The Secularization of Christianity Part XVII - Wrapping it Up

It has been a few weeks since I last posted, as life has gotten very busy.  Due to this reason, I have decided to limit my examination of Mascall's The Secularization of Christianity to chapter 2, which bears the same title as the chapter itself.  Most of the study of this series has focused on chapter 2 anyway, and this section is going to deal with the conclusion of the chapter.

Mascall is still evaluating Van Buren's overly secularized theology, and interesting enough he notes on page 74 that Van Buren observes a very marked difference between the approaches of Bultmann and Karl Barth for justifying the minimalization of the historicity of the Gospels.  For Bultmann, the interest is primarily in the Kerygma.  On the other hand, for Barth all that matters is the witness of the Apostles to the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead.  In this, Barth is actually more in line with the historical position of the Church (surprising, given his lack of orthodoxy in other areas of his theology) in that he accepts the Gospel story as historical fact, whereas Bultmann doesn't.  However, although Barth accepts the historicity of the Gospels, he also downplays it.  This can also be problematic as well, for as can be seen with some of Barth's later disciples (notably Tillich, Niebuhr, and Hauerwas), the downplaying of the historicity of the Gospel accounts opens a Pandora's box of other heretical notions, such as attacks on the divinity of Christ and on the Magisterium of the Church (which to a degree Protestants do accept as part of the historical patrimony of doctrine they have received from the Church herself).  This is why, while Barth is to be commended for defending historicity, his minimalizing of that historicity brings many of those who subscribe to his theology back to the same place Bultmann and his followers are.  Historicity is therefore not a sideline or a mere footnote; it is fundamental to faith.

Moving on to page 75, Mascall dissects what Bultmann calls "Easter faith," and what is meant by this in the context of Bultmann's theology is this - the events of the Gospel were colored and shaped, in his view, by the "Easter hope" of the Apostles, and thus for him they are subjective essentially.  For Bultmann therefore, it is possible to obtain a reliable picture of the kind of person Jesus was from what he deems the "various fragments" that "make up the Gospel tradition." 

To bolster his view on this Van Buren refers to the writings of Ernst Fuchs (1903-1983), Gerhard Ebeling (1912-2001), and Gunther Bornkamm (1905-1990), all of whom were to some degree Bultmann's proteges.  In quoting Van Buren's work The Secular Meaning of the Gospel on page 121 of that work, Mascall notes that Van Buren observes that each of these very liberal theologians focused on different aspects - Fuchs on the conduct of Jesus as a "great teacher" essentially, Ebeling on the issue of faith, and Bornkamm on the individuality Jesus noted in persons He encountered.  Mascall notes that the fault in these approaches is that they all focus on what the investigators want them to focus on rather than accepting the historical record of the Gospels in their entirety.  For all of them, and for Van Buren as well, the issue at hand is "freedom" and the proclamation of Jesus's message coming back to that - "Freedom," then, for such individuals, has precedence over faith, and it essentially means a sort of politicizing of the Gospel in a secular context.  For the secularist, faith and the supernatural present issues, and therefore they must re-interpret historically-understood concepts regarding Scripture and the person of Jesus in order to justify their own conclusions.  One recent author who demonstrates this is Jon Krakauer, whose 2004 book, Under the Banner of Heaven, is punctuated with Krakauer's mentality.  Krakauer's book deals specifically with the extremes of Mormon Fundamentalist sects that practice polygamy in the American West, but in doing so, he paints with a broad brush all people of faith.  One passage that exemplifies this can be found on page 297 of Krakauer's book where he basically paints with a broad brush Mormon Fundamentalists and committed Evangelical Christians such as former Attorney General John Ashcraft - for Krakauer, in true secularist fashion, to make any differentiation between cultic groups and legitimate Christian traditions is unreasonable, in that he sees one as fanatical as the others.  This is essentially as well where Van Buren and others tend to go by emphasizing "freedom" over faith - faith is bad to them because it is irrational in their minds, but "freedom" is the key.  Question is though, freedom for whom??  This reductionism of freedom being the logical meaning of the Gospels rather than the consequence of faith is one step away from denial of the divinity of Christ and other fundamental truths of the Christian faith, and it is exactly where Van Buren - as well as his predecessors such as Bultmann - are headed.  As Catholic philosopher Plinio Correa de Oliveira, in his seminal work Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Spring Grove, PA:  Association for the Preservation of Tradition, Family, and Property, 2014) notes, a rebellion against morality, which is rooted in faith, leads to a more or less unconfessed hatred for the very moral order as a whole, and this in turn is a revolutionary tendency to generate doctrinal errors as well as espousing things contrary to moral law (de Oliveira, p. 57).   He also notes that secularism is atheism with principle, which means that it is incompatible with the Christian faith - that would automatically rule out Van Buren then as a true follower of Christ.  This leads now to a sound response at the conclusion of the chapter to Van Buren by Mascall.

Mascall notes that Van Buren's conclusions are questionable in a couple of ways, starting on page 77.  First, a sincere love of God necessitates trust in God, something Van Buren's concept of "Freedom" lacks.  Therefore, if Van Buren's scheme is carried to its logical conclusion, Jesus Himself would have to deny God, and in essence deny Himself as part of the Triune Godhead - this conclusion is unacceptable to a true follower of the faith.  Oddly - and secondly - Van Buren rejects God yet believes in Jesus (like de Oliveira asserts, this would make Van Buren a functional atheist).  This creates a problem in that it divorces a historical knowledge of Jesus from faith for Him.  This cannot be, and therefore is in the realm of the heretical rather than orthodox Christian faith and practice.  At least however Van Buren acknowledges that the writers of the New Testament (and by extension, the leadership of the primitive Church) did not share his position, and with very good reason - Van Buren is heretical by their definition!  Divorcing faith from historicity and attempting to secularize Christianity is an impossibility and a contradiction, as John Horvat points out in his book Return to Order (Hanover, PA:  York Press, 2013) when he notes that the State best fulfills its role when it is permeated by a Christian spirit, working together for the common good.  A secular state - and much less a secular theologian! - doesn't have the capacity to do that because the common good is subordinated to the whims and fancies of the ones wielding the power.   The "freedom" of the Gospel message that Van Buren prefers to emphasize does indeed exist, but that freedom comes at a price - the price of our sin, and the ultimate act of supernatural grace being expressed to meet the true common good by Christ giving His life on a cross on a hill in far-away Palestine.  That act, and the supernatural grace it imparts is received by faith, and only in faithfully receiving and believing those facts can a true freedom and restoration affect either a society or an individual (Horvat, p. 216).  Mascall drives this home on page 80 by noting that even Van Buren has to concede that the Resurrection was not a mere resuscitation (as the Muslims and others suggest), as that would have little to do with impacting Christian faith.  In other words, the historical truth of Christ being Who the Gospels say He is defines all aspects of Christian life, and it is the guiding force of Christian civilization. 

Beginning on page 83, Mascall notes that Van Buren has a few problems with linguistic analysis he subscribes to.  Van Buren concedes, rightly, that evidence should not intend to assert a resuscitation by the Apostles of Jesus's dead corpus.  But, unfortunately Van Buren still reduces the witness of the Apostles to subjective experience by retaining the phraseology of Christianity but altering its meaning.  His position, as Mascall defines it on page 86, is that God doesn't exist and Jesus ceased to exist - like the heretics, Van Buren has basically attacked the core doctrine of Christianity, being the person and divinity of Jesus Christ.  While Van Buren though would accept Jesus as historical, he denies the divinity of Christ.  Again, as de Oliveira correctly has asserted, this turns Van Buren into a practical atheist.  This also radically redefines soteriology for Van Buren as well - essentially, the person of Christ and the accuracy of the Easter event have no soteriological effect on the Christian, but rather "the history of Jesus" and "a history of what happened on Easter" are subjectively accepted by the believer as a faith-crutch.  In reality for Van Buren, they merely provide historical account and basis for the individual perspective - they are past events that are used as reflective points for guidance and encouragement, in other words.  This reduces Jesus from being God the Son to being a "good man" and a "great teacher," and little else for Van Buren. 

On page 89, Mascall makes an interesting observation on how Van Buren even views the concept of "freedom" - for Van Buren, it is like a virus that people want to catch rather than the act of supernatural grace it is, and thus it can be "caught" without subscribing to historical faith.  Being a "good person" like Jesus is all that is needed (the old "salvation by works" heresy, in other words).  Moving onto page 91, Mascall then notes Van Buren's two principles of interpretation as follows:

1.  For Van Buren, statements of faith are to be interpreted as statements which express, describe, or commend a particular way of seeing the world, other men, and oneself.

2.  Also for Van Buren, the norm of the Christian perspective is the series of events to which the New Testament documents testify, centering on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as merely historical events without spiritual merit.

In other words, for Van Buren, faith becomes a subjective but unnecessary exercise based on the outlook on the individual rather than an acceptance of historically-taught doctrine and the written account of the Gospels as truth.  This obviously leads to a dilemma for him and others who profess Christianity but seek to reinterpret or outright deny its teachings.

On pages 94-95, Mascall notes that there is a tension between the traditional formulae of the faith as upheld in the historic Creeds of the Church and the radical reinterpretations of secularists such as Van Buren, and it blurs the line between the disciplines of theology and hermeneutics. In the historic Creeds, for instance, it is plainly stated that Jesus is the living Logos, the incarnate Word of God, and thus He is nothing less than God Himself.  That is the orthodox and historical belief and teaching of the Church, and is a mystery of faith to be accepted by her faithful.  Van Buren, who rejects God and reduces Jesus to a dead man, would have been condemned by the Councils that drafted these historic Creeds.  This means then that traditional doctrine upholds two things:

1.   Economy - relating to the created world
2.   Essentiality - the inner life of the Trinity themselves

Van Buren's rejection of these historic aspects of faith inevitably trickles down to what he believes about other essentials of the faith.  For instance, he rejects the Virgin Birth and thus the Nativity account because they cannot be understood "factually" (very Cartesian of him, isn't it?).   He also rejects other doctrines - this means the supernatural dimension of the faith - based on the same idea.  How someone like Van Buren can still identify as "Christian" while denying core Christian doctrines on very important matters escapes me, and like de Oliveira I would condemn Van Buren and others like him as functional atheists.  And, that leads to a couple of final thoughts on the footnote Mascall has on pages 104-105.

Mascall, in his concluding notes, references an article published in 1964 by Don Cuppitt (born 1934), a British Anglican priest and philosopher, that he wrote in response to some of Van Buren's views.  The question raised is whether the Gospel is about God or about Jesus, and although Cuppitt correctly asserts it should be about both, he also observes that people like Van Buren tend to sunder the unity between Theocentricity and Christocentricity, a problem that stems back even to Barth's writings.  As Cuppitt notes, the traditional understanding is that the Gospel is about God as personified in Christ (which is beautifully illustrated in catechetical literature by such great writers as Fr. Josef Jungmann and Msgr. Eugene Kevane - Jungmann's "spokes of a wheel" analogy of doctrine, for instance, asserts that all we believe points back to Christ, and ultimately as a result to God, of whom Christ is Incarnate).  A new trend (new during the time both Mascall and Cuppitt wrote their works, but more evident today) is this paradox called "Christian atheism," which Cuppitt defines as this dichotomy of God as an evil "demiurge" of sorts and Jesus as a "tempering agent" as a holy man but not God Himself - this radically dualistic view of Christ is foreign to orthodox faith.  God was present in typologies before the Gospels were written, and has been present in the course of human events since the dawn of creation.  This "Christian atheism" has again raised its leviathon head in the teachings of people like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, as well as with other Protestant participants in the "Emerging Church" movement.  This dualistic mentality of God being divorced from Jesus as a bad "demiurge" at worst or merely an Old Testament "covenant enforcer" at best doesn't do justice to the complete account of the Gospels within the context of all of Scripture.  Cuppitt rightly asserts - and Aquinas would agree - that the correct understanding of this issue is that the Gospel must (and does) presuppose a natural theology;  remember, God is the author of both Revelation and Nature, and the Thomistic principle here is that Nature never contradicts Revelation, but through supernatural grace Revelation perfects, elevates, and heals Nature.  Van Buren and other secular/liberal theologians like him (including even "Emergent Evangelicals" such as Brian McLaren and others) cannot grasp this truth because they deny the supernatural as something that they cannot understand logically (which they have in common with Rene Descartes and other Enlightenment-era figures) and thus in doing so they deny the very essence of what it is to be Christian to begin with.  The final thought on this now follows.

We live in an age that is characterized by Enlightenment thinking, unfortunately on greater levels and at greater depths than we realize.  It may even impact us to an extent as individuals, despite how orthodox we may be.  It also creates a toxic situation that is defined by John Horvat as "frenetic intemperance," and it is defined as being the following (Horvat, p. 17):

1.  It seeks to throw off legitimate restraints (including orthodox faith, in the Christian context).
2.  It seeks to gratify disordered passions by one of two ways:
     a.  Reinterpreting and redefining traditional language to fit a secular mindset.
     b.  Suppressing traditional definitions with intimidation and so-called "logic" (i.e.:  "political          correctness")

Although Horvat primarily deals with the effect frenetic intemperance has on the economics of a civilization, it can also be applied in other areas as well - ethics, theology, philosophy, etc.  As a matter of fact, I would assert that the economic manifestation of this is driven by philosophical, moral, and religious undertones, and the change in those three areas is what manifests itself in selfish economic policies - as Horvat correctly observes, it throws the whole system off-balance.  Van Buren is primarily a product - a fruit, if you will - of a poisoned legacy that goes back many decades, even centuries;  Van Buren was impacted by Rudolf Bultmann, who in turn was influenced by F.C. Bauer, and he in turn by Friedrich Schleiermacher, etc.   Ultimately, it goes back to the genesis of the via moderna during the Enlightenment, and such individuals as Spinoza, Descartes, Machiavelli, and earlier "trailblazers" such as Marsilus of Padua, etc.  Of course, if you want the ultimate root of the problem, look at Genesis 3 - it involved a snake, a tree, and a gullible woman who should have known better in the first place.  Heresies are based on recycled old lies, and one of the lies is an exaggerated self-importance of the individual to the point that such a person deifies himself, and thus the concept of an outside Creator or Savior upsets that ego trip.  In other words, the secularization of Christianity has old roots, and thankfully the true Church has (and will) prevail.  But, until that happens, there will always be the Van Burens who seek to destroy her from within, and they must be exposed for what they are, which is the value of Mascall's fine work we have discussed.  God bless until next time.