Theology or Theologiclasm?

    In my preschool days, I became acquainted with the concept of show and tell. Though I never thought about it very much then, the conjunction of showing and telling seems fairly important. I could tell the whole class about my Thomas the Tank Engine set and leave a whole slew of questions unanswered. In the first place, no one would know if I even had the Thomas the Tank Engine set. And when I told them that Thomas was blue, none of my compatriots would really know what sort of blue Thomas was.
    But what if I showed them Thomas and told them nothing about him? They would not know that Thomas was my favorite toy, that I got him from my parents, and that the chip in his wheel was there because I dropped him from the tremendous heights of a barstool. Perhaps they could guess at some of these facts, but they could hardly know or believe them.
    Our discussion about Hildegard of Bingen got me thinking about pictures and words - showing and telling. I mentioned in class that I gave hardly more than a glance to the pictures which accompanied her visions. I realized immediately that there was something very strange about this, since the whole point about her visions is that she saw them.
    For all that, I know why I read the words. I wanted to know what she had to say about God. I wanted to know her Theology. Upon reading it, I came away pleased - the seemingly strange visions which she described turned out to be ways of speaking rightly about God. On their own, the visions seemed a bit iffy to me. After all, it is of principal importance that doctrine is communicated by words, not pictures. It would be strange if I showed someone a crucifix and asked, without further qualification, “do you believe?” [1]

Do you?

    Thinking first about faith and sight and now about pictures and words has helped me to wrap my head around what’s at stake in Bultmann’s “New Testament and Mythology”. It was an essay which I dismissed at first glance as nothing more than an attempt to dismiss Christianity while leaving some room for the subjective and humanistic elements which are most appealing within it. I now think that the point he was trying to make was a bit more fundamental: because theology is about words, it cannot be about pictures.
    As may be apparent from what I said above, I sympathize somewhat with this approach. Theology has an awful lot to do with words because it is the speculative science rooted in the revealed word of God. We share the central realities of the world which God created through our language. This is why the blind man in the gospel has faith even though he literally cannot see Jesus.
    We need to remember, however, that the words already have a lot to do with pictures. When I’m talking about Thomas the Tank Engine, it makes all the difference whether or not my words correspond to the toy which I am talking about. Likewise, Hildegard’s theology has recourse to her visions - what she has seen. Indeed, all theology has its roots in witnessing the word of God - whether it be written into creation, proclaimed through the law and the prophets, are incarnate as a man, Jesus Christ. In this sense, theology is the use of words which talks about the picture (the world) which God has created.
    Bultmann makes the rejection of a picture his task. In particular, he rejects “the mythical world picture” as something which no modern person could be asked to believe with any seriousness. [2] Moreover, it is essential that modern people know what it is that they are supposed to believe. This situation leaves Bultmann the task of deciding what it is that we are supposed to believe after all - given that it certainly cannot be talk of miracles or God atoning for the sins of the world. He arrives at the view that we can say such things as “God’s eschatological emissary is a concrete historical person” as if it makes more sense than saying “the word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
    Is Bultmann simply making the obvious point that none of us saw the historical event of the crucifixion, and so our belief is going to have to come from somewhere other than witnessing this event? Is he making the similarly obvious point that a study of history cannot guarantee our faith? It seems rather that he wants to us these two facts as a springboard to critique things about the New Testament which he either does not like or finds difficult to believe. And this is the move he needs to make if he takes it for granted that science proves the miraculous impossible and rigorous thought demonstrates that belief in the atonement is infantile. He needs to make this move because he wants to protect the possibility that God really can speak to us and that he really did.
    In short, Bultmann rejects the mythical world picture as impossible and then rejects the dogma which he says is inextricably connected to that picture. In other words, because he rejects the picture, he also rejects the words that describe it. He wants to defend theology, but in doing so destroys it. This destruction is ironic because that which he destroys - doctrine - is the very thing which preserves Christianity from accusations of being subjective, which seems to be what Bultmann wants to prevent.

    How, then, can the study of the word of God, be linked to any picture? I think that this fact is puzzling to us because human speech makes nothing more than propositions. But God is not like that. When God speaks, he creates.

-TvB


[1] My attention was brought to this point by Paul Mankowski, S.J. - “It is striking that the Church proposes no image -- not even the Cross -- as an object of faith that must be accepted in a particular way; the Christian is not, e.g., required to say of any particular representation, this is a true image of Christ.” “Language, Truth, and Logos”, The Oxford Handbook of Christology. Edited by Francesca Murphy (Oxford, 2015).

[2] Rudolph Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology”, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings. Translated by Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

[3] Ibid. 8 - It is puzzling and perhaps suggestive that he does not explain why it is important that the congregation know what they are supposed to accept or reject.

Image Credit: https://www.abtei-st-hildegard.de/die-scivias-miniaturen/