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| Goosebumps - Hebrews' unique summary of the Bible. Hint - this speaks of Abraham's Justification by Faith, Genesis 15. |
Background for All Saints Sunday - Eternal Life
We should not take the resurrection of Christ for granted or assume that everyone using the name Christian believes in it. One of the hallmarks of modernism is the rejection of the resurrection of Christ.
This attitude grew quickly at Halle University, which was founded to promote Biblical Christianity. The school quickly became ratonalistic, which means the faculty explained away anything miraculous in the Bible.
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| Schleiermacher was the initial gateway to modern theology; Barth was the gateway to our apostate era. |
Some famous names of that era are Reimarus, D. F. Strauss, Albert Schweitzer, and F. Schleiermacher. One is supposed to know the works of these great "scholars" to be a Biblical scholar. Although their theories differed from each other, they agreed in rejecting the divine in their work.
Theology moves slowly, so this rationalism grew in some quarters but came to America rather later. By the early 20th century, the modern theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch (Social Gospel lectures at Yale) reinterpreted everything in the New Testament. It was not taken at face value but each story had another meaning. Jesus died on the cross, wrote Rauschenbusch, to express His solidarity with the poor.
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| Karl and Charlotte worked on "his" Dogmatics until her death. He was heavily influenced by Schleiermacher. |
Karl Barth and his mistress Charlotte Kirschbaum treated theology the same way, reinterpreting everything divine. Although others were much like Barth/Kirschbaum, his Dogmatics had long-lasting and continuing influence with Roman Catholics, liberal Protestants, and Fuller Seminary, whose hip professors studied with Barth. So did my doctoral advisor John Howard Yoder at Notre Dame. Stan Hauerwas and Frank Fiorenza at ND were both "Barth scholars." This intellectual history serves to show how extensive is the idea of making a Biblical narrative into something else. If anyone wonders about the collapse of Catholicism and Protestantism, this is why - people are given myths, as the leaders may call them in a fit of honesty, and they fall away under that influence.
My Moline friend's wife summed it up well in her description of her learning at the Disciples/Unitarian seminary. "The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection? Those are not important doctrines anyway."
The resurrection of Christ is the basis for faith in the Bible. That fact alone drew the disciples away from fear and despair, giving them a Gospel message that no one could frighten from them. No one doubted that Jesus died, but the apostles and hundreds of witnesses also said, "The Savior rose from the dead, because He died for our sins. Believe in Him and receive salvation and eternal life."
Our one great fear - and pain - is loss of life, whether we admit it or not. Ours is a grief-denying culture, but that does not mean anyone escapes grief. We lose family members and friends, beyond our control. We plan for what happens after we have died, and we have little control over that. So one great fact is pivotal - we have souls and there is a path to eternal life. That makes everything else drop away in importance.
