A Short Systematic Theology - Softcover

Zahl, Paul F. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802847293 ISBN 13: 9780802847294

Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A user-friendly summary of the essentials of Christian belief.This short systematic theology is a refreshing alternative to works on Christian doctrine that are too large or demanding for personal or group study. Paul Zahl offers a concentrated summary of the whole Christian faith in three concise, biblically correct chapters at once serious and popular, scholarly and contemporary.Arranged around twenty-five theses that cover the core Christian beliefs, the book clearly explains the person and nature of Jesus Christ, the meaning of the atonement, and the life that results from Christian freedom. Encompassing a great wealth of knowledge in a user-friendly, easy-to-follow format, A Short Systematic Theology is one of the best resources available for church, group, and personal study.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul F. M. Zahl is a retired Episcopal priest. He formerly was rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, MD, and dean and president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, Ambridge, PA.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Short Systematic Theology

By PAUL F. M. ZAHL

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2000 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-4729-4

Contents

Introduction................................................................................................1I. The Subject of Theology: Jesus Christ (Theses 1-11).....................................................5The Historical Jesus........................................................................................13The Present-Day Christ......................................................................................22The Presence of His Absence.................................................................................35The Expanding Christ........................................................................................39Christ as Subject...........................................................................................41The Spirit of God...........................................................................................46Summary.....................................................................................................48II. The Content of Theology: Power in the Blood (Theses 12-19).............................................51Two Metaphors for Substitution..............................................................................61The Incarnation.............................................................................................69The Trinity.................................................................................................71The Hardest Part............................................................................................73The Atoned, Atoning God.....................................................................................76III. The Method of Theology and the Method of Life: Libertas christiana (Theses 20-25).....................79Conclusion..................................................................................................91Appendix A: Beza's Summa totius Christianismi...............................................................95Appendix B: Lucas Cranach's "The Old and New Testament".....................................................99Selected Reading List.......................................................................................101Index of Authors............................................................................................105Index of Biblical References................................................................................107

Chapter One

The Subject of Theology: Jesus Christ

For Christians, the prism through which all light concerning God is reflected is Jesus Christ. This means that Christology is the beginning and the end, better, the starting point and summary, of all Christian thought. Christology is Paul's theme when he writes, "For it is the very God who said, `Let light shine out of darkness,' who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). Christology is the subject of theology. More precisely put, Jesus Christ is the subject of theology.

We understand that God in any sense differentiated from Jesus Christ is unknowable. This needs to be affirmed from the start. John writes in the prologue to his Gospel, "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (1:18). John repeats this idea forcefully in his first letter: "No one has ever seen God" (4:12). Job complains of God, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" (23:3). Bible religion knows nothing about a God who can be found or made out from our side of things. "Such knowledge is too wonderful; it is high, I cannot attain it" (Psalm 139:6).

Why is theology unable to start from God as the creator of the universe, or God as the "ground of our being," or God simply as the Other? Theology is unable to start in those places because the picture of God that emerges from such beginnings is speculative.

It is speculation, for example, that there exists a "first cause" that set all things in motion. No proof! It is speculation that there is an underlying principle governing or sustaining all that is. No proof! It is speculation that otherness—that is, all that is other to me as the subject of my life—has any personal or conscious character. No proof! It is speculation to suggest that a single entity, power, or unity created the universe, even in some pre-existing sense. In that case, the case that there is a unity or fundamental harmony to the natural world, there exists proof to the contrary. There is contrary, discouraging evidence against the existence of a unified primordial harmony. The contrary evidence is the cruelty of nature, the catastrophes of nature, the predatory character of the food chain from top to bottom, the disorder of nature, and the demonstrated fact of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Nature is neither orderly nor pre-existing nor absolute nor kind.

We go wrong from the beginning if we start with God in any other sense than as known in concrete engagement with universal human vulnerability. We go wrong if we start from a god who exists detached from our experience of relentless, arbitrary, even cruel nature. God cannot exist apart from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 or Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

We also go wrong in starting with God in any metaphysical or ontological remove from the empirical lives we live in the world. This is because of the existence of sin within these empirical lives. The theme of sin, its verifiability among all sorts and conditions of men and women, through all moments of recorded history, prevents us from positing a God who exists in any stage of his existence apart even for a moment or an atom from the problem of sin. Because of the ubiquity of injustice and sin in the world, no God can exist who is not a moral being. We have this written in our human nature by the instrument of conscience. "What the law requires is written on the hearts [of human beings], while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus" (Romans 2:15-16). Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are, let alone endured us, without also wishing to delete us and start over (Genesis 8:21; Zephaniah 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise from any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

This is why Christian theology is Christology and why the subject of theology is Christ. Moreover, Christ is theology's subject not only as its theme but also in the sense of being its governor or voice, its driver. Christ proves to be the "I" of the conversation between God and human nature. God addresses humanity through Christ. He is the subject of address, and we are the object.

Thesis 1: Theology is Christology.

Systematic theology proceeds from an assertion concerning human nature that is not the Also Sprach Zarathustra (as in the film 2001) declared through the first verse of Genesis. We do not start, save in long retrospect, with article 1 of the church's creeds: "I believe in God the Father." Rather, our starting point is article 2: "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord."

Christian theology is rightly described as being "from the bottom up" rather than "from the top down." The usual contemporary meaning of the phrase "theology from the bottom up" is theology from the vantage point of human experience, through which, partly by observation and partly by analogy, we are able to build up a picture of God, layer by layer. On the other hand, the usual contemporary meaning of the phrase "theology from the top down" is theology that starts from revealed statements about God from God. God from the top down is over and above and also prior to human experience.

A theology that is Christology before it is anything else is a theology from the bottom up. It begins with the existence and ministry of Jesus in his own time and space, and it states that it is entirely agnostic concerning anything other than what he has given us to know of the essential attributes of God. We do not know God, nor have we seen him. Even Moses the Lawgiver saw him only "from the back" (Exodus 33:23). Our own subjective visions of God, our personal stories and experiences, are simply whatever they are worth. They are all tarred by the facts of universal self-interestedness, that is, sin, and by the capricious catastrophes of life that we have experienced. We cannot know God from nature or, most especially, from human nature. This will affect our view of mysticism and all attempts to transcend the circumstances of life in order to "find" God. We "look for another" (Matthew 11:3), that is, another than the god or gods to be observed in nature or within ourselves.

Theology is therefore reluctant from the start to speak of God by analogy to any human situations until we first have our feet on the ground. For us that means a close attention to the Jesus of history, the one who "came down to earth from heaven" (Cecil Francis Alexander). Without a word to us who live here, without a word to us who experience the disasters of creation gone wrong in the world around us and in the world within us, theology is only speculation and projection.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) understood the basic mistake of all theologies that start from the bottom up as that idea is generally understood today. He saw that theology as conceived by the human being is anthropology writ large. Mystified by the overwhelming enigma of human nature, we fantasize a god or gods to fill our perceived needs. The shape of God is the shape of our unmet yearnings. Barth and others in the so-called neo-orthodox school of thought slammed Feuerbach while admitting some of the truth of his critique. We require revelation, the neo-orthodox theologians said, a Word from outside ourselves, in order to speak about God. He is silent unless he chooses to speak. All attempts to "feel after" God from our end are destined to fail (Proverbs 1:28; Ecclesiastes 7:28; Isaiah 41:12; Hosea 5:6; Amos 8:12). They create only the projected idols of our deepest needs and wishes. Feuerbach was surely right about anthropology become theology (i.e., theology from the bottom up), and Barth was surely right about theology from the top down, the Word that alone carries the weight of externally defined truth.

But Barth did not start with Jesus. He started with the electing or sovereign God who said "Let there be light!" and there was light (Genesis 1:3). He started with God's electing choice in general rather than God's grace in Christ in particular. Barth's God was too removed, too other. This is because we live here! We see what we see, and we hear what we hear. We feel what we feel. The God who speaks must also be the God who is heard. We are therefore neither Feuerbach's disciples nor Barth's. We understand a different text to be the starting point for systematic theology: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man" (John 3:13).

We understand theology as starting from the ground up, but understand that ground to be Year Zero of the Christian era, the initiating point when Jesus was born into a contentious, eruptive province of the Roman Empire, when "in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed" (Luke 2:1). We begin, therefore, christologically, with a concrete historic figure who appeared on the stage of human history. "God's grace is only manifest in the historical work of the historical Christ."

Human History as Theater

Human experience is a theater of endless repetition. It serves as the background for the birth of Christ, which took place not "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away" but rather in a particular province and city governed by the well-documented Roman emperor Augustus (27 B.C.–A.D. 14). Into the cyclical, recidivistic, ever-turning wheel of history came a unique appearance that caused all earlier explanations of the human tragedy—which is also the human comedy if you prefer to see it with irony and fatalism —to recede into the background in favor of a more lucid diagnosis. The Christology of our theology, the starting point for all further reflection, begins with the appearance of one man.

How is it that human history prior to Christ, and in a lesser but still continuing sense after him, is a never-ending cycle of repeated dramas in which each new generation repeats its part and then gives way to the next? How is it that human history is like a long-running musical in which the actors change every year but the songs remain the same? Like The Fantasticks off Broadway or The Mouse Trap in London, this play goes on and on. The Bible teaches that history, and in particular every human character within history, exists as a phenomenon of repetition:

Vanity of vanity, says the Preacher! All is vanity.... A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever.... What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:1, 4, 9)

The same observation concerning the human destiny of endless repetition is offered by Shakespeare in a famous speech from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Act 5, sc. 5, ll. 19-28)

It is vital for theology to recognize and accept the closed system of human history into which Christ came. Human history is closed because of the enigmatic and unknowable God who is veiled by the capriciousness of nature and by the permanence and universality of sin.

Human history is also a closed system because of the relentless reality of death, the termination of life. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes, William Shakespeare, and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe all stand speechless before the futile achievement of the world's "works and days" (Hesiod, fourth century B.C.). Poe thus opens our eyes, only to close them forever:

Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

We shall return to this theme of human existence as repetitive theater. Jesus Christ is the one who interrupts the never-ending performance of the drama of despair. He turns life as a play of marionettes into life as action and will, life as reality, and life as liberty. He also awakens the dormant vigor of another actor, God's adversary and ours: Satan.

The biblical thinker who most securely explores this unknown landscape, the surveying of which maps out the territory into which Christ came, is St. Paul. Paul's most famous testament of the case of human impotence, the impotence to fundamentally alter the inner as well as the outer geography of human life, occurs in the Book of Romans. Because this standard text (sharpened to its edge in 7:4-24) for understanding the world as the cyclical scenario of the bound, the theater of servitude and not the theater of freedom and life, is so devastating to human hopes of self-generated change, it has attracted to itself a vast and almost undocumentable wealth of discussion in the history of theology. Many, especially in the modern era, have challenged its relentlessly unsettling depiction of human ethical gridlock, the paralysis involved in trying to make a moral choice. Paul's plain meaning, which resonates beyond almost all other passages of Scripture to hearers of every time, every place, every condition, is exactly what he says:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.... I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.... For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (7:15, 18-19, 22-24)

The twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) saw this passage from Romans as marking a point of important new discovery in the history of human self-observation: "The Apostle Paul's discovery, which he describes in great detail in the Letter to the Romans, concerns a two-in-one, but these two are not friends or partners; they are in constant struggle with each other. The will, split and automatically producing its own counter-will, is in need of being healed, of becoming one again."

The will is impotent, not because of something outside that prevents willing from succeeding, but because the will hinders itself. Arendt continues,

In the Letter to the Romans, Paul describes an inner experience, the experience of the I-will-and-I-cannot. This experience, followed by the experience of God's mercy, is overwhelming. He explains what happened to him and tells us how and why the two occurrences are interconnected. In the course of the explanation he develops the first comprehensive theory of history, of what history is all about, and he lays the foundations of Christian doctrine.

Paul's painful portrait of human inward dividedness has never been refuted. It has never been countered by any enduring feats of human progress. It has never been disproven by means of any lasting achievement of unity, in which the willing, acting, thinking, and feeling of a person, not to mention a unity of imagining and fantasizing, cohere with the person's thinking and acting. Experience confirms Paul's diagnosis hourly. Experience confirms Paul's diagnosis every sixty seconds!

For the Christian theologian the repetitive, hence static character of world history is interrupted by the appearance of Christ. The Old Testament worldview foreshadows this interruption through the growing conviction that a Messiah or Savior will come to rescue the people and restore them to a Promised Land. The Old Testament also clings to the conviction that God has interrupted the turning wheel of repeating works and days by means of the exodus of Israel from its bondage in Egypt. The Old Testament worldview is future oriented by virtue of the annually celebrated remembrance of the one great past discontinuity, the exodus under Moses. The ancient and historic discontinuity could occur again! The coming of a future Savior or Christ is therefore spoken by the prophets. The theme comes to a full crescendo in the crisis with Rome resulting in the fall of Jerusalem to Pompey in 63 B.C. This was an unimaginably disappointing catastrophe. It marked the destruction of prophetically inspired hopes for an independent God-enabled state. Nevertheless, the coming of Jesus in 4 B.C. is preceded by the prophetic Jewish belief that history will be interrupted, once and for all, by the discontinuous God who interrupted it once before, in the first Passover.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Short Systematic Theologyby PAUL F. M. ZAHL Copyright © 2000 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802847293
• ISBN 13: 9780802847294
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei