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Horton
things."
4[4]
With Hegel's ghost looking over his shoulder, Harnack argued that traditional
theism represented a static Stoic worldview, while the apocalyptic religion of the early
Jewish and Christian believers reflected values strikingly familiar in modern society:
individualism, enthusiasm and a direct, unmediated experience with God.
5[5]
This thesis has underwritten a century of modern theology, not only in neo-
Protestantism but in neo-orthodoxy and in the version of the "biblical theology"
movement identified especially with G. E. Wright. According to Wright, the God of
systematic theology was the deity of static order, while the God of biblical theology was
always on the move.
6[6]
But the twentieth century, especially through the work of Barth
and Brunner, also witnessed the rehabilitation of the Reformers in this respect, shifting
the blame for "Hellenistic" theology to their systematizing successors instead.
7[7]
More recently, however, this thesis has been unraveling. On the biblical-theological
side, James Barr led the way to its demise
8[8]
and subsequent research has raised serious
questions about its viability: in relation to Jesus (Hebrew) vs. Paul (Greek)
9[9]
and the
Reformers vs. the Protestant scholastics.
10[10]
4[4]
ibid., 205-6
5[5]
"The attempts at deducing the genesis of the Church's doctrinal system from the theology of Paul" or
the analogy of scripture, Harnack was convinced, "will always miscarry; for they fail to note that to the
most important premises of the Catholic doctrine of faith belongs an element which we cannot recognise as
dominant in the New Testament, viz., the Hellenic spirit," ibid., 48. In the beginning, the church possessed
a "sure consciousness of an immediate possession of the Divine Spirit, and the hope of the future
conquering the present; individual piety conscious of itself and sovereign, living in the future world,
recognizing no external authority and no external barriers," ibid., 49.
6[6]
G. E. Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press, 1952). He speaks of
"propositional dogmatics, the systematic presentation of abstract propositions or beliefs about God, man
and salvation. The churches retain and encourage this conception in their liturgy and creeds. For example,
every elder, deacon, commissioned church worker and minister in the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. is
required to affirm when he or she is ordained that the confession of faith of that church contains `the system
of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.' But does the Bible contain a system of doctrine?" (35).
Therefore, "Biblical theology cannot be analyzed after the manner of propositional dogmatics because it
rests on a living, changing, ever expanding and contracting attitude toward historical events" (81). It is
preferred to "the rubrics of systematic theology in the customary static and abstract form: i.e., the doctrine
of God, the doctrine of man, the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of redemption, the doctrine of Christ, the
doctrine of the Church, etc." (111).
7[7]
This was the working assumption of neo-orthodoxy (particularly evident in Brunner and Barth), in its
attempt to rescue the Reformers while eschewing the systems of their successors. On the Reformed side, it
is the controlling presupposition of T. F. Torrance, James B. Torrance, Michael Jinkins, Jack Rogers, B. A.
Armstrong, R. T. Kendall and others. It has proved so effective rhetorically that even many conservatives
have assumed it in their work.
8[8]
James Barr, "The Old Testament and the New Crisis of Biblical Authority," Interpretation, vol. XXV
(January 1971), number 1: 24-40; cf. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961); Biblical Words for Time (London: SCM Press, 1962).
9[9]
Against the application of the Harnack thesis to the so-called "Jesus vs. Paul" antithesis, see the recent
collection, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ed., Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
10[10]
For the criticism of the Luther/Calvin vs. Lutheranism/Calvinism version, see particularly Richard
Muller, "Calvin and the `Calvinists': Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities between the Reformation
and Orthodoxy," Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995), 345-75 and 31 (1996), 125-60; cf. Robert Preus,
The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1970-72). Articles and
monographs by Willem van Assalt, David Steinmetz, Susan Schreiner, Irena Backus, Robert Kolb, among
others, have contributed significantly to this field.