Trends and Movements: The Vocabulary of Faith

On a regular basis, people discuss churches, para-church organizations, denominations, and movements among church leaders. The vocabulary of these conversations is familiar, yet bears examination. What are these words, and what do they mean?

Consider these words: Main Line, Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist. These are frequently-used words, and people often have a ‘gut feeling’ about what they mean. Yet it becomes clear, when people are called upon to provide precise definitions of these words, that there is substantial ambiguity.

The word ‘Protestant’ is found almost always capitalized. ‘Fundamentalist’ and ‘Mainline’ and ‘Evangelical’ are found both capitalized and with lower-case initial letters in various writings.

Evangelical is an adjective derived from the Greek word meaning ‘Gospel’ and has been used among Jesus followers for around 2,000 years. In its most literal and basic meaning, it is almost synonymous with ‘Christian,’ yet it has come to be used in a different way, to denote a specific subset of Christians.

Protestant refers to individuals and groups in the sixteenth century who objected to, or disagreed with, the Roman Catholic church. It came also to refer to later groups who opposed or diverged from Roman Catholicism. Sometimes it is used in an extremely broad sense, to refer to anything or anyone who is not Roman Catholic. But it is also used in a much narrower sense, to refer to a specific group of radical reformers who were a subset of the larger set of reformers in the 1500s. In this latter context, e.g., some Lutheran theologians insist that they are neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant.

Fundamentalism is and was a movement that emerged largely in North America, although present elsewhere, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The movement arose in response to various theological trends which were diverging from traditional Christian teaching — in this way, the movement can be seen as a defensive action. It began with the identification of five “fundamental” teachings within Christianity. These five concepts were well established within the norms of historical Christian thought. In this way, at its root, fundamentalism was originally inclusive: individuals from a variety of traditions and denominations could give assent to these five fundamentals. These five theses constituted a platform for mutual recognition, a sort of minimum standard: a person who acknowledged the five fundamentals could be understood as a Christian, and as a relatively non-heretical Christian. Over time, however, the movement began to be less inclusive. Mere assent to the five fundamentals — although such assent might prove that a person was tolerably Christian — was not enough to make a person a part of the fundamentalist movement. Eventually, instead of creating a broad basis or consensus for a range of denominations and theological viewpoints, fundamentalism came to denote a well-defined and small subset within the larger range of Christianity’s forms.

Mainline is a word used to label a group of churches, primarily in the United States. The word is used primarily to list organized institutional churches, while the other words — fundamentalist, protestant, evangelical — can also be used to describe theologies or individual believers. The ‘mainline’ denominations tend to be those which were well-established as institutions, had large numbers of members, facilities like church buildings, schools, and colleges, and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enjoyed a generally respected status in American society. The late twentieth century saw a decline, both in numbers and in social prestige, for mainline churches.

Given the meanings and histories of these four words, the complexity of their use becomes apparent. Many mainline churches have a historical doctrinal basis which would embrace the ‘five fundamentals’ and so, in the mid 1800s, mainline churches could be seen as possibly friendly toward fundamentalism. Now, however, ‘mainline’ and ‘fundamentalist’ are often seen as opposing movements.

The Roman Catholic church could be described as ‘evangelical’ in the sense that it acknowledges the message of the New Testament, i.e., the Gospel, and sees Jesus as Redeemer and Savior. Yet the word ‘evangelical’ is often used to describe people, institutions, and theologies which self-consciously define themselves as something other than, and even opposed to, Roman Catholicism, to the extent that it was seen as a great feat to help “Catholics and Evangelicals” make common cause in the late twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the word ‘Protestant’ has endured gerrymandering to the extent that, on the one hand, people are routinely asked to put themselves into one of only two categories: Protestant or Catholic (as if no other type of Christianity were possible); while on the other hand, there is a rather large set of Christian denominations who identify themselves as neither Catholic nor Protestant.

When using one or more of these words, then, readers would be well-advised to pause and consider precisely what they intend to communicate. Consider a sentence like this: “His sermon was less fundamentalist and more evangelical.” Or: “These mainline churches aren’t currently faithful to their Protestant heritage.”

Whoever writes or says such sentences certainly has a meaning which she or he hopes to convey to the reader or listener. But there is a significant danger that the intended meaning might get garbled, because of the ambiguities surrounding these words. The writer or speaker should first stop, and define for the audience what, precisely, is meant by these words.

God’s Presence, God’s Word, and God’s Action

A close reading of the Tanakh — the Hebrew text of the Old Testament — reveals, in the words of scholar Frank Seilhamer, “the Hebrew concept of the extension of the divine Personality,” which finds its analogue “in Luther’s doctrine of the ‘Word of God.’” Between the Tanakh and Luther stands the New Testament, which likewise states that “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12).

Seilhamer directs attention to “the Hebrew concept of the extension of the personality, human or divine” —

The “how” of this extendibility has many facets that still need clarification.

What does Seilhamer mean by the “extension of the personality”? His emphasis seems to be on the agency of the person; indeed, agency would seem to be essential to personhood. With humans, this is obvious: people do things. But with the divine personality, there is often a quietly sneaking tendency to view God more as what He is, but less as what He does.

“This subject” of the extension of personality “is important for both Jewish and Christian thought and life,” notes Seilhamer:

Luther’s writings on the “Word of God,” on the other hand, are voluminous. Very few things that he wrote, and he was a most articulate person, were completed without some discussion of the “Word.” The “Word of God” is the footer upon which so much of his theology is built, so it is not surprising that literally shelves full of his treatises, sermson, and various other writings are available to give us an insight into this primary concept.

This truism about Luther’s thought, and about the centrality of text in his thought, is so obvious that it needs no repeating or explanation, as even the most casual reader of Luther’s writings will know. But what is worth noting is the connection between Luther’s concept of the Word and the Hebrew concept of God as active.

God is essentially so active that His presence and His activity seem to be inseparable. He is “personally present and active in the created order.” From the earliest events recorded, to future events yet to occur, God’s Word often is His action: His word creates in Genesis and heals in the New Testament. So a triad emerges: God’s Word, God’s presence, and God’s action. Where one is found, the other two are usually at hand.

The Hebrew “concept of the extendibility of personality” is first more obviously understood “as it relates to man,” and then by analogy, taking the same line of argument further, “the subject of how God, in a similar manner, is able to extend himself and be really present wherever he chooses, and in whatever medium he selects, is” understood:

Both the ancient Hebrews and Luther had a similar basis for their dynamic, throbbing awareness of the real presence of the God they worshipped.

Not only is their awareness “dynamic,” but the presence of which they are aware is also “dynamic.”

For the Hebrews, one of the major differences between God and humans is that God’s functions have a spiritual basis, while human functions have a physical basis. Such a general statement, of course, needs close and careful unpacking, but for the moment, it can stand as expressing the notion that humans are more physical and less spiritual than God. Hence the need for an incarnation. The danger of leaving the statement without closer reading is that it can create the impression that God is only spiritual and not at all physical; such an impression would be mightily wrong.

To see how the Hebrews conceived of God as active, Seilhamer examines who they conceived of human personhood as active. The way in which the text expresses human agency can then be transferred into the way divine agency is expressed:

This essential difference notwithstanding, in the Hebrew’s experience God still functioned in many ways much like man.

The Hebrew phrase nefesh hayyah means living soul, and is often used as a circumlocution for ‘human being’ in the text. “Many of Yahweh’s characteristics and qualities parallel those of” such a nefesh hayyah, but this should not be taken for an anthropomorphism. On the contrary, human beings were conceived in God’s image. But the similarities between God and humans remain:

One of these similar abilities of God was his capacity to “extend” himself in the same way as man could.

God is like man, not because God was imagined in man’s image, but because man is framed in the likeness of God. “Just as man, with all his” soul, “could ‘reach out’ beyond the contours of his body, God, in his ‘totality’ could do the same.

For God, as for his creatures, the “word” was one of the very potent forms of this extension.

“For the Hebrew the ‘word’” was both a verbal — written or spoken — expression, as well as the physical object or event which was connected with that word. It “was one with the ‘thing’ which it was to perform.

The “word” was the power of the personality to do the thing for which the “word” was spoken. The “word” was the person in the action.

God is active: this understanding is central both for the ancient Hebrews and for Martin Luther. Yet a subtle tendency exists to see God as distant, impassive, and disentangled from the world. This tendency leads the believer to suspect that God might only rarely rouse Himself into action, prodded by fervent prayer. Many wrongly assume that God’s activity is found seldom at best in the world.

To the contrary, however, the ancient Semites and Luther point out to us the God is always and everywhere active and in motion. God is continually interfacing with every human being on earth.

To this end Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians that God “began a good work in you” and “will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” This is a concept of God whose continuous action spans centuries and millennia. Paul reminds his readers that “God who works in you.”

God is in ceaseless motion, and so it is good to ask not only about what God is, but also about what God is constantly doing.

The Indispensability of Old Testament Theology: The Insights of Otto Eissfeldt

God has presented a complex text to the human race: roughly three-quarters of it is in a Semitic language and set in a Hebrew context, while a quarter of it is Greek set in the context of the Roman Empire.

Scholars have long wrestled with the task of seeing a whole composed of these two parts.

The term “Old Testament Theology” appears in academic literature. What does it mean? Otto Eissfeldt suggests that it describes “the revelation of God as it has occurred and occurs ever anew for faith in relation to the Old Testament,” and “can never take the form of a historical presentation, because faith has not to do with things past but with the timeless present.”

To fully explore the phrase “Old Testament Theology” would take a long discussion. For the present, it will suffice to indicate that the Old Testament is not secondary or ancillary to the New Testament. The Old Testament stands on its own as a theological document. Neither Testament is complete without the other, as Otto Eissfeldt writes:

Of course, this kind of Old Testament theology, structured on the basis of faith, is influenced throughout by the central faith experience of its author and his religious community, but it is not required that every assertion must be expressly related to this. In other words, Old Testament theology does not always require “fulfillment” in New Testament theology. There are elements in the Old Testament - for example, the psalms that praise God’s majesty as it is unfolded in creation - that can also be direct revelation to the Christian, all the more since such are almost wanting in the New Testament. In this case, the otherwise self-evident schema of placing the religion of the New Testament above that of the Old must be replaced by a schema that sets them alongside each other. Here the Old Testament serves to complement the New.

The Old Testament — or Tanakh — represents a number of absolutely unique developments. On a social level, it placed women on a higher level than had previously been documented in any ancient text; it asserted that even slaves were human beings, and as such had certain rights, and that their masters did not have limitless arbitrary power over them; it expressed a humane attitude toward, and legislated decent treatment for, the poor, the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan.

Indeed, it expressed a privileged status for, and God’s favor upon, the poor, the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan. This was a revolutionary overthrow of the existing hierarchies in the ancient nations of that time.

On a spiritual level, the Old Testament was positively iconoclastic vis-a-vis other ancient religious texts, pronouncing that the possession of earthly and material blessings was not necessarily a sign of God’s favor, and that enduring earthly and physical hardship was not necessarily a sign of His wrath.

The Hebrew word anawim can be rendered as the “needy” (Psalm 9:18), the “afflicted” (Psalm 10:17, 22:26), the “humble” (Psalm 25:9, 147:6, 149:4), or the “meek” (Psalm 37:11) — depending, of course, upon translation. These are the people for whom God has special favor.

The concept of the anawim blossoms in the New Testament in the teachings of Jesus (Matthew 5:3-12; Luke 14:7-14), and in the letter written by James (2:1-9). So it is that the Old Testament is foundational for the New, according to Otto Eissfeldt:

This applies above all, as Karl Holl has justifiably stressed (“Urchristentum und Religionsgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 2 [1924/25] 387-430), to conceptions regarding the relation of God to sin and the sinner. The New Testament idea of a God who offers himself to the sinner is actually foreign to the Old Testament. But it is equally correct and worth noting when Holl adds this conclusion: “Indeed, in the question of evil, Judaism came to a similar recognition never attained elsewhere among humankind. Recalling only Isaiah 53 and the anawim in the Psalms - Judaism broke through the conventional wisdom which held that the best person must also be the most fortunate. Just the reverse: precisely the most pious can suffer the harshest troubles. The unfortunate one does not necessarily despise God; he may stand closer to God than the one who gains everything.” With respect to overcoming evil, the Old Testament must here be placed alongside the New.

Eissfeldt outlines a mode of thought which he calls “religious pragmatism” or “theological pragmatism,” a view in which “the way of the world can be evenly calculated in such a way that piety and fortune, conduct pleasing to God and success - or the reverse, sin and suffering - always go together.” Eissfeldt argues, convincingly, that such a view “corresponds in no way at all to what can be recognized at the high points of Old Testament religion as the nature of faith. There, faith always entails struggle and daring, and precisely where an incongruity between piety and fortune is discovered and must be overcome, faith displays itself in its full power.”

Thus, Eissfeldt urges the reader to

Compare Holl’s statements with what was said above concerning the religious pragmatism of the Old Testament’s historical books.

It is high praise indeed to say that the Old Testament contains, in chrysalis state, but also in a more developed concept, the Theologia Crucis which is both an essential part of, and an enduring mystery regarding, the Gospel as presented in the New Testament.

The Creative Tension Inside Theology

One of the mysteries confronting the reader of the Old Testament is a question about the status of the assertions it makes - assertions made more often by implications rather than by explicit propositions: not the assertions made about concrete history, but rather the assertions it makes about spirituality, about the relation between God and man, assertions which are often indicated rather than stated, assertions which are indicated by the structure of the religion of the ancient Hebrews.

Is the Old Testament showing eternal truths, or truths that were true only for that time, or showing that it was true that those things were presented as truths - whether or not they actually were truths? In these questions lurk both a slippery slope toward the heresy of Marcionism, and another slippery slope toward a woodenly dogmatic and hyper-literal reading of the text.

Phrased another way, one can ask if the faith of the Old Testament is the faith of the New Testament. Or is it a separate faith? Exploring this question, Otto Eissfeldt writes:

The tension between absolute and relative, between transcendence and immanence, is the current problem of theology. For biblical scholarship, this general problem is reduced to a particular one: history and revelation. It is with this problem that the study of both Testaments, of the New just as of the Old, has to grapple, and a new solution must be found that applies fundamentally to both. However, particular matters in the Old Testament differ from those in the New, so that a treatment restricted to the Old Testament is legitimate. The question, then, is whether the religion of the Old Testament is to be understood and presented as a historical entity like other religions of antiquity, and thus in terms of the history of Israelite-Jewish religion, or as a religion which is, even if in some limited way, the true religion, the revelation of God, and thus - so the term will be understood here - as “Old Testament theology.”

So there are two approaches. The first approach looks at the text as a source regarding the history of religion: What did people believe? What were the doctrines and practices? Did that belief change or develop over time? The second approach sees the text as a source of theological truth: Which spiritual insights can the reading find in the Old Testament? How does God reveal Himself in the text?

Obviously and fittingly, the historical approach tends to use past tense verbs, while the theological approach tends to use present tense verbs.

The two approaches certainly interact with each other. Can they be harmonized? Otto Eissfeldt suggests that, finally, they can even be united:

Despite every distinction between the two approaches, the historical and the theological, it is nonetheless finally the case that, seen from a higher vantage point, they form a unity - and they do so not just to the extent that its importance to us as the source of revelation, rather than only or even primarily as the object of historical knowledge, accounts for the extraordinarily urgent historical investigation of Old Testament religion. Rather, beyond all this, we are confident that it is the one identical truth for which knowledge strives and by which faith is grasped. Knowing and believing belong, as we have seen, to two parallel planes, and they must meet each other in infinity - but only in infinity. Within the finite realm the two approaches form a unity only to the extent that one person can master them.

Eissfeldt seems, perhaps, to suggest that the wisest course is to pursue both approaches, and to strive to discover the organic unity of which each displays an aspect.

Not Theomorphism, Not Anthropomorphism: The Metaphysical Status of God in Early Hebrew Thought

It can be difficult for the modern reader, or for the postmodern reader, to peel back the centuries of accrued worldview in order to understand the conceptual framework of ancient Hebrew writers. The typical 21st-century eye will approach the text with one of two viewpoints: either modern metaphysical Cartesianism, or modern materialism — the latter available in various versions, from, e.g., David Hume or Karl Marx.

The reader who fancies herself or himself to be postmodern is still probably operating out of one of these two options.

Neither of these frameworks would have been familiar to the Hebrew author writing anywhen between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C.

The conceptual pigeon-holes into which the ancient Hebrew slotted his thoughts did not distinguish as sharply and rigidly between physical and metaphysical as does the modern thinker. But the ancient Hebrew would have drawn a more distinct boundary-line between the divine and the worldly than his modern analogue.

Generally, the ancient Hebrew might have been more comfortable with fuzzy and indistinct boundary-lines than 21st-century folks. While the modern reader is inclined to dissect the human being into a physical body on the one hand, and on the other hand into parts which are spiritual, mental, emotional, psychological, and soulful, his Hebrew counterpart might have said that a human being is not a “body and soul” but rather the intersection of body and soul — that “body and soul” are not two parts, like nut and bolt, or like nail and wood, or like shirt and pants, but rather that body and soul are like the flour and sugar in a cake: stirred together, joined with a liquid, and baked into an indivisible unit.

Reaching for another metaphor, it may be said that the ancient Hebrew looked at the human blend of body and soul like the blend of two colors of paint, which the artist mixes on his palette, the black and the white mingled to form a shade of gray, and it would be hopeless to speak of the “white” as somehow distinct from the “black” once the two are mixed.

While the Hebrew therefore made less of a distinction between the physical and the metaphysical, he made perhaps more of a distinction between the divine and the commonplace.

The modern metaphysician calmly adds “God” to the list of other objects which he classifies as “metaphysical” — metaphysical objects include thoughts, ideas, emotions, memories, minds, abstract numbers, geometrical forms, mathematical formulas, angels, demons, etc.

The Hebrew was more inclined to see God as absolutely and utterly apart from other types of existence — from other types of being, or, with Heidegger, from other types of Being — Sein or Dasein.

When the interpretive question is then posed, does Scripture speak of God in an anthropomorphic manner? The answer is a clear and decisive “Yes and No.” As scholar Frank Seilhamer writes,

Much of the Old Testament conceives of God in a highly anthropomorphic fashion. Yahweh is no far-off, abstract idea, but a person who in many ways is much like a man, thought greater, mightier, etc. He is not seen as “absolute Being but as the ‘living God,’ active in this world of time and space … ” Not only is God one who has a body, enabling him to walk in a garden in the “cool of the day,” but he is capable of exhibiting the whole gamut of emotional and psychical states. God can feel anger, hate, love, and mercy and compassion, just as he can be jabbed with sorrow, and even be bargained with. In all, Yahweh is a deity who communicates and feels and acts “personally” with and in his creation.

The Hebrew author was quite comfortable in writing of God using thoroughly human vocabulary. But this does not necessarily imply ‘anthropomorphism’ as the term is often understood. The difference between God and man is not one of metaphysical category, but rather one of spiritual category. All of this will be quite uncomfortable for the metaphysician trained in a cartesian or post-cartesian pattern.

For the ancient Hebrew, God can enjoy a walk in the garden during the cool part of the day while still being utterly different from a human being — especially from a post-Fall human being.

The difference between God and man, in the ancient Hebrew mindset, is not the difference between metaphysical and physical; it is the difference between divine and commonplace, as Seilhamer notes:

This is not to say, however, that there were no essential and basic difference between God and man other than degree in early Hebrew thought. As Aubrey Johnson points out, even in the earliest Biblical records Yahweh, though pictured in the formof a man, was, nevertheless, thought of as a Being of a different substance than the latter.

While the modernist emphasizes the distinction between metaphysical and physical, between mind body — and then comfortably places both ‘mind’ and ‘God’ into a categories which includes a variety of other ‘metaphysical objects’ — the authors of the Tanakh emphasized the distinction between God and everything else.

This is perhaps why most forms of the gnostic heresy had to wait for the Greek conceptual framework to enable their appearances. Gnosticism would not have been intelligible, much less plausible, to the ancient Semites.

Among other Hebrew vocabulary, Seilhamer examines nefesh and basar.

“Though there was nothing in Hebrew thought that made the ‘body’ or ‘flesh’” sinful in and of itself, such a sense of “body” or “flesh” was still somehow incomplete, or not complete enough, to capture the divine presence. Such body or flesh is not “a substance too ‘base’ to be the ‘person’ of the divine,” But it is insufficient to be the fullness of the deity.

“God’s ‘person’ usually was spoken and written of in terms of being of a light and rarefied substance, sometimes explained as being like ‘fire.’” This might perhaps be read as vaguely analogical to, or foreshadowing of, the type of metaphysical objects which appear in the writing of the Descartes or Leibniz — a Platonic idea(l) or an abstraction to which is attributed some ontological reality. But we cannot read the ancient Hebrews as being dualists, or substance dualists, in the sense of the Cartesians and other early modern philosophers. When the early Hebrews describe God as “spirit,” they are not working in the conceptual framework which categorizes things as either physical or metaphysical.

This difference between God and the rest of his creation is pointed up in the well-known oracle of Isaiah uttered by the prophet against his contemporaries who looked to Egypt for help against Assyria.

In Chapter 31, Isaiah notes that “the Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses are flesh and not Spirit.” Perhaps a tentative reconstruction of ancient Hebrew ontology may be ventured. In the juxtaposition of ‘men’ and ‘God’ — and of ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ — Isaiah is not organizing his thought around the early modern distinction between physical and metaphysical. Rather, Isaiah is operating with these two categories: God and everything else.

The “parallelism” in Isaiah “points out the contrast between the substance of God and the substance of his creation.”

In contrast to what he has made God is not “flesh,” he is “Spirit,” and in this sense different in essence from man and animals. It is not that this passage, or ones similar to it, attempt to indict “flesh” as being essentially evil or corrupt. The intent of the text is to show that God is not of the same fragile substance as man. Where man is limited God is not. God is infinitely beyond man in “being,” while continually in communication with man “personally.” God is not an unidentifiable unknowable glob floating around in space! He is a “person.” Yet, while God is a “person” he still is essentially “Spirit.” Therefore, while God can be, and so often is, spoken about in an anthropomorphic framework, it must never be forgotten that for the early Hebrews at least God’s psychical functions have a “Spiritual” basis in contrast to man, whose psychical functions have a physical basis.

The 21st-century reader must therefore be careful not to read into these words — spirit, soul, body, flesh, etc. — a modern ontology.