Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Brito, Lusk & McAtee

“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.”

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.”