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The Critical Problem of Theology Today: The Problem of Method
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
Extract
Systematic Theology used to be the acknowledged Queen of the Sciences, exacting allegiance and tribute in every district of human thought. By one of those cataclysmic upheavals of thought that now and then disturb society, the situation has been radically altered. The queen has been dethroned. Surveying this wrecked glory and these emblems of departed power, the faithful speak of a rebellion; the philosopher thinks of it as a revolution; the man of science calls it evolution.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1911
References
1 Introduction to the Seven Lamps of Architecture.
2 The opening sentence of his book, The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit.
3 In an analytical discussion of “The Old Theology and the New,” in the Harvard Theological Review, January, 1911, which has appeared since this article was prepared, Professor William Adams Brown makes a similar emphasis. “All turns here on the term ‘method.’ The new theology is not a matter of date, but of principles.”
4 American Journal of Theology, April, 1910. The contributors to the symposium were Professor Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary, Professor Wm. Adams Brown of Union Seminary, and Professor Gerald Birney Smith of the University of Chicago.
5 Faithful critics have pointed out that this use of the words “modern” and “traditional” to designate the contrasted types of theological method is ambiguous. But any words are open to like criticism; and the carefully restricted definition here given to the terms ought to render them innocuous, and fairly adequate.
6 This relativity is not the “absolute relativity” of the Hegelian “becoming is the truth of being.” It is not a metaphysical doctrine at all, but the recognition that we know phenomena as process. Our explanations must take account of the omnipresent fact of finite development, whatever our conception of the absolute.
7 See, for example, Henry Jones, Idealism as a Practical Creed, pp. 24 f.
8 Borden P. Bowne, Essence of Religion, p. 65. This was always a fundamental principle with this master thinker; and it is, indeed, an illuminating insight of much modern philosophy.
9 The fault to be criticised in this type of thinking is not that it is not true, but that it does not exhaust the meanings and function of explanation, nor even touch our fundamental religious questionings.
10 This seems to be the pervasive weakness of Professor Gerald Birney Smith's otherwise admirable discussion in the Symposium cited above (note 3).
11 This language will seem too indefinite to some readers. We desire here only to make Jesus Christ the supreme test and principle of Christian theology, without entering the field of christological theory. The acceptance of this canon of criticism is consistent with a great variety of conceptions of Jesus and his work.