Baptist Theology without Apology 

© Jason A. Springs

Not until I had submitted the title for this address did it occur to me how strange it was. “Baptist theology,” Dr. Redditt replied to me in a confirmation e-mail, “is there such a thing?” While I found the prospects of devising one—if only to show Dr Redditt that it could be done— at once intriguing and daunting, I must confess here at the outset, that I make no pretense of devising from scratch a theology that is uniquely and distinctively Baptist in next 25 minutes. In fact, given what a privilege it is to be invited to return to this place—and these people— who first introduced me to the life of the mind, there are some things that need saying. How theology emerged as a somewhat problematical conversation partner for me, largely in light of my Baptist identity, will help provide the narrative thread for these, my reflections on what it means to be an aspiring scholar of religion, and educator, a Baptist, and in all of these, a minister. At the same time, I aim to offer a more formal set of reflections about an approach to thinking theologically that may accommodate the very idea of scholarship as vocation— a ministerial calling— and do so in an academic field that, in recent years, is less and less hospitable to theology as a conversation partner, namely, the Study of Religion.

The old cliché claims that we ride on the shoulders of giants, and surely I have— none greater than several who are sitting in this room today. As a young sophomore at Georgetown I responded to a call to ministry that took the form that I thought at the time that all such calls would come—a call to the pastorate. I can recall my conversation with that Doc Birdwhistle after I disclosed this realization to him, and how we spent many an afternoon together in the three years that ensued, discussing matters theological, philosophical and biblical amid the high book shelves of Doc’s office. I was passionate about my studies. It wasn’t until the Dr Redditt once remarked to me as an aside that his decision to pursue his doctorate in Old Testament had been as much his response to God’s call to ministry, as anything else that I first began to entertain the thought that God might be calling me in such a direction.  

Theological discussion spread like wild-fire around Georgetown’s campus in those days, as we worked to make sense of what we believed, and what “believing” was. Between Ruth Heizer’s History of Western Philosophy course and Dr. Redditt’s “Law and History” and “Synoptic Gospels,” we did our best to cobble together some answers. It was some time during my Herculean struggle with the dilemma of “freewill and predestination” that Doc Birdwhistle whispered two fateful words to me—Karl Barth. Karl Barth? Who was that, and what did his doctrine of election have to do with me? At the time I was struggling to come to terms with the “limited atonement” and “irresistible grace” in the “terrible tulip” of the 5-point Calvinism. Those were recurring theological ideas that were in the air as the result of a fairly sudden reversal in the direction of the theological winds blowing from a seminary up the road form here a ways.   

It was during my first year of graduate study at Baylor University that it was first explained to me why the notion of a “Baptist theology” was peculiar, if not an oxymoron. From a visiting Systematic Theologian named James McClendan— who introduced himself as a Baptist in the “small b” sense—I encountered the observation that, historically speaking, we Baptists had been far more concerned with orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy—“right practice,” rather than “right belief.” That one might speak of Baptist theology as a lived theology in which we often held one another accountable over matters of personal piety in our actions within a framework of several fragile freedoms. Averse to Creeds and doctrinal formulations in our discussions of what it means to follow Christ, serve the world, welcome the stranger, and preach the gospel. We Baptists needed “no creed but the Bible,” it was explained to me. That was one of the reasons that Biblical Studies was so important to Baptists. Moreover, if I intended to be an aspiring doctoral student, I should first get a command of the original biblical languages and sharpen my exegetical skills, and the theological minutia would sort itself out. 

Soon thereafter I discovered that one way to come to terms with one’s Baptist identity was to leave the South, and go out from the Baptist fold. I headed north to New Jersey to dwell among the Presbyterians. There I quickly learned that, given the makeup of Princeton Seminary’s faculty at that time, I was a Baptist receiving arguably the best Lutheran education that Presbyterian money could buy. In seminary, it quickly became evident to me how deeply I had drunk from the Baptist heritage of biblical studies. I found that I was far better versed in biblical studies— in historical critical methodologies, in particular— than many of my Presbyterian counterparts. And I recall the great Lutheran scholar of Mark’s Gospel, Donald Juel— now of the blessed memory— announcing on one occasions that “So often, it’s my Baptist students who actually read the Bible, and study it very seriously,” he put it. All over again I saw a handful of students suffer a melt-down when they heard about the “documentary hypothesis.” I relied as much on notes from the required Biblical studies classes that I took as an undergraduate as I did upon my work in those seminary classes. Of course, at the same time, it was there that I encountered rigorous theology for the first time. Interestingly, as far ahead of many of my classmates as I might have been in biblical studies, I was just as far behind most of them when it came to theology. Still wary from the meager exposure to the Protestant Reformers I had theretofore received, I quickly learned that the Calvinist tradition was anything but as one-dimensional as its distillation at the Synod of Dordt made it appear, and that the “terrible tulip” was, at best, a projected caricature of a rich and deep theological tradition— a socially embodied argument extended over time— never without deficiencies and faults, of course, but one that, at its best moments, meant quite seriously its claim that to be “Reformed” meant to be continually in the process of reforming in light of God’s leading.

The reactions inspired by the historical critical study ranged between two extremes:  a revulsion at the bible’s claims were not infallible or inerrant, and intrigue at these developments that eventually led, in my own case (and the case of many others I’ve known) to serious questions like: “well, if the evidence is so scanty, then what can we assert about these events with any certainty?” and, “does it matter?” What are we to make of the claims to faith? Could one be both a historian and a believer? In my judgment, few books have better posed this question— and exemplified the apparent answer— than Van Harvey’s The Historian and the Believer. In the Intro to the 1996 Edition, Harvey candidly talks about growing up the son of a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist evangelical preacher “who wore the label ‘fundamentalist’ as a badge of honor.” “He seemed to me to be both a learned man and a minister of extraordinary integrity.  He read the Scripture in Hebrew and Greek; he wrote a doctoral dissertation aimed at refuting the theory of evolution; and he would form time to time deliver entire series of sermons on the archaeology of the Bible or the alleged conflicts between it and science.” The book portrays Harvey’s own pilgrimage from his childhood dedication to the biblical witness— so inspired by his father— to his time actually working with Rudolf Bultmann, and his acquiring a “de-mythologized” faith, of sorts, which set him on his journey down a path that—as it has for many— led from Friedrich Schleiermacher to David Strauss, and finally to the religious naturalism of Ludwig Feuerbach. 

In Van Harvey’s story, his father was a Christian minister and scholar who believed that the scriptural witness could meet the challenges of historical-critical methodologies—challenges of acquiring the proper evidence, assessing the probability that the events occurred as claimed on the basis of that evidence, and then tailoring the strength and character of one’s faith to match that degree of probability —and win the argument on those terms. As such he was, and remained all his life, an apologist for the historical truth of scripture’s story. Van Harvey, by contrast, concludes that if “faith” attempts to play the game of evidence and probability on the playing field of critical-historical methods, then it must lose, or remain intellectually unrespectable, and perhaps dishonest with itself. Van Harvey writes:

Biblical criticism, especially research into the historical figure of Jesus, constitutes a skeleton in the closet of Christian theology, and the history of theology since the middle of the nineteenth century may be seen as a series of unsuccessful salvage operations mounted to deal with this problem.  (ix-x).

Van Harvey here highlights a disjunction between history and belief that was, at the time that he wrote this text in the late 1960s, increasingly dividing the study of religion in the classrooms of higher education and church-affiliated schools and seminaries— and this divide was, to a certain degree— based upon a division that said that biblical studies belonged to historical analysis, while theology fell squarely within the sphere of faith. And this was a division that I came up against in my own work and journey of faith in the academy. With the formal division of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, it seems to be a division that divides the Academic Study of Religion more than ever today.  But it is also a division that bothers Baptist scholars and students. Are Baptist classrooms and churches, associations and conventions divided over how to make of the historical dimensions of scripture’s claims? 

In the remaining pages of this paper, I would like to introduce a thinker who spent his career grappling with just these questions. I can only offer a brief sketch of his approach in the current context, and can make no promise to resolve the question of how one can be both historian and believer once and for all, if at all. But I do think that, as much as Van Harvey claims how biblical studies and theology must forever remain divided, that this thinker in particular exemplifies the prospects for an approach to theology that Baptist scholars— generally concerned about the centrality of the Scriptures for their scholarship, as well as the relevance of that scholarship for the life of the Church.

The span of twelve years around Van Harvey’s book witnessed the theological landscape of the twentieth century change radically. That decade witnessed the passing of H. Richard Niebuhr (1962), Paul Tillich (1965), Karl Barth (1968) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1971).[1] Rudolf Bultmann passed away in 1976. The decade in question found Christian theology in North America in an uncertain transition, and facing prospects that appeared precarious at best.  The role of theology was unsure in the life of the church, as was its relevance for public life generally. The very idea of theology as an academic enterprise increasingly required justification, and theologians faced a set of dichotomous options. To remain within the academy likely meant surrendering much of its distinctively theological content in order to justify its legitimacy in that context. Could a theologian speak in the full particularity of her theological convictions without becoming incomprehensible to her non-theological interlocutors? Moreover, if she did adopt more broadly acceptable terms and presuppositions, what might she say that was not already available to fellow scholars without the assistance of her theological insights? In a shifting institutional and cultural context, theology appeared dispatched to the professional confines of seminaries and divinity schools.[2] The second option tempted theologians to draw back entirely into the life of the church. If this avoided compromising theological distinctiveness, however, it risked retreat into a self-contained “theological ghetto,” or assuming a “sectarian” posture. It was in this context that a young man named Hans Frei wrote a book called The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, and arguably, thereafter became one of the most influential American theologians of the latter twentieth century.[3] 

In The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative Frei presented a historiographic analysis of the development of biblical interpretation in 18^th and 19^th century Europe. At once descriptive and diagnostic, Frei demonstrated there how scriptural reasoning and textual interpretation had come to be regulated by fairly recent, and highly theory-laden, conceptions of “meaning,” “interpretation” and “understanding.” And he worked to recover approaches to scripture that early Christian communities had drawn from ancient Jewish scriptural practices, and employed in various forms through the Protestant Reformation.[4] At the same time, he refused to valorize some bygone era of “pre-critical” biblical interpretation by enriching the practices he retrieved with the help of whatever philosophical and literary tools might lend themselves to his subject matter and purpose. Enriching ideas like the “literal sense” of scripture, Frei thought, could provide a way through the interpretive impasse wedged between the likes of conservative evangelical Christians, on one hand, and theological liberals on the other. While textual literalists and scriptural apologists defended the Bible against practitioners of “higher criticism,” the “higher” critics viewed scriptural apologetics as archaic, or protectionist, or simply superstitious. In fact, Frei argued, both parties to this dispute held certain presuppositions in common. Their conceptual deadlock, he thought, was largely symptomatic of Christian thought in the modern context. Frei worked to reframe many of the presuppositions underpinning the challenges to scriptural reading and theological exegesis posed by eighteenth and nineteenth century thought. He avoided any attempt to justify the basic presuppositions of theology from the standpoint of an allegedly unbiased conception of universal reason. And he sidestepped appeals to an “anthropological flash point for faith” posited apart from, or prior to, God’s revelatory activity. 

Frei claimed that theology must be unapologetic— that is, it must take faith in God as its ground and goal. Theology, moreover, must not be concerned to justify itself in non-theological terms, nor according to criteria set by some source outside the Gospel witness. Neither can it take its raison d’etre to be its relevance or use-value to the world at large. That said, theology cannot do without resources from non-theological disciplines and interlocutors. Neither can it forgo attention to its broader relevance. Theology wants non-theological resources not because it is incomplete in itself, or incapable of expressing itself. It needs these resources precisely because it is capable of expressing itself.  It is licensed—if not compelled— to explicate itself and expand its implications by every available means. So understood, theology cannot be sequestered by the boundaries of professional and academic propriety, nor in terms of the conceptual paraphernalia by which each specialized domain distinguishes and legitimates itself. All things are available to the theological task because that task first belongs to Christ. “Belonging to Christ” means that this task is initiated and oriented by the Gospel witness in which the person and work of Christ confronts its readers as a range of stories whose unity rests upon a Name. Whatever tools might help clarify and illuminate these stories are to be claimed for theology—even, and perhaps especially historical analysis.  On this, Frei followed the great Karl Barth:

[T]he truth of the Word must be sought precisely, in order to be understood in its deep simplicity. Every possible means must be used: philological and historical criticism and analysis, careful consideration of the nearer and more remote textual relationships, and not least, the enlistment of every device of the conjectural imagination that is available.[5] 

To say that theology belongs to Christ is to say, as well, that theology belongs to the Church. Dogmatic theology was, as Frei conceived it, divine Wissenschaft—the spinning-out, testing, ordering, and redescribing of all the inferences and implications of the rationality intrinsic to faith. Frei found Karl Barth’s pithy definition of dogmatic theology particularly helpful in expressing this idea— dogmatics as “the scientific test to which the Christian Church puts herself regarding the language about God which is peculiar to her.”[6] The language peculiar to the church was not the medium that the church had invented in order to talk about the revelation of God. This peculiar language was, rather, the medium that had created the church. The point of origin of the church’s peculiar language— and the church itself— was the life, death and resurrection of Christ to which the Gospel witnesses. The very notion of the “Church” has no un-revisable form or fixed meaning, apart, that is, from the fact that it belongs to Christ as the One who calls, commands and gathers the followers into communities of various shapes and forms. Scripture’s witness to the person and work of Christ presents the “fount and origin” of that peculiar language in which the church is gathered, and in which its life unfolds.[7]  

Scripture, then, is not a distinct and separable medium of God’s revelation. It is, authentically yet indirectly, that revelation. God acts to manifest the person of Christ in and through the apostolic witness of scripture. The content of revelation is inseparable from its form, while the two remain qualitatively distinct. God takes up human conceptual practices—words, concepts, and the claims and assertions they constitute—and breaks and transforms them for the purposes of revelation. And yet, at the same time, God’s activity leaves their social and practical identities intact. There is no simple or univocal correspondence between the words of scripture, and the Word as he confronts us through Scripture. Nevertheless, God’s Word comes as the gift to human kind, in human form. “[T]he transparency of these human words is God’s free gift,” Barth had written “But this gift is placed in their hands, and it is theirs to make their own insofar as they will make use of it. Thus the exposition of the prophetic-apostolic witness becomes a human task and activity.”[8] “Since all our language inevitably arises from and is formed by the human and creaturely sphere,” George Hunsinger rephrases the point, “the question in speaking about God was not whether but how to be ‘anthropomorphic’.”[9] On this point Frei follows in wake of a theological tradition according to which human speech of and to God is a possibility predicated upon the actuality of God first speaking to humanity (once for all in the life, death and resurrection of Christ as witnessed to by the biblical accounts), and God’s continued speaking to humanity today (again and again, as Christ comes new to us each day). 

The questions that Frei confronted press in upon us again today. Is there a place for unapologetically theological voices within the supposedly multi-vocal conversation of the academic study of religion? How, then, should the theologian think about her vocation within the church as she enters headlong into the conversational fray? How might a theologian engage and draw upon the best insights of cultural theory and philosophy without compromising the integrity of her commitments? What does she have to teach them? Institutionally speaking, these questions present crucial points at which to put biblical scholars and theologians in conversation with one another, and to work out the practical implications of this conversation for curriculum in Religion and Bible departments. This, in my judgment, is a conversation in which Baptist scholars and teachers can— and should— play a crucial role.