Authority of Scripture

We should not interpret the Scriptures by the Creeds, but the Creeds by the Scriptures.

Spener in Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation Bampton Lectures 1885 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1961), 355.

Luther, Martin

Luther was the “intensified self” of the German nation. This man it is a recent fashion in the Church of England to revile—and would to God that they who revile him would render to mankind but one of the very least of his many services! He gave to the Germans their Bible; he gave them the perfection of their language; he gave them the sense of their unity; he gave them the conviction of their freedom before God; he gave them the prayers which rise night and morning from thousands of hearts; he gave them the burning hymns, rich in essential truth, and set to mighty music, which are still daily poured forth by millions of voices; he gave them the example of a family life, pure, simple, and humbly dependent upon God. “To have lifted the load of sin from many consciences—to have reconciled nature and duty, purity and passion—to have made woman once more the faithful helpmeet of God’s servants as of other men—to have been the founder of countless sweet and peaceful homes—is no small part of Luther’s true glory.” But his highest glory—the glory he valued most—was to have fulfilled the vow of the Doctorate—juro me veritatem evangelicam pro virili defensurum—and to have given to the people whom he loved an open Bible which could be closed no more.

Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation Bampton Lectures 1885 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1961), 323.

Authoritative Hermeneutics

The plague of the Church for above a thousand years has been the enlarging our creed, and making more fundamentals than God ever made.

Baxter in Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation Bampton Lectures 1885 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1961), 243.

Neo-Orthodoxy

Between the two world wars, the work of Barth and Bultmann spawned a new theological movement called neo-orthodoxy (or dialectical theology). Dominated by Barth and another Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, three basic assumptions guided the approach of neo-orthodox theologians to biblical interpretation. First, God is a subject not an object (a “Thou” not an “It”). Thus, the Bible’s words cannot convey knowledge of God as abstract propositions; one can only know him in a personal encounter. Such encounters are so subjective, mysterious, and miraculous that they elude the objective measurements of science. Second, a great gulf separates the Bible’s transcendent God from fallen humanity. Indeed, he is so transcendent that only myths can bridge this gulf and reveal him to people. Thus, neo-orthodoxy downplayed the historicity of biblical events, preferring to view them as myths that conveyed theological truth in historical dress. Third, neo-orthodox theologians believed that truth was ultimately paradoxical in nature. Hence, they accepted opposite biblical ideas as paradoxes, thereby implicitly denying that any type of underlying rational coherence bound the diverse ideas of Scripture together.

William Klein, Craig Blomberg, and Robert Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Dallas: Word, 1993) 48.

Demythologizing

The restatement of mythology is a requirement of faith itself. For faith needs to be emancipated from its association with every worldview expressed in objective terms, whether it be a mythical or a scientific one…it has tried to project God and his acts into the sphere of objective reality.

R. Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, 210.

Demythologizing

Demythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought. Like the doctrine of justification, de-mythologizing destroys every longing for security. There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge. The man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build his faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum.

R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribners, 1958), 84.

Existential Hermeneutics

Here is perhaps the heart of existentialism. All effort to seek the meaning of one’s life in this world, whether by money, or relationships, or accomplishments, or tradition, or anything else that one can have, is inauthentic existence, and doomed to death. Only when one looks to one’s future possibility, to what one can be, and continually decides to act on the basis of that future possibility, does one live authentically. This, says Bultmann, is love. Love seeks nothing for itself, but always denies one’s self, not seeking one’s own security, but in faith choosing insecurity, the insecurity of faith in what is not phenomenally experienced.

Dan McCartney and Charles Clayton, Let the Reader Understand (Bridgepoint, 1994), 107.

Rudolph Bultmann

In all such factual knowledge or knowledge of principles the world is presumed to have the character of something objective, passive, accessible to simple observation. That is, the world is conceived in conformity with the Greek understanding of being…In such a conception of the world as an objective entity, man himself is regarded as an object (as a fragment of the cosmos); his self-understanding is achieved along with the understanding of the world (and vice versa)…But the existence of man does not have the character of an objective entity but is historic existence; where it is recognized that man in his history can become a new person and consequently can also newly understand himself; where, therefore, it is recognized that the being of man is potentiality to be. That potentiality to be is always at risk; its possibilities are grasped each time by man in resolve, in decision. An understanding of these possibilities of man’s existence here and now would obviously be a new understanding each time, since a historical situation with its character of possibility is not understood if it is conceived as a “case” illustrating a general law. The historical situation cannot possibly be “seen” in the Greek sense as an objective fact; it can only be heard as a summons.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 187.

Rudolph Bultmann

All historical phenomena which are subject to this kind of historical investigation are only relative entities, entities which exist only within an immense inter-related complex. Nothing which stands within this inter-relationship can clam absolute value. Even the historical Jesus is a phenomenon among other phenomena, not an absolute entity.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 31.

Check the Context

Apocalypse Now

I discovered this lovely poster on the outside of an Adventist Church in Bartlesville, OK.