes does, that a Lutheran understanding of justification is to be normative for Protestant theology as a whole,[1] then all Protestant theology must be judged by the criterion (or discrimen, if you’d like) of justification. Yet according to Mattes, not just any understanding of justification will do. Rather, Mattes suggests that models of justification are captive to the work of Luther; thus, Mattes seeks to measure the work of five epic theologians—Eberhard Jungel, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jurgen Moltmann, Robert Jenson, and Oswald Bayer—against Luther himself, to whom Mattes audaciously refers as “the messenger of the ‘Everlasting Gospel.’”[2]…Easy there Mark. Criticizing Jungel, Pannenberg, and Moltmann especially for conforming their theologies to the secular philosophical trends of modernity, Mattes, it seems, is only picking up a battle left off by his idol.[3] It is evident that Mattes harbors a ferocious distrust for secular reason and is dedicated to the deconstruction of this the “devil’s whore.” As his project is directly out of Luther, it is only natural that Mattes apply the fiery monk as the ultimate arbiter for acceptable Protestant visions for justification.
Since space only allows for such, I will focus primarily on Mattes’ criticism of the theology of Jurgen Moltmann. After casting aside the neo-orthodox and existentialist Jungel[4] and Wolfhart Pannenberg (a personal favorite of mine) for his emphasis on a metaphysical connection to God and over-focus on ecumenism,[5] Mattes picks up in criticizing Jurgen Moltmann for an obviously un-Lutheran doctrine of justification. Though Moltmann is not confessionally Lutheran, he is Protestant, and this, says Mattes, is sufficient grounds from hauling him into Luther court. It is no surprise that Mattes’ verdict is “guilty.” As Mattes demonstrates, Moltmann’s understanding of justification is not purely Lutheran (whether it should be or not is another question). So, if we operate under Mattes’ assumption that Luther is the Protestant ideal, we ought to strongly reconsider allegiance to Moltmann. Mattes does well in expositing Moltmann’s theory of justification.[6] Keying on Moltmann’s Marxist emphasis on social and ecological transformation through solidarity with the oppressed and the alleviation of material concerns predicated on a hopeful anticipation of the future kingdom, Mattes arrives at the conclusion that Moltmann posits that justification essentially comes through hope.[7] Mattes is tenaciously critical of the revered theologian, correctly asserting that Moltmann’s ideas on justification can hardly be reconciled with Luther’s: “Politics has soteriological import for Moltmann. The Kingdom will save us. Moltmann does not hold to Luther’s view of keeping salvation to the promise, trusting that it liberates us from incurvation and returns us to creation.”[8] As it seems, Moltmann’s justification rests on active ethics, a living in light of the future; within this context, the Christian is justified on the basis of participation in the ideals of the coming kingdom of God. Put another way, for Moltmann, good works are of supreme importance in coram deo. Overall, Moltmann and Luther are at odds fundamentally over the issue of human agency; for Moltmann, humans are active agents for the transformation of the world. This flies in the face of Luther’s famous “passive righteousness.” Perhaps Mattes’ greatest critique of Moltmann is found in the latter’s political systematic theology. In Mattes’ estimation, Moltmann confuses the order of the theological enterprise. Instead of establishing justification as a hub to which all other doctrines are subjected, Moltmann values justification, but only as an ancillary doctrine that serves as a prelude to the real action: the advent of total global justice.[9] Thus, the fundamental problem is that Moltmann seeks to fit justification into a system rather than constructing his system around justification.
Mattes’ arguments are convincing, but they are not without their problems. My primary issue with Mattes relates to fundamental assumptions. Mattes assumes from the beginning that a good Protestant theology will automatically conform to Luther on the issue of justification. Now, I may very well be inclined to agree. Yet, his judgments on Jungel, Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Jenson (Bayer is the only one to pass the Lutheran Inquisition) are only legit if we buy the assumption that Luther’s view of justification is the hallmark and defining character of Protestant theology. If we do not agree with this starting assumption, all of his criticisms are rendered invalid. Perhaps, then, the greatest contribution that Mattes makes with this work is his challenging us to think. Often, we fall in love with theologians and their romantic ideas; and, as we are enamored with them as a lover, we overlook flaws. Mattes is right: if we are committed to Luther’s view of justification as an essential and non-negotiable element of Evangelical faith, than we had better think twice before we uncritically buy in to Jungel, Pannenberg, or Moltmann’s systems wholesale. Mattes challenges us to discernment. His audacious survey demonstrates rare intellectual courage to take on the giants of contemporary Protestant theology. Perhaps we should do the same.


[1] This is what Mattes means when he refers to justification as the “hub” of theology rather than a “foundation” for it. According to Mattes, justification must serve as a hub through which all other doctrines navigate; for a proper understanding of Protestant theology, all other doctrines must be subjected to justification, the central dogma. For further discussion see Mark C. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 11.
[2] Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology, 15.
[3] Ibid, 11-13. It seems that Mattes blames the follies of liberalism and modernism on confusion over crucial doctrinal issues; namely, he accuses these movements of losing sight of Luther’s view of justification. Here, Mattes carries Luther’s torch of relentless criticism of secular reason.
[4] Ibid 53-55: Mattes criticizes Jungel essentially for his anthropocentric model of justification, which, in his mind, betrays the Lutheran requirement of a theocentric understanding: “Rather, with Jungel, we might say that God became human so that we might actually be able to discern our own humanity, accept it, and even grow in it” (53). Clearly, if we are playing by Luther’s rules, Jungel is disqualified.
[5] Ibid, 83.
[6] It has been said (mostly by Matt Martin) that Mattes misreads Moltmann, who, it is contended, holds to an orthodox view of justification. As I do not know Moltmann as well as I perhaps should, I will make no judgment on the accuracy with which Mattes reads Moltmann. However, in my limited experience in reading Moltmann, it seems that Mattes is pretty accurate in coming to the conclusion that, for Moltmann, we are essentially justified by hope.
[7] Ibid, 86.
[8] Ibid, 89. Emphasis mine.
[9] Ibid, 98.