Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Brito, Lusk & McAtee

The quote by Bultmann below defines the kind of Christianity that Dietrich Bonhoeffer embraced.

“It is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”

Rudolf Bultmann

Kerygma and Myth

And yet, Rev. Uri Brito and Rev. Rich Lusk of the CREC are both out there championing that Bonhoeffer was not so bad and was even a conservative theologian.

What Bultmann gives in this quote is the essence of Neo-Orthodox (Barthian) theology. The Neo-Orthodox theologians would argue and quibble among themselves, but make no mistake, not one of them were Christian in any historic sense. Neither were any of them conservative in any historic sense. Because that is true for “men” like Brito and Lusk to argue the way they are arguing is sheer madness.

Here is a quote from the Bonhoeffer himself on Scripture,

“There may be some difficulties about preaching from a text whose authenticity has been destroyed by historical research. Verbal inspiration is a poor substitute for the resurrection! It amounts to a denial of the unique presence of the risen one. It gives history an eternal value instead of seeing history and knowing it from the point of view of God’s eternity. It is wrecked in its attempt to level the rough ground. The Bible remains a book like other books. One must be ready to accept the concealment within history and therefore let historical criticism run its course. But it is through the Bible, with all its flaws, that the risen one encounters us. We must get into the troubled waters of historical criticism.” 

 [Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Edwin H. Robertson (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 73-74.]

1.) The authenticity of the text of Scripture has been destroyed by historical research.

2.) When Bonhoeffer bitches about “Verbal inspiration is a poor substitute for the resurrection,” what he is saying is that it is the subjective encounter with the resurrected Christ we must be looking for in order to arrive at “truth” and not some kind of reliance on the fact that the only Christ we know of is the Christ revealed in a propositionally true and inspired text. Bonhoeffer, like all neo-Orthodox “theologians” presupposes that the objectively supernatural cannot be true and so what must be pursued is an individual personal subjective mystical encounter with a Christ who may or may not be reflective of the Christ found in the verbally inerrant scripture.

3.) When Bonhoeffer says, “But it is through the Bible, with all its flaws, that the risen one encounters us,” he does not bother to tell you that the risen one that one is encountering is not necessarily the risen one who walks through the pages of Scripture. In point of fact that Bible is a flawed book and so the only encounter one can have is with a Jesus that is unrelated to the flawed Bible because the Jesus of the flawed Bible is a flawed Jesus.

Neo-orthodoxy has always been contradictory subjective excrement, and neo-orthodox theologians have always been contradictory subjective excrement eaters. They take their subjective experiences, call it encounter, and then like filling their subjective balloons with a kind of experiential helium they call their subjective balloons “objective reality.”

And Brito and Lusk are calling this “Conservative.”

Julius Stahl on the Failure of Natural Law

“The core problem w/ Natural law, having hitched its wagon to reason, converts reason from an instrument to discover truth into a, indeed the, source of truth. Thus, we look to reason, not to revelation or divine authority to discover the truth. But this is to put the cart before the horse. ‘The true, the just are therefore that at which reason in its activity arrives, not what what it is; they are what is discovered through it and not from it. It sees the light and testifies of the light, but it is not the light and did not make the light. This is precisely what is wrong with rationalism: it turns the organ of truth into truth itself, and because of this, it thinks by dismantling and examining this organ it has obtained the content of the true, which this organ was supposed to convey’ (pg. 216). To view reason as the source of knowledge and truth is akin to believing ‘that corporeal instruments through which we receive food, actually are our food. Such a conception corresponds with rationalism’s procedure’ (p. 217).”

The Rise and Fall of Natural Law
Julius Stahl
Preface – XVI

“What impelled the career of natural law was the effort to discover a common ground for all right-thinking persons beyond the dividing lines of sectarian religion. If our times have taught us one thing, it is the absolute untenability of the notion of a such a natural law accessible to people of “good faith,” regardless of how flawed they might be in themselves, should by now have disabused us of this fata morgana. Stahl had already anticipated such a turn of events nearly two centuries ago. As he wrote “Every philosophical system of whatever name in the final analysis rests on a foundational presupposition that is nothing more than faith, no matter what claim it may make to so-called scientific certainty. Even unbelief is a faith – one cannot reason from naked doubt. We have no immediate or homogeneous view of the highest principles of things and thus no absolute certainty; therefore for philosophical systems a purely objective knowledge independent of all personal judgment, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, or even the positive sciences, is ruled out.”4 Modernism is not based on neutral science but on specific presuppositions enthroning autonomous reason, which, consistently applied, end up destroying life.”

From the forward to Frdereick Stahl’s “The History of Legal Philosophy”

“Prior to philosophizing, the Christian world recognized a cause of the ethic independent of reason in the will of God and in the content thereof, divine holiness, which is of specific determinacy, positive, not susceptible to and without need of any further logical deduction. To remove this cause was therefore the precondition, the first step natural law had to take to clear space for itself. The beginning of this were already given in the philosophy of the Middle Ages: in the lex eterna, which the scholastics set in holy nature over God, which was in Him prior to any resolutions, from which they believed they needed to derive the ethic. This abolished freedom of decision and determination in God, and it was now requisite to explain reason as that which by necessity is determinative of Him and the world. This took place by asserting that the differences of right and wrong would stand according to reason, even if there were no God. Because in that case God could not possibly be the cause of them, neither His sanctas nor His voluntas — otherwise without Him the consequences would lapse as well — this cause could only be reason.”

Fredrich Stahl
The Rise and Fall of Natural Law – p. 95

Rev. Uri Brito Tries to Resurrect Bonhoffer … McAtee Keeps Shoveling the Dirt

Below is one example of what I mean when I talk about how stupid modern “conservative clergy” are. This is from CRE’s Rev. Uri Brito on Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

“But in his own setting, Bonhoeffer was not a theological liberal by the standards of the German academy or the state church. Quite the opposite. He was remarkably conservative relative to the dominant trajectory of German Protestantism in the 1920s and 30s.”

Bret responds,

Bonhoeffer was only “remarkably conservative” when compared to how ultra remarkably liberal the left was during this time. Calling Bonhoeffer “remarkably conservative” then is like saying that Doug Wilson is remarkably conservative today.

What Brito apparently doesn’t realize is that Bonhoeffer was a particular shade of Barthian. The Barthians did not believe in the historicity of redemptive history, instead opting to create a new category of history called “Geschichte.” Brito does not seem to know this. Big surprise. Geschichte (as opposed to Historie) was like the fairy dust that falls off and so emanates from the Historie. It is this Geschichte fairy dust that makes the Historie to be “true” even though it is not true. The Historie can point to the Geschichte the way that a sign on the road can point to a Gas Station (that isn’t really there). However, for Barthians like Bonhoeffer, the Geschichte is enough to convert because when the Geschichte is encountered in a personal event moment then the Gas Station becomes true for the person having the Geschichte encounter event even though the gas station is not objectively real. This is what Barth means by the Geshcichte being a pointer. The event that didn’t happen can serve as a pointer to the impact of the event as if it did happen and someone having that Geschichte encounter moment can now be considered a Christian.

There is no way that any Barthian can be considered “conservative” in the sense of belonging to the tradition of those who believe that redemptive history is true history. In that sense Bonhoeffer was a raging leftist though a leftist quite different than those belonging to Schleiermacher’s ilk.
Brito is either ignorant or stupid.

Matthew Poole; “The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Are Infidels”

Here is the ARP defining Kinism which they inveigh against and condemn;

“The belief that God has not ordained the existence of distinct ethnic and racial groups and that these groups should not be preserved and protected . . . It is the conviction that the love of one’s own kind is not a natural and biblical duty, and that the modern drive for ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘universalism’ is not a rebellion against the created order.”

By the way here is Matthew Poole on 1 Tim. 5:8 insisting that the ARP clergy are idiots. Perhaps someone has denied the gospel, but it is not the Kinists by the definition the ARP provided.

“‘But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house: here is a manifest distinction between his own, idiwn, and his own household, oikeiwn, they are distinguished by terms in the Greek, and as to the care which men and women ought to extend to them. By his own he means his relations, all of a man’s family or stock; by his own household, he seemeth to mean those who cohabit with him. The apostle saith that he who is careless of providing for the former, (so far as he is able), but especially for the latter, hath denied the Christian faith, that is, in the practice of it, though in words he professeth it; he liveth not up to the rule of the gospel, which directeth other things. And is worse than an infidel; and is worse than a heathen, that believeth not; because many good-natured heathens do this by the light of nature, and those who do it not, yet are more excusable, being strangers to the obligation of the revealed law of God in the case.”

Matthew Poole

Any fair reading of Poole finds Poole insisting that the ARP clergy and elders who drafted the Kinist document are worse than infidels.

You might belong to the ARP if….

1.) You think an assertion is the same as an argument.
2.) You think the Ordo Amoris is a kind of salad dressing.
3.) You think that Drew Poplin is a heavyweight intellectual.
4.) You think that the church in the US needs more Brits like Andy Webb.
5.) You want your grandchildren to look like foreigners.
6.) It bothers you that Jesus had to be born of the tribe of Judah.
7.) You have never lived around or had to work with minorities.
8.) You’ve a poster in your study that reads “We be all the same.”
9.) John Lennon’s “Imagine” is you’re all time favorite song.
10.) You spend every night thinking, “If only I’d married outside my race.”
11.) Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and Marcuse are your beau idéal.
12.) You spell “Exegesis” as “E – I – S – G – E – S – I – S.”
13.) You refuse to deal with Church history.
14.) You refuse to read the books “Who is My Neighbor,” and “A Survey of Racialism In The Sacred Christian Tradition,” for fear it will convict you.
15.) You think “Jacobin” is a brand name of blue-jeans
16.) You willfully misinterpret and twist what your conversation partner says.
17.) You think “Nuh-Uh” provides a serious rebuttal to a reasoned argument.
18.) Erskine Seminary is the only one that would accept your application.
19.) You assign sinister motives to people you disagree with … after all, they must be wicked if they disagree with you.
20.) You think you’re smarter than nearly all the Church fathers who preceded you.