Is There an Apostacy in America Today?

         The modern theology in America is heavily influenced by pluralism and not modeled

 on the God of the gospels, according to Scriptures or the Ecumenical Creeds or Reformation.

 Those who interpret the recent history of American Christianity may level a charge of

 apostasy against it.1 The fatal flaw in American Christianity can be traced back to ancient

 festering Christological issues that were never really resolved either at Chalcedon or in the

 sixteenth-century controversy between Lutherans and Calvinists.2

          Robert W. Jenson has analyzed the flaw of American Protestantism that allows it so easily to ‘substitute political ideology or psychotherapeutic spirituality for the gospel.’3 Jensen thinks American Protestantism might have experienced the reformation that Bonhoeffer missed had Jonathan Edwards not lost the battle he fought against Arminians and deists.

          Jonathan Edwards pointed fingers at Arminians and Deists for their inadequate Christian identification of God. ‘The Christian faith disintegrated into both a deistical knowledge of God apart from the gospel and a purely sentimental subjectivistic relation to Jesus.’4 When Edwards spoke of God, he always meant the specifically triune God. He did not follow the tradition that spoke of one God, to create a common ground with the Deists, and then of God as Triune. Edward’s theology was also theocentric and found common ground with Gustafson. But Gustafson converts Edward’s theocentricity into one in which there is not the beauty of the plurality of persons in God’s being, in that, “he subsists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”5 Had there been a reformation, along the lines of Edward’s thoughts, ‘it would have led to an interpretation of the nature and attributes of God based on what happened in and for the world solely through Jesus Christ as attested by the community created and sustained by the Holy Spirit.’6 It is not what ensued and hence the charge of apostasy.

          Robert Jensen’s Trinitarian theology is based on the gospel announcement that the crucified Jesus lives and will come again to establish God’s eschatological rule and Lordship over the creation. In his writings, he gives detailed accounts of how the Trinitarian thinking originated in the Eastern and Western Christianity.

          In one sense, the Christological arguments we see in modern pluralistic thinking are the same as the old questions addressed by the historic church councils. For example, Paul Knitter writes: When I call this link between the finite and the infinite by the name of Christ, I am not presupposing its identification with Jesus of Nazareth. Though a Christian believes that ‘Jesus is the Christ,’ this is not identical to ‘the Christ is Jesus.’”7 This leads to a Christ who is separate from God in his human nature. If you can point to a God where Jesus is not or to Jesus where God is not, you have a divided Christ and therefore a useless Savior.8 The Christian understanding is that in Christ, we truly do meet the humanity of God.

          Braaten says we will know that the reformation has arrived in America Christianity when God and the gospel mutually interpret each other, not only to satisfy the emotional needs of Christians but also to make sense of speaking of God.9

 

1Braaten, Carl E. No Other Gospel! Christianity Among the World’s Religions. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. (1992) p24

2 ibid

3 Jenson, Robert W. America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press (1988) p18

4 No Other Gospel p25.

5 ibid

6 ibid. p26

7 Knitter, Paul. No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. (1985) p156

8 No Other Gospel p27

9 ibid p28

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