Chapter 1: Contexts and the Contextual Nature of Theology
Introduction: Historical Contingency and the Possibility of Truth
Christianity is a religion centered on salvific events in history. Although it makes claims about an eternal God and his transcendent truth, at the same time it paradoxically finds its sources of knowledge about the eternal God in finitude and the contingency of history. The historical embeddedness of Christianity not only pertains to the biblical revelation, but also to the subsequent task of Christian theology.
Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual. During the previous two centuries, New Testament scholars have made much of how the first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations. This pattern continues in the rest of the history of Christian thought. Starting with Ignatius of Antioch moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth, all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings. In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply God’s Word to the challenges that face the contemporary Christian community.
The application of God’s Word to new contexts entails relating the content of revelation to the surrounding culture’s beliefs about the nature of reality. Put another way, because Christian theology is an incarnational discourse embedded in the concrete world of history, culture, and experience, what the Bible says about the old and new creation, as well as the Lordship of Christ, cannot be hermeneutically sealed against the claims of the surrounding culture. Rather, when theologians seek to apply the Word of God, they need to explicate and relate what the Bible teaches to what historically and culturally contextualized people see as the nature of reality. This may take the form of pushing back against the claims of the wider culture. It may also take form of translating the biblical worldview and the gospel into a new historical/cultural idiom. Translation is essential to the task of theology, something which we will explore at greater length below. Even when theologians use biblical revelation to critique the idolatries of the wider culture, the thought-forms they utilize to explain the Bible will invariably be borrowed from the culture they are pushing against.
The contingency and historical-contextual nature of theology raises a number of important questions, most notably, whether the historically embedded Word of God is capable of giving us access to universal and absolute truth. In On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power (1777), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing questioned how Christian theology could ever make absolute truth-claims in light of its reliance on history with all its messiness and contingency…. Lessing complained that Christian theology asserted necessary truths on the authority of mere accidental truths (i.e., the events of salvation history), something which was by definition impossible. Beyond this, according to Lessing, Christians had often made apologetic arguments in favor of revelation on the basis of miraculous historical events that could never be definitively proven and were subject to much doubt.
In the early twentieth century, Ernst Troeltsch made a similar critique in his work The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (1901). Following the scholarly trajectory of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Troeltsch contends that all religion is a byproduct of the culture from which it grew. As a result, religions are historically contingent and cannot make claims to absoluteness….
Christian theology cannot dodge the problems presented by Lessing and Troeltsch either by exempting one’s own theology from historical contingency or by sinking into the radical relativism of one’s personal faith or that one’s individual community. This is because from its inception, Christian theology has been an incarnational and eschatological discourse. Christian theology, properly understood, therefore does not hide from claims regarding the absolute, whether this be the absolute God, or the absolute destiny of humans. Neither does Christian theology deny its embeddedness in the finitude and contingency of history, either in the case of the biblical revelation, or the ongoing task of translating the Christian message into new historical and cultural idioms.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press, forthcoming).
Image from “What is a prolegomena?”, Got Questions?: Your Questions, Biblical Answers, https://www.gotquestions.org/prolegomena.html.