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.
“In that sense Bonhoeffer was a raging leftist though a leftist quite different than those belonging to Schleiermacher’s ilk.”
I am not one of those people who like to blame “da Jooz” for everything. It does not bring me pleasure to see the nefarious influence of Christ-rejecting Jews everywhere. And yet, through my studies I have learned that even such a “goyish” form of subversion as the German Higher Criticism originally had a strong Jewish connection. Namely, through the wicked genius of Baruch Spinoza, whose influence of the first, pioneering generations of German freethinkers in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was great indeed.
Spinozism radiated to Germany (and also France and England) from Holland, and taught rebellious gentile youths, who usually had grown up in devout Protestant homes, how to interpret the Holy Scriptures in a systematically infidel, miracle-denying manner (Spinoza was the first important early modern era thinker who dogmatically denied the possibility of any supernatural miracles, as they violated those totally unbreakable, deterministic laws of nature he promoted).
Even this PC creationist source can observe:
https://creation.com/en/articles/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-1
“In Germany and France deism flourished, especially in biblical scholarship. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whose influence on all subsequent European thought has been describe as a ‘watershed’, increasingly followed Spinoza’s pantheism in the latter years of his life.81 Spinoza made ‘the first significant contribution to the modern discipline of biblical criticism’.82 Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), a leading founder of the modern German theatre and publisher of Hermann Reimarus’ (1694–1768) Fragments (which attacked the veracity of the Old Testament and the New Testament resurrection accounts), openly professed to be a Spinozist near the end of his life. The romanticist theologian, Schleiermacher (1768–1834), spoke of ‘the holy, rejected Spinoza’, who was pervaded by ‘the high World-Spirit’.83”
The Jewish historian Egon Friedell commented:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.218820/page/n433/mode/2up?view=theater
“Although this is rather a jejune interpretation of the phenomenon of religion, Schleiermacher’s writings have inspired whole generations of Protestant theologians. He was also indubitably one of the first and most powerful dialecticians that Germany ever had. But fundamentally he was only a renegade disciple of the Enlightenment. He possessed merely the will to believe, just as he also leaned pretty strongly, but not quite whole-heartedly, to pantheism, often treating God and the Universal as identical concepts, and evincing the highest possible respect for Spinoza.”
Another thing that I have learned in this field is somewhat comforting to me – namely, learning that while it still is terrible cause of shame and repentance for Protestant Christendom to have promoted so much the infidel science of scriptural “Higher Criticism,” it was not, after all, Protestants or even Christians who originally invented it.
I already mentioned Spinoza, whose book “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” was the pioneering milestone of modern Higher Criticism. When he left Rabbinic Judaism behind and moved into the gentile world, he had brought with him the traditions of higher-critical argumentation that Talmudic Jews had in the course of centuries secretly developed in their ghettos, seeking to refute and trash the Christian scriptures the best they could. Here is an example of the kind of stuff they came up with – anti-Christian scholarship that gentile Enlightenment philosophés were then ready to employ for their own purposes:
https://etshaimmanuscripts.nl/items/eh-48-c-12/
“Baron D’Holbach’s Israel vengé ou Exposition naturelle des Prophéties hébraïques que les Chrétiens appliquent à Jesus, leur prétendu Messie par Isaac Orobio (London, 1770) is the first printed edition of Orobio’s polemical writings, freely translated into French, and including abstracts from the Prevenciones divinas, under the title “Dissertation sur le Messie”.”
While rabbinic Jews shot only at the New Testament and its reliability, Spinoza applied this sort of destructive criticism to the Old Testament.
And the medieval Muslim scholars and philosophers for their part labored to refute both New and Old Testaments, or at least radically downgrade them, according to the Islamic claim that the writings of Jews and Christians had been falsified. For example, I learned that Ibn Hazm, a learned 11th century Andalusian Muslim scholar, had already prefigured the great pièce de résistance of Western Higher-Critical scholarship, the denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrif
“Ibn Hazm rejected claims of Mosaic authorship and posited that Ezra was the author of the Torah. He systematically organised the arguments against the authenticity of the Biblical text in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament of his book: chronological and geographical inaccuracies and contradictions, theological impossibilities (anthropomorphic expressions, stories of fornication and whoredom, and the attributing of sins to prophets), as well as lack of reliable transmission (tawatur) of the text.”
Ibn Hazm’s arguments might have been known to Spinoza:
https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2348-the-father-of-modern-biblical-scholarship/attachment/6289.pdf