Neo-orthodoxy (sermon)

Neo-Orthodoxy November 2003

Neo-Orthodoxy - by Michael Phillips Nov 16, 2003

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Heresy is a major false teaching in the Church. I say it's a major false teaching because no one is perfect and the soundest men make mistakes. I say it's in the Church because many false doctrines are not in the Church-atheism, for example, or Islam. 

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The first major heresy was Judaism or reading the Old Testament as though Christ had not come. It is exposed and demolished in the New Testament, especially in Romans, Galatians, Colossians, and Hebrews.

A theologically and philosophical useful background presentation of heresy. However, as Judaism existed before Christianity, I would not consider Judaism a Christian heresy.

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Neo-Orthodoxy did not just drop out of the sky. Like other human philosophies, it developed over time against a particular background. The context it came out of was Liberalism or Modernism.

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The three leading men of Neo-Orthodoxy were all German (or Swiss-German). All were born in the 1880's and lived long and fruitful lives. The most important of them is the pastor, Karl Barth , Emil Bruner a theologian, and the New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann. The men did not see eye-to-eye on everything, of course, but it is fair to group them together under the name Neo-Orthodox.

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What do the leading men of Neo-Orthodoxy teach? What are the distinctives of their system compared to others? This is not easy to answer because to a man they depend very much on what they call paradox and what I'd call contradiction.

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However, let me single out a few of their distinctive articles of faith and state them as clearly as I can (though, remember, they're always contradicting themselves). 

God is Wholly Other. This term, Wholly Other, is central to their theology. It was forged as a weapon against the Liberals who equated God with nature and the human spirit. Barth and the other said, Nein! God is not us; He is not the babbling brook or the starry heavens the poets are so fond of! This is right-He isn't the creation; He is Other. But they don't leave it there. They say He is Wholly Other, which means God is absent from the creation. This means "The heavens do not declare the glory of God and the firmament does not show His handiwork.What can be known of God are not clearly seen by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.He left Himself without witness." This fundamental mistake is going to create all the others that follow.

I reason that God is infinite and eternal. God is separate from his material creation, as transcendent, but also works within finity, time, matter and energy (the ability to do work) as immanent.

The Bible is not God's Word but is a witness to the Word. What is the Bible? To Barth's way of thinking, it is a creation of man-a fine and noble creation, to be sure, but that's all-a creature. Now, is God connected to the creation in any way? No. Therefore, the Bible cannot be the Word of God. If it's not the Word of God, what is it? It is man's attempt to describe his encounter with God. God came to the writers of the Bible in an awesome and spiritual way and they tried to put their feelings about Him into words. That's the Bible-a witness to the Word-and, therefore, "true" in a vague, fuzzy sense, but not infallible, inerrant, or authoritative. 

And connected...

The Gospel events are true, but they are not factual. Was our Lord born of a virgin? Did He live a sinless life? Did He perform miracles? Did He preach the Sermon on the Mount? Did He die on the cross? Did He rise from the dead? All Christian affirm these things. The Neo-Orthodox do too, but then they explain that the events did not happen in history, but in what they call Sacred History. In other words, they occurred in the Faith of the Church, in the hearts of the faithful, and so on, but they didn't occur in and around Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago-and even if they did, it doesn't matter one way or the other! You can see how this is connected to the wholly otherness of God. If God is totally separated from the world of time and space, then His Son did not-really-die on the cross and rise the next Sunday morning. 

The Scripture is instead, divinely inspired, human written, documented, religious history.

All men are saved. Finally, the Neo-Orthodox affirm a universal salvation.

My PhD work dealt with the soul-making theodicy and universalism of the late John Hick:

Universalism July 2007

Soul-making September 2018

I stated in the September 2018, article:

Via the New Testament,it is apparent that a fracture exists between humanity and God that will only be repaired by the applied atoning and resurrection work of Jesus Christ to those that believe by the Holy Spirit. Human salvation, culminated in resurrection (1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21-22).

Otherwise the separation between the divine and humanity continues in this life and post-mortem.

I would add that common sense, common philosophical and theological sense, would lead to the premise a fracture exists between humanity and God. Where is the direct fellowship? Why does God willingly allow human suffering and death?

Approaches which postulate heaven and yet deny the biblical revelation are overly dependent on speculation and what I call ‘sentimental theology’.

Could God save people post-mortem, after death within a non-Christian worldview? Yes, it would be logically possible, but not theologically certain or probable. This would feature a theistic/deistic God that it my mind would likely only have limited temporal plans for humanity. Everlasting life for created humanity and fellowship with him, for any human beings, would be unlikely. People die, within the plans of the infinite, eternal God. If a few were saved for everlasting life that would be fortuitous from a human perspective and not based in sound theology or philosophy of religion. The probable end result for humanity in theism/deism would equate to an the end result for humanity within atheism. Non-existence.