| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
The "Rothe Principle" reduces the basis of Bible Faith to "faith of Jesus" (not "faith in Jesus"), thereby making Bible Faith possible for us and preserving orthodox faith. If we can believe in Jesus, we can accept that the Bible is the Word of God based on "his faith". Here, "accept" is a word used when accepting something that cannot be understood.
Therefore, the key to Bible Faith comes down to the question, "Can we believe in Jesus?", which is the very challenge of Christian mission. Accordingly, questioning whether one can believe in Jesus also determines whether one can believe in the Bible, and with this, the question of Bible Faith is provisionally resolved.
However, it must be understood that the issue resolved here is the "Bible Faith possibility"
However, this is not because the arguments for Bible Faith actually presented by Warfield and Packer contain errors. The fallacy of their arguments is another matter. (See notes for errors in their arguments for Bible Faith.
The "Bible Faith possibility" according to the "Rothe Principle" depends on the faith of Jesus and the Bible writers, so we have not directly proven the validity of Bible Faith. It simply means that we believe because he believes, but it does not demonstrate the correctness of Bible Faith through rational consideration, nor does it provide indirect proof by revealing the reasons why Jesus believed what he did.
In the field of biblical criticism, for example, Bultmann's method of "form criticism" leads to the following judgments: Regarding the passage in Luke 17:20, "The Pharisees asked, 'when the kingdom of God would come' the Pharisees", who were not supposed to be interested in the end times, asked Jesus a question, which shows the Gospel writer's Jewish ignorance. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that this passage originated from Hellenistic tradition, and therefore it is not a historical fact from the time of Jesus.
Regardless of the truth of this view, it is clear that declaring "No, I believe the Bible to be historical fact because of Jesus" is an inconsistent rebuttal to such an assertion, which is based on some kind of evidence. Here, an appropriate counterargument here would be something like this: "The Pharisees were not indifferent to the end times; they denied it. They had already debated the Sadducees on this very subject. This passage is understood to report that they attempted the same thing with Jesus." Even if this rebuttal is wrong, it is a appropriate one.
There are several closely related concepts of “correctness,” and it can happen that one responds with a different kind of ‘correctness’ to the “correctness” that is being sought. In the previous chapter, Chapter 1 - Essay 4, we saw that when "some people" claimed that "the value of the New Testament does not depend on whether the accounts in the Gospels are true or not," F.F.Bruce responded that "that view of the Bible is not Christian."
"Some people" was trying to question the very nature of the Christian ethical value of "living according to the facts", but Bruce answered with the orthodox definition of Christianity. Here, questions of ethical "legitimacy" are answered by religious "orthodoxy," and the questions raised and the answers do not mesh.
This discrepancy arises because both "legitimacy" and "orthodoxy" are included in what each position considers to be "correct". "Legitimacy", "orthodoxy", "possibility", and "necessity" are all concepts closely related to "correctness".
Similarly, responding to claims based on academic considerations in biblical criticism with Bible Faith is simply responding with the "possibility" of Bible Faith when rational "validity" is being asserted.
It's similar to when evidence points to a culprit in a crime drama, the detective starring suggests that another culprit could be the culprit. The hero detective's reasoning at this point does not refute the evidence gathered by the other detectives. For this reason, it is a "convention" that the main detective's deductions, which are interesting to viewers, are first denied by the incompetent detectives.
The type of "correctness" with which a response to a claim should be made is determined when the claim is first presented, and is not something that can be decided arbitrarily by the respondent. As long as it is intended as an “answer,” one must respond with rational validity to those who assert rational validity. The detective starring must not only present his own theory, but also scramble to find solid evidence.
There are also some reflective comments on this point in books on Bible Faith.
"One of the issues being raised is that it cannot be said that discussions about biblical criticism have been sufficiently in-depth within evangelicalism."
"Now is the time for evangelicals to break free from the meaningless inerrancy debate, break away from borderline thinking, and improve their constitution."
However, these reflections have not yet reached the point where they represent the consensus of conservatives. Judging from the endlessly repeated debate over inerrancy / infallibility, conservatives seem to be satisfied with the "possibility" of Bible Faith and mistakenly believe that this allows them to oppose the mainline.
When Bible Faith is "possible" by faith in Jesus, and that manner of belief is "orthodox", and furthermore, because of Jesus' own faith, it is even "necessity (inevitability)" for us — yet even so, Bible Faith still falls short of answering biblical criticism. This is because it still lacks the academic "validity" that biblical criticism requires.
On the other hand, there are also problems with the approach of those who are attempting to counter mainline theology while reflecting on inward-looking discussions of Bible Faith. This is because, perhaps as a reaction to the long period in which conservatives have viewed faith and scholarship as being in opposition to each other, they tend to jump at new ideas and new methodologies.
Reading the history of philosophy, we can see that the ideas of a new era do not necessarily emerge as something that overcomes the ideas of the previous era. The ideas of a thinker who has produced a comprehensive body of work form the ideas of an era, and it is later intellectual historians who trace the reflections and overcoming of the ideas of previous eras.
Rather, it is often the research of academic scholars, often referred to as "schools", that is responsible for directly overcoming and developing particular ideas. For example, in the case of Kant, it is called the "Neo-Kantian School", and in the case of Bultmann, it is called the "Bultmann School".
Therefore, in the current situation where it cannot be said that "discussions about biblical criticism have been sufficiently in-depth", what should be done is not to try to find light in the newly emerging field of postmodern theology, but rather to examine Kant's critique of reason, which is a given in almost all biblical criticism, and the methodology of biblical criticism itself. This is because the new does not necessarily overcome the old.
First, we must understand why liberal theology and neo-orthodox theology had to break away from orthodoxy. Without understanding that they left orthodoxy simply because it seemed to them the right path, it is clear that criticism of them will continue to be irrelevant.
For example, one Christian philosophy supported by conservatives is that of H. Dooyeweerd. It posits that reason possesses a hidden religiosity, and by critiquing the religiosity underlying the premises of reason, it seeks to establish that only the use of reason grounded in Christian faith is correct. In this philosophy, Kant is said to have reached erroneous conclusions because he employed pagan reason.
However, in order to overcome Kant's philosophy, there is no need to prepare a new concept of "the religiosity of reason" (or, in Dooyeweerd's terms, "the religious basis motive") and fundamentally reexamine the "speculative reason" in the Critique of Pure Reason. There are some things that need to be done before such extensive criticism can take place.
It involves delving into the Critique of Pure Reason itself, particularly examining its central concept of the "separation of phenomena and things-in-themselves". It is necessary to examine whether this idea, which influenced Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Bultmann, and others and led to the modification of Christianity, was logically correct within the scope of ordinary reason without faith, in other words, within the scope of reason as Kant conceived it.
Therefore, if we come to the conclusion that, within that scope, it was inevitable to move in the direction of Bultmann and others, or that Kant's philosophy cannot be overturned as long as we accept reason as it is normally understood, then for the first time we can say that Dooyeweerd's fundamental criticism of reason begins to have a seed of usefulness.
But in my understanding, there is no need for that. Extracting accurately the assertion of "separation of phenomena and things-in-themselves", the inconsistencies will become clear, and we will be able to show that Schleiermacher and others who accepted this idea had a mistaken understanding of Kant.
To skip this process and jump straight into a fundamental critique of Kantian philosophy would mean acknowledging that, if one accepts Kantian reason, the only possible paths were liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. In that case, the only way to criticize them is to fundamentally deny Kant's philosophy, as Dooyeweerd did, or to reject it completely, as previous evangelicals have done.
However, this approach means that we will not learn anything from Kant's philosophy which is said to be "the epitome of all past philosophy and the starting point of all modern philosophy." Kant's philosophy is not completely wrong from a modern perspective, and it is a useful theory that gives us an opportunity to reflect on our own way of thinking, or in other words, our theology. Furthermore, it is an essential philosophy for understanding modern thought.
Without addressing Kant's philosophy in the direction of clarifying what we should learn from Kant's cognitive dualism and the errors that lie within it, it will be impossible to construct a Christian theology that is useful in the modern world of thought, where all thought can be said to have passed through this philosophy. This essay attempts to do so by examining Kant in detail not under "Theory of Faith" but under "Theory of Faith and Reason".
Examining the methodology of biblical criticism is an effective way to counter modern theology.
For example, Bultmann's “dismythologization” is an interpretive method concerning the formation process of the Bible that assumes a Kantian perspective asserting “the "impossibility of transcendent perception". On the other hand, the method of the Bultmann school, also known as "the second(new) quest for the historical Jesus," also relies on Kant's critique of reason, but attempts an analysis that eliminates assumptions as much as possible by limiting the scope of its consideration to internal phenomena. Namely, the "historical Jesus" in "the second quest" does not seek to determine what the historical Jesus was like, but rather what we can know about the historical Jesus.
As will be stated later in "Faith and Reason", the former method is hermeneutical and realist (affirming the consequent inference), while the latter is analytical and constructivist (affirming the antecedent inference), and the methods of consideration are clearly different. For this reason, it is not correct to view these as a single category of "biblical criticism".
Traditional theology has long attempted to harmonize the four Gospels, but the principle underlying such efforts is the ordinary exercise of reason seeking mutual consistency. In biblical criticism, too, there is a mixture of such considerations that are primarily based on rational judgments, and assertions that are based on certain assumptions or hypotheses, such as in "the first(original) quest for the Historical Jesus" and the modern "the third quest".
Conservative theology should undertake the task of examining these matters to clarify what is destructive about biblical criticism. Although somewhat old, the Ronshū seisho [Essays on the Bible], published by Tōkyōseishogakuin in 1983, provides commentary and criticism on the methodologies of major biblical criticism up until the mid-20th century. Such considerations should be conducted more frequently.
Theology is an academic discipline and therefore needs to continue to progress, but by its nature it does not need to be a cutting-edge discipline, except in practical frontline areas such as missiology. I believe that the core areas of systematic theology and biblical theology, for instance, can afford to lag behind philosophy and science by a century without hindrance; what matters is that they develop by assimilating the significant achievements within those fields.
At this point, we should have already digested the 18th century Kantian philosophy, which considers knowledge related to the transcendent realm, and the 19th and 20th century existentialism, which emphasizes human subjectivity――In the context of Christianity, in other words, the problem consciousness of how to accept what Christianity presents as truth, as truth for oneself――. Furthermore, the achievements of Anglo-American analytic philosophy in the first half of the 20th century, which dealt with the concept of truth, should also be incorporated.
These concepts of "transcendence," "subjectivity," and "truth" are all extremely important to Christianity. However, the reality is that conservative theology has not yet gone through these ideas and is not qualified to reject them.