Faith Seeking Understanding

Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

Mentor Books, 1953, 213 pgs.

Summary: Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) is billed by the cover as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest men.” He was brilliant. His accomplishments in interpreting Bach, the construction and preservations of pipe organs, theological publications, and as a medical philanthropist in Africa are extraordinary. Much of this is traced in Out of My Life and Thought.

Schweitzer had realized that modern liberalism or the emerging Post-Enlightenment thought destroyed the possibility for positive culture. The driving impetus of his philosophy was first to be nice and second to give other people a reason to be nice. Corporate niceness allowed for the possibility of an environment where Bach, Mozart, philosophy, architecture, and human health could be appreciated and preserved. Positive culture was the social space necessary for Schweitzer and his friends to enjoy the finer things. Schweitzer was also rather fond of Jesus, not so fond as to suggest that Jesus was God, but at least a likeable and important teacher (48).

Yet having accepted that the Bible can’t be true in the details, Schweitzer could find no universal platform to build culture. The other great teachers—Confucius, the Brahmans, the Stoics couldn’t be really true either because their teaching was culturally bound and therefore not universal: but then he had an epiphany:

Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo

The University of Chicago Press, 1969, 117 pgs.

Summary: Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) was a French physicist and developer of the history of the philosophy of science. He was also a strong Roman Catholic and a humbling thorn in the flesh for his contemporaries in the French academy. Apparently, he delighted in piquing them.

The common historical narrative is that Galileo was an enlightened scientist who was censored and cowed by the bigoted and reactionary Catholic Church. There is of course some truth to the myth or it wouldn’t have stuck. Galileo was a brilliant scientist and the Catholic Church was often bigoted and reactionary, but. . . and it’s a significant conjunction, Galileo (1564-1642) and his cohorts were making some claims about natural philosophy or science that were irrational, and Bellarmine (1542-1621), other Catholics, and Osiander (a mostly Protestant—c.1496-1552) attempted to correct their unreasonableness.

The basic issue is that the Greek philosophers had “proved” there were two forms of physics—earthly and celestial. The celestial sphere was unchanging and the earthly sphere allowed for change and flux. While the rules that governed these two physics were analogues, they operated differently. Plato’s system was the most rigid, but Aristotle’s was similar. This philosophical doctrine cohered to Christian theology, because the Bible clearly teaches a difference between heaven and earth. Greek physics was then modified and incorporated into Christian hermeneutics and theology with little or no ado for about a thousand years (cf. review of the Lewis’ Discarded Image). Aristotle would not have claimed and likely barely recognized the system that developed.

Oliver D. Crisp, An American Augustinian: Sin and Salvation in the Dogmatic Theology of William G. T. Shedd

Paternoster, 2007, 183 pgs.

Summary: Oliver D. Crisp, a former student of Paul Helm and now professor at Fuller Seminary, has written a philosophical/theological consideration and critique of Shedd’s views on salvation and sin. The book is especially focused on his Augustinian realism as it relates to ensoulment, the atonement, and salvation.

Shedd was a convinced realist of the Augustinian school rather than a federalist like many other Reformed theologians. Thus, he understood 1 Corinthians 15:22 “in Adam all die” to mean that all of humanity was in some real way in Adam at the fall. He defends this view on the ground that to be human is to be related to Adam in both body and soul. Shedd’s convictions led him to all sorts of interesting outcomes within the general framework of Reformed orthodoxy.

Crisp’s main concern is to bridge Shedd’s work to the contemporary philosophical/theological conversation by teasing out the possible logical contradictions, creating modern defenses of Shedd’s thought, and suggesting avenues of use in a modern context. Crisp is sympathetic to many of Shedd’s theological outcomes and has done yeoman’s work in turning up the weakness in his arguments and bolstering some of the best of Shedd’s insights.

Stuart Murray, Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition

Pandora Press, 2000, 277 pgs.

Summary: Stuart Murray (1956- ) is an Anabaptist theologian who has been a church planter and a director of Spurgeon’s College church-planting program in London. He has a PhD in Anabaptist hermeneutics.

Biblical Interpretation is my favorite sort of book. It’s historically grounded but presents the argument that the past may serve to assist if not correct the present. The author is at his strongest when he is describing and analyzing the historical Anabaptist interpretation methods with one exception to be noted below. His use of Anabaptist sources is a fascinating consideration of the general attributes of Anabaptist hermeneutics in response to Roman Catholic and Reformed polemics from about 1515 to the mid-1600s.

Much of Murray’s arguments about the contours of Anabaptist hermeneutics can be collapsed into the fact that the Anabaptists he embraces (i.e. the non-violent ones) took a first thought reading of the Sermon on the Mount and made it their fundamental method for understanding the life of Jesus and the rest of the Bible (74). Some Anabaptist even lacked the Old Testament to assist them in understanding Jesus’ historical context (109).

K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity

1952, The English Universities Press, Ltd., 188 pgs.

Summary: A brief, unflattering and unsympathetic overview of Wycliffe’s history and doctrine and the Lollards. As an example of his analysis:

The feverish but ill-directed activity of the last half-decade of [Wycliffe’s] life, the confident assumption of infallibility in the face of diminishing support, the bad tactical judgment that robbed him of even minor success may all be accounted for as symptoms of that high blood-pressure from which he died (72-73).

Benefits/Detriments: My mind is divided as to whether the book should be considered Catholic or Epicurean propaganda.

Interesting only in its brevity, general historical accuracy of the dates and persons, and information on the Oldcastle rising or Lollard Rebellion of 1414. (Oldcastle was likely Shakespeare’s model for Falstaff, but McFarlane doesn’t mention this.)

Utterly devoid of humor, human interest, or sympathy for anyone not burning heretics.

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1963, pgs. 206.

Summary: Karl Barth (1886-1968) made a stringent effort to pull Christianity out of the liberal malaise caused by theological compromise with the Enlightenment tradition. The book contains a series of lectures given by Barth at the close of his academic life in Basel and then in the United States.

The book is divided up into four sections: the place of theology, theological existence, the threat to theology, and theological work. Each section is then subdivided into four chapters. It’s tightly organized and intentionally vague in some places while narrowly focused and defined at others.

Barth has recognized the dangers of Christians compromising with Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment (a.k.a. post-modernism) thought. The way he escapes the conclusions and corrosive effect of modernity is by grounding his theology in the existential experience of the theologian through the Spirit and the Word.

Richard A. Muller, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology in Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: the Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725

Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Baker Books, 2006, 537 pgs.

Summary: A carefully researched overview of the development of the doctrine of Scripture within the Reformation and through the Orthodox era.

The Reformers by grounding their theological system within Scripture alone were completing and formalizing the exegetical insights of men like Andrew of St. Victor (d. 1175) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). The insistence on Scripture alone also created a more precise definition of inspiration and more carefully fencing of the canon. The men who completed the codification of inspiration within Protestant doctrinal statements were the Reformed Orthodox.

The Orthodox’s task was polemical—against the Socinians, Catholics, and Anabaptist—and churchly within their own communions. This led to the careful development of the following hermeneutic in general agreement with the Reformers:

[A] fundamental emphasis on the unitary character of the literal sense, the recognition of allegorical or tropological meanings only when they belong to literal intention of the passage itself, and the control of typology by means of the hermeneutic of promise and fulfillment . . .(521).

Boethius, trans. Victor Watts, The Consolation of Philosophy

Penguin Books, 1999, 155 pgs.

Summary: Written by the Christian Boethius (c. 480-524) just before his execution by bludgeoning. It is a mix of prose and poems in a dialogue between Lady Philosophy and himself about free will, the sovereignty of God, Fortune, sanctification, and the role of reason in theology.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Boethius’ writings on philosophy, logic, and Plato and Aristotle to Medieval and early Renaissance theology and philosophy. He clearly articulates the medieval belief that the world was round and almost infinitely small in comparison to the universe (41, II.vii) and takes an Augustinian stance on the freedom of the will (118).

Benefits/Detriments: Often times both Christians and scholars in general step in to a conversation that’s been going for a long time without going back and carefully reviewing how the conversation has unfolded. In the same way that a group of friends might laugh at someone mentioning “the Dairy Zone,” because of a shared experience, so the study of theology and philosophy have a developed vocabulary and history. Boethius is one of the key components of the later conversation in the Reformation and modernity, and he needs to be read to fully participate in the conversation. He helps us understand why Machiavelli’s Prince is so blatantly anti-Christian and to grasp the significance of Reepicheep’s comments to Eustace about the wheel of Fortune in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980, 484 pgs.

Summary: A brilliant overview and critique of the philosophical description of hermeneutics from Heidegger (cf. review s.v.), Gadamer (1900-2002), and Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Thiselton includes brief overviews of Kant and the secondary writers that influenced the authors. He also reviews the work of the major interpreters—critical and admiring—with a close summary and critique of Bultmann (1884-1976) as the most public synthesizer of Heidegger’s thought. The theologian Panneberg (1928- ) tends to reside in the background providing Thiselton his epistemological foundation. Thiselton then argues for the acceptance of portions of Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s insights as corrected by Panneneberg, Gadamer, and others as a part of New Testament hermeneutics.

From Heidegger he draws the recognition that the writers of the Bible had different horizons from ours and that we must be aware of the horizons or pre-understandings and the authors’ as we approach the text. Panneneberg’s insight that the part cannot be known separately from the whole allows Thiselton to avoid the passive relativism of Heidegger. He clearly finds Wittgenstein’s descriptions more useful in Christian hermeneutics than Heidegger.

Faith Seeking Understanding

More Articles ...