With Frank D. Macchia, Ralph Del Colle and Dale T. Irvin, “Christ and Spirit: Dogma, Discernment and Dialogical Theology in a Religiously Plural World,” Journal of Pentecostal

[JPT 12.1 (2003) 15-83] ISSN 0966-7369

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2003, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010, USA.

CHRIST AND SPIRIT: DOGMA, DISCERNMENT, AND DIALOGICAL

THEOLOGY IN A RELIGIOUSLY PLURAL WORLD

Amos Yong, Dale T. Irvin, Frank D. Macchia and Ralph Del Colle*

ABSTRACT

Theology is dialogical. Emil Brunner said as much in his classic, Wahrheit

als Begegnung (Truth as Encounter). In a sense, such a notion is not only a

judgment but a statement of fact, since every theological reflection is in

* Amos Yong (PhD, Boston University) is Associate Professor of Theology at

Bethel College, Minneapolis, MN, USA. His publications include, Discerning the

Spirits: A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions

(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) and, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological

Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). He serves as

Book Review Editor of Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

Email: [email protected]

Dale T. Irvin (PhD, Union Theological Seminary, NY) is Professor of World Christi-

anity and Academic Dean at New York Theological Seminary, USA. His publications

include, Christian Histories, Christian Traditioning: Rendering Accounts (Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis Books, 1998) and, with Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian

Movement, Vol. 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453 Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

Email: [email protected]

Frank D. Macchia (DTheol, University of Basel) is Director of the Graduate Program

in Religion at Vanguard University, Costa Mesa, CA, USA. His publications include,

Spirituality and Social Liberation: The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of Wuer-

temberg Pietism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1992). He serves as Editor of Pneuma:

The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He is also a past president of the

Society for Pentecostal Studies. Email: [email protected]

Ralph Del Colle (PhD, Union Theological Seminary, NY) is Associate Professor of

Theology at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA. His publications include,

Christ and the Spirit: Spirit Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1994). He currently serves as President of the Society for Pentecostal

Studies. Email: [email protected]

16 Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12.1 (2003)

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2003.

conversation with the biblical text and with other voices, both historical and

contemporary. ‘Table talk’ theology has historically been an effort to

engage in the dialogue of theological discourse in a somewhat personal and

spontaneous mode. In the late 1970’s, a three-volume dogmatics involving

dialogue between three theologians at the University of Basel (Heinrich Ott,

Jan Lochman, and Fritz Büri) with the title, Dogmatik im Dialog (Dog-

matics in Dialogue), was celebrated in Switzerland as the dogmatics of the

future. The following theological reflection is consciously dialogical as

well, except more in the spontaneous, table-talk (indeed, chat-room) mode,

reflecting the fresh patterns of human interaction that are rapidly opening

up through the pace and parameters of internet communication. This

dialogue unfolded without forethought of publication; such an outcome

emerged only later by way of risky afterthought-a thought and a hope that

others would enrich it from their own engagement in a living and lively

conversation. The topics taken up here revolve most centrally around the

question of the role of pneumatology in facilitating a discernment of truth

that is open to the voices outside of the church and respectful of their

‘otherness’, as well as the role of christological and trinitarian dogma in

guiding this discernment without prematurely hindering it.

Part I

What follows emerged from a session devoted to Amos Yong’s Dis-

cerning the Spirit(s) at a recent meeting of the Society for Pentecostal

Studies.1 In responses at this meeting, Ralph Del Colle pushed the question

of the trinitarian missions, challenging Yong’s characterization of the

Spirit’s mission being distinct and in some way autonomous from that of

the Son’s, and thereby dis-abling rather than en-abling the proper discern-

ment of the Spirit in the world; Dale Irvin (also) sought for a more explicit

identification of the Spirit, insisting both that Christ is the eternal manifes-

tation of the Spirit’s glory, and that the unavoidable particularity of the Son

sustains rather than undermines the integrity of the interreligious dialogue

for Christians.2 Yong then offered a brief rejoinder, acknowledging the

validity of these concerns but contending that the threat of pneumatological

1. A. Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Response to

Christian Theology of Religions (JPTSup, 20; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,

2000), discussed at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies

(SPS), Southeastern College, Lakeland, Florida, 14–16 March 2002. The session was

organized by James K.A. Smith, now at Calvin College, to whom we are all indebted.

2. The third respondent at the SPS meeting was Peter Althouse (Wycliffe Col-

lege). His comments focused on the foundational pneumatology and the pneumatologi-

cal categories of Yong’s project.

YONG ET AL. Christ and Spirit 17


subordination, all too prevalent historically, would persist unless some way

was found to preserve the distinctiveness of the respective missions of the

Son and the Spirit. Open discussion followed with the audience, during

which Frank Macchia raised the question of whether or not Discerning the

Spirit(s) should be read as an attempt to ‘bracket’ dogmatic approaches to

the interfaith encounter so as to allow a truly dialogical engagement to

occur. The conversation continued there at the conference and for more than

two weeks after the conference through an intense email conversation (al-

most 32,000 words) between Yong, Irvin, Macchia, and Del Colle. The

following presents in full the theological aspects of the exchange, with

elipses (…) representing material left out of the original e-dialogue due to

space and other constraints. It has been edited only for spelling and read-

ability, and footnoted as appropriate.3

From: Yong, 3/19/02

Ralph, Dale and Peter, I did not get a chance to say (personally) ‘Thanks’

for taking the time to read my book and respond to it at this past SPS

meeting. So, thanks for pushing me on the points that you did. I think that

your comments were, for the most part, right on target, criticisms of which

I was aware and about which I need to be reminded. I have another book

coming within the next year from Baker Academic on this topic, and with

your prodding, I am going to be sure to watch against using the unquali-

fied notion of ‘autonomous’ missions.4

Of course, I think that the difficulty lies in how to conceive and talk

about the relationship between christology and pneumatology without sub-

ordinating either to the other. Is there room here to talk about a ‘mutual

subordination’?… Besides the ontological point there is the epistemologi-

cal, rhetorical and missiological one: the possibility of bracketing christol-

ogy for the purposes of the engagement. Any bracketing is never absolute,

nor is such possible. And here, I also agree that there is a real sense in

which the particularities of faith which are brought to the interreligious

arena are the building blocks of all true interfaith engagement, and in that

sense, ‘bracketing’ may be a passe strategy. But also in that sense, chris-

tology is both particular and universal, just as pneumatology is particular

3. The initial task of editing the dialogue was accomplished by Yong. The pub-

lished version which appears here includes the input and approval of the other members

of the dialogue.

4. See Yong, Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Reli-

gions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).



and universal, albeit both in different ways… But if that is the case, then

the question of bracketing arises in other respects—i.e. in asking how we

can recognize the distinctiveness of pneumatology over and against chris-

tology if both are particular and universal. My immediate concern is that

our preconceived christologies do not hinder our encountering and engaging

those in other faiths…and I am exploring ways in which pneumatology may

help us in regard to this question.

The other reason why I think pneumatology is crucial is that it allows us

to deal with the ‘wild card’ in the interreligious arena: the demonic. In one

sense, how do we discern the Spirit except as the Spirit of Jesus. But how

do we recognize Jesus? By the Spirit. Circularity? Perhaps yes and no. I

am wondering if a genuine encounter with others will not expand the

horizons of our discernment, perhaps give us fresh insight, new categories,

even a revised criteriological framework, even into christology. That is, at

least, the motivation that drives my work…

From: Irvin 3/20/02

Amos, our thanks are just as much in order to you…I decided to go down

a wider ecumenical road in my response and raise the trinitarian concerns

from a classical orthodox perspective, but could have done so from a more

traditional Pentecostal perspective. I don’t think one can really construct a

Pentecostal theology of the demonic and not begin by raising the name of

Jesus (as ‘in the name of Jesus!’ said with gusto).

I have also been thinking further about Frank’s closing comments about

the need for bracketing christology. For me the notion is too weighted with

Husserlian phenomenological baggage to carry us very far. As I told Frank,

once the brackets go up, as Husserl discovered, it becomes impossible to

get them down. On the other hand, I am also ready to say that ‘bracketing’

is in one sense the nature of dogma. Dogma is a container that seeks to

bracket in order to locate. But isn’t this also the grave? Wasn’t the tomb an

attempt to bracket Jesus, to silence him so that another spirituality could

speak (that of the Sadducees and that of Rome)? Yet Jesus slips out of such

bracketing, and the empty tomb tells us starkly that he cannot be found

where we last bracketed him.

Marianne Sawicki’s brilliant book, Seeing the Lord, points to the signifi-

cance in early Christian life for the kerygma of the empty tomb being heard

through the witness of women.5 It was these same women who birthed and

5. Sawicki, Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Minne-

apolis: Fortress Press, 1994).



nurtured Jesus, she says. By their witness the women rebirthed him from

the tomb/womb. But then the men re-entombed him in the text of Scripture.

Thus the text of Scripture itself becomes, for Sawicki, the ‘empty tomb’

from which the Risen Christ continues to emerge, as Jesus continues to be

remade in ways that slip past the guardians of his tomb. Thinking along

these same kind of lines, I would add to Sawicki’s insights the testimony

that it was by the power of the Spirit that Jesus was raised from the dead. I

would want to connect this with the descent of the Spirit on him in his bap-

tism in the river Jordan, and with the descent of the Spirit on his disciples

on the day of Pentecost. Aloysius Pieris pointed out the importance of

linking the cross and resurrection with baptism in Christian life.6 This is a

linkage made not only by Paul but also by Mark in ch. 9 (drinking from

the cup of ‘my baptism’). In the event at the Jordan River with John, Jesus

was baptized into the spirituality of Israel, says Pieris. On the cross Jesus

was baptized a second time, into the historical suffering of the oppressed.

Was not the second baptism of Jesus being completed in his resurrection?

And was this not the mission given to the disciples on the day of Pente-

cost? Being baptized into the spirituality of others might be a way to move

in the direction you want to go. The risk is that the demonic may be

encountered along this road as well: only after being baptized in the Spirit

in the Jordan can Jesus encounter Satan in the wilderness; and only after

being baptized by the Spirit on the day of Pentecost can the disciples

encounter the demonic in the form of Temple authority and Roman power.

One question I didn’t raise but still wonder: why no real engagement

with Tillich’s essay on ‘The Demonic’?7 This, it seems to me, would be a

way to move the discussion into the historical arena of political and social

life. Tillich begins with the philosophical concept of the me on (non-

being) and goes on to locate the demonic as the abyss, emerging from the

same depths as the divine. I think in this early essay he was already deal-

ing with the ambiguities of history in a way that does not lose sight of the

horror that the demonic entails…

From: Macchia 3/20/02

Amos and Dale… Let me get right to the point by expanding on the inten-

tion behind my remarks at SPS and think out loud with you both. First, I

6. Aloysius Pieris, SJ, An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988),

pp. 62-63.

7. Paul Tillich, ‘The Demonic’, in idem, The Interpretation of History, (trans. N.A.

Rasetzki and E.L. Talmey; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), pp. 77-115.



am not glued to the term bracketing, and I am willing to substitute some-

thing else for it. Let me explain my intention. Dale, I found your remarks

about dogma as brackets and the efforts to bracket (locate) Jesus in ways

that stifle his voice interesting. But keep in mind that I was not speaking of

bracketing the living Jesus. That would be impossible, because he is the

Lord of life who transcends all brackets and engulfs both me and the other

I encounter… My remarks had to do with dogma. As Bruce McCormick

once noted, one learns from Barth that the heart of the church and of all

dogma is not a dogmatic principle but the living Christ.8 Hence, dogmatics

are meant to be very ‘nondogmatic’. Now, if the living Christ engulfs all

of reality through the Spirit, both me and the others, then what am I to do

with the dogmatic tradition of the church concerning Christ? Christoph

Blumhardt stated that the Spirit makes Christ a life force throughout

history that emerges not only in the church but also outside of it to en-

counter Christians in unexpected and even disturbing ways.9 Christ outside

of dogma? Yes! Because of the witness of the universal Spirit, we cannot

confine Christ to the history of the church’s dogma. Note Khodr’s remark:

‘contemporary theology must, therefore, transcend the notion of “salvation

history” in order to recover the meaning of oikonomia. The economy of

Christ cannot be reduced to its unfolding in history; the heart of it is the

fact that it makes us participants in the very life of God. It must involve

reference to eternity and to the work of the Holy Spirit.’10 Dale, after the

SPS session, you rejected my use of the term ‘bracketing’ in order to state

instead that Christ is further illuminated for us in our encounter with the

other. OK—this ‘christology on the way’ is what I am after as well. But

how does this happen in encounter with the other? Here is where Amos’

speculations are helpful for me. Amos’ book reminded me of a struggle I

had years ago during my research into Buddhism. I was concerned with

how I can really let Buddhists be who they are with all of the integrity that

they deserve as the ‘other’. More importantly, I wondered how I can ex-

perience their unique sense of the divine reality, if I come to them with

8. McCormick shared this with me in a personal conversation.

9. Blumhardt stated, ‘Jesus is not like a man who lived once and then passed

away; we can only compare him to a Spirit who always creates something new and

wills that which is good for each time period’. Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen,

Predigten, Reden, Briefe: 1865–1917 (Neukirchen–Vluyn: Herder, 1980), II, p. 287.

10. Quoted in Conrad Raiser, ‘Holy Spirit in Ecumenical Thought’, in Nicholas

Lossky, et. al. (eds.), Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: World Council

of Churches, 1991), p. 477.



lenses of christological dogma firmly fixed on my nose? Is there not a

sense in which I must place the dogmatic tradition of the church into the

background so that I can experience the divine in the world of the other in

all of its uniqueness? I think this is Amos’ question. I don’t let go of the

dogma, only ‘suspend’ (bracket, whatever) so as to experience the Spirit’s

witness to the living Christ within another world. In this way, the dogmatic

tradition of the church can be questioned and illuminated in unexpected

ways. When I go to a film, I place my sense of reality into the background

so that I can enter and experience the imaginative world of the film. I do

not let go of my sense of reality(!), but I also try not to let my sense of

reality intrude into the experience so as to hinder the hosting of this other

imaginative world. In this way, I can experience the other on its own terms

and have my own sense of reality enriched. Call it bracketing or whatever.

The term is unimportant to me. What do you both think?

From: Yong 3/21/02

The question to me is how to locate the universal Jesus (Jn. 1.9) in the par-

ticularity of the other. The answer, I am exploring, is pneumatologically.

This allows us to experience the other as other, yet in a mutual field of

interrelationship… The danger is at least threefold: (1) baptizing the other

uncritically (here, Panikkar, Bede Griffiths, Abhishiktananda, etc.,11 pro-

vide us with glimpses of losing Christian identity); (2) losing the capacity

to recognize the demonic in the other (and, correlatively, in ourselves—I

deal with this tension, as well as with the socio-political implications of a

theology of the demonic, in my Discerning the Spirit(s) ch. 8); (3) making

an idol out of the risen Christ and then demanding that representations of

Christ in others correspond to that idol. Another way of putting this last

point is to raise the question of how we can guard against erecting our own

ideological Christ as the norm to which religious otherness must answer.

In this sense, then, I believe that only a robustly trinitarian hermeneutic

can save us from this prospect. The Spirit illuminates the Word even as the

11. I am thinking here about the controversial work of Raimundo Panikkar, The

Unknown Christ of Hinduism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964), and The

Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha (trans. Robert R. Barr; Maryknoll: Orbis

Books, 1990); Bede Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith (Los Angeles: Dawn Horse

Press, 1973), and The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God (Springfield, IL:

Templegate, 1983). On Abhishiktananda, see Edward T. Ulrich, ‘Swami Abhishiktan-

anda’s Interreligious Hermeneutics of the Upanishads’ (PhD dissertation, Catholic

University of America, 2001).



Spirit testifies to the Word. Is this only an epistemological claim without

ontological implications? Is there some way to talk about the Spirit being

sent by Jesus even as Jesus was conceived of/by the Spirit? In that case,

there is a dialectical (at least) relationship between Word and Spirit. And

yet both reveal the Father, ultimately. Is there a sense in which religious

others can be revelatory means of the Father to us who look at the Father

through the face of Jesus? If so, how so? Pneumatologically, I answer.

But, discerning such is always a complex…affair of interpretation.

From: Irvin 3/21/02

I think for me the concern about not erecting an ideological Christ is mis-

placed. I think the issue is being true to Christian identity. When pastors in

the Church of the Prophets and Apostles in El Salvador were invoking the

name of Jesus to cast out the demons of death squads in the land, they

were being true to their Christian identity. When Brazilian Pentecostals

seek to cast out the demons that inhabit people who are often involved in

the African religions, they are being true to their Christian identity.

Peter Ochs told me one time he refused any longer to be involved in

inter-religious dialogue with liberal Christians. ‘They won’t tell me what

they believe about Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘Either they don’t believe

anything about Jesus, in which case they are no longer Christian and are

secular, and I don’t want to speak to them’ (secularism poses a more subtle

danger to Judaism than do fanatical Christians, Peter claims); ‘or they do

believe something about Jesus but refuse to tell it to me, in which case

they are dishonest’. Thus Peter’s alternative was to ask that I be totally

honest with what I believed about Jesus, Judaism, and salvation. He would

go to church with me to hear about Jesus—and would challenge the ten-

dency to back off when a Jew was in the house… I never made room for

his ‘otherness’. His otherness made room for my own articulation of faith

more clearly. I think this is true for Pentecostalism in the same way. How

can one be true to Pentecostal identity and not claim the (ideological) name

of Jesus? The problem for me is that we have posed ideology over against

transcendence—buying into Marx’s unfortunate (and very modernist) oppo-

sition. Ideology is the only way we have into transcendence, in the same

way that language (in the fuller meaning of communicative practice) is the

only avenue we have to the (mystical, transcendent) other. It is both epis-

temological and ontological. In Orthodoxy this is taken up in the iconic.

Icons are Orthodoxy’s ideology … So in answer to the question you pose,

Amos: ‘Is there a sense in which religious others can be revelatory means

of the Father to us who look at the Father through the face of Jesus?’ I



would say yes, of course, absolutely. But it is still the face of Jesus that is

being revealed pneumatologically. No doubt it is more about Jesus than I

imagined. I have no problem following M. M. Thomas on this and ‘risking

Jesus for Jesus’ sake’.12 I see here no intrinsic problem with syncretism, in

the same way that I find Jesus had no problem having his name mixed in

with that of sinners and foreigners and others. What I don’t want to waste

time on is pretending we are constructing a universal framework, when it

is just another particular one with universal packaging.

From: Del Colle 3/21/02

Amos, Dale and Frank… I want to return to my trinitarian point that I

made in my response. I agree that starting pneumatologically is the way to

go, and this is what is exciting about Amos’ book. But my question is

about the Holy Spirit himself (herself?). The subjectivity of the Holy

Spirit (if we can speak this way) has passed through the incarnation and

paschal mystery of Jesus. If the eternal Son is no longer the same after the

incarnation, neither is the Holy Spirit. Forget about us bracketing Jesus or

Christology. The Holy Spirit can’t bracket Jesus! This would deny the peri-

choresis in the trinity. So if the Spirit is active in other religions it will be

with a christological or filiological dimension, as it will be with a patrologi-

cal dimension (let us not forget the Father who is the abyss of divine love),

as well as with the Spirit’s own pneumatological dimension. This takes care

of trinitarian (which is the divine) ontology. What about epistemology?

What about our knowing of the divine persons and their triune (one)

agency? Frank talks about the living Christ as opposed to dogma. Frank,

have you retreated from Barth to Schleiermacher (or even further, to

Harnack!)? Dogma is a witness (or, in Catholic terms, is revelatory) of the

divine reality to which it points. We don’t confuse the reality with the

dogma but the dogma indeed does have a positive claim on our knowledge

of God. This does not inhibit the discernment of the Spirit (with Christ and

the Father) in other religions. I like that Amos chooses discernment as the

operative model here. It is more open than comparative theology right

from the outset. But do I discern without dogmatic guidance? I don’t think

so. For example, it is such dogmatic guidance that will help me discern

what is good in gnosticism, or bad. My Christian commitment to an incar-

nate embodiment of the Word will caution me about appealing to strictly

spiritual claims as the gnostics were wont to do. This caution is a good

12. M.M. Thomas, Risking Christ for Christ’s Sake: Towards an Ecumenical Theol-

ogy of Pluralism (Geneva: World Coucil of Churches, 1987).



thing. And it will point me to how, despite Buddhist claims about the shed-

ding of the body relative to release from samsara and passage into nirvana,

Buddhists, nevertheless, engage the body in meditation more than many

Christians. My Christian lenses help me to see how the Spirit may be active

in that tradition in ways which will enrich my own Christian faith. It also

does not inhibit an openness to their otherness on their own terms, since

the incarnate Word (a dogmatic truth and even proposition) is himself

open to those who are not against him! The Holy Spirit enlightens me

about such a reality and forms it in our own lives. Christ and the Spirit

together revealing how the love of the Father may be embedded in this

other tradition. If we want a robust trinitarianism, then let us really be

robust by referencing all three divine persons in their distinct but peri-

choretic and triune economy…

From: Irvin 3/21/02

This is the best thing I have read today. And the point about Schleier-

macher, no Harnack: Ouch!!! But yes, I think this is where I was going in

the reflection on Peter Och’s words about Jesus. Yet Ralph has done it in a

much more sophisticated way, elaborating the trinitarian dynamics at work

in their perichoretic splendor. The great threat that I think hangs over

Pentecostals and Charismatics is that we/they will arrive at the table of

liberal theology just as everyone else is discovering it is a poisoned meal

or has already died from it—and the Pentecostals will sit down and eat! I

like the way you slipped that filiological dimension in the side window,

Ralph… I absolutely agree—this time with Orthodox conviction—that

there is no clear line to be drawn between dogma and the living Christ.

What Frank and I had been talking about the evening before was Basil’s

statement that dogma proceeds in silence, kerygma is written.13 Basil was

explaining why dogma is not written down as scripture is. It is because it

is not preached but is the instruction handed on by bishops to those who

preach. The distinction between dogma and kergyma in Basil is correlative

to that between tradition and Scripture, I think. One is the living process

that hands on the other…


Ralph, I’m not sure what it is you have received from me or what it was

you were responding to (my comments at SPS or the e-mail I sent to Dale

13. St Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary

Press, 1980), pp. 98-100.



and Amos). But I did not recognize my ideas in your comments! I would

certainly not bracket Jesus or place Jesus against dogma. At any rate, retreat

from Barth?! You should know me better than that!… As for the trinitarian

connection, the language of perichoresis is appropriate for discovering the

uniqueness and inseparability of the divine persons. I have no quarrel here.

As for bracketing, of course, bracketing Jesus is an impossibility since as

the risen Lord he engulfs all of us, we and the others in all of their other-

ness. In any case, I am enough of a Barthian/Blumhardtian never to rela-

tivize Jesus—God forbid! As I said at SPS, what my encounter with the

‘other’ calls into question for me is not the Spirit’s universal witness to

Jesus but the witness of my particular faith in Jesus. It will even call into

question the dogma of the church, but not to displace it, rather to call it

beyond itself to embrace aspects of the other (christology on the way). As

for dogma, I have a deep love and devotion for the dogmatic heritage of

the church, not only for its brilliance (for its time) but also for its witness

by the Spirit to Christ. As you know, there are lots of technical points we

could discuss here (the relation of dogma to Scripture and the kerygma of

Christ, infallibility, its role in theological reflection, etc.). But I am no

liberal. I take dogma very seriously and would never deal casually with it.

But as Barth has taught me, the heart of the church and of dogmatics is not

a dogmatic principle but the living Christ (hence a very nondogmatic

dogmatics is ideal). I agree that dogma is vital to discernment and has

been guided of God. My point is that, as a living person, Jesus transcends

dogma to engulf the other. Dogma has not yet caught up to this. Anything

I said about bracketing was only a response to the obvious fact that the

interpretive framework of other religions challenges our dogma at decisive

points. Many cannot get beyond this to experience God in other religions

on their own terms with all of the riches that are there—to enrich our

dogma. So how do we transcend? How do we make that move across the

divide? Not by leaving the dogma behind. Certainly not. But if we have

the dogma clearly before us, can we enter effectively into the imaginative

world of the other to experience the Spirit’s witness to Jesus there?…

From Macchia 3/22/02

Once again, Dale, Ralph, I respect your ‘high’ view of dogma, but I would

want to see some qualifications in your statements on this before I can

unite with you in them. For example, Ralph calls dogma revelatory ‘of the

divine reality to which it points’. What I am looking for here is that

dialectical tension that I think Congar grasped so well between this reality



and the concrete historical expressions of it in the dogma of the church.14

Barth, for example, elaborates on this tension in CD I/1, stating that this ten-

sion is the reason why dogmatics must continually seek to justify dogma as

a witness to (and participant in) revelation and why dogma has ‘relative

not absolute authority’.15 For Barth, dogma is an indirect witness because

it is a necessary attempt to deal with the likes of an Arius in the new lan-

guage of the times. It is a second order witness that does not command the

same authority as the kerygma (he says this even of the Trinity, a point

Mel Roebeck could have mentioned at the SPS meeting in response to

Kilian McDonnell’s reference to the foundational role granted the Trinity

by Barth16).

Dale, you stated that there is ‘no clear line’ between Jesus and dogma.

In general, I might agree, though I do not think I would use that same lan-

guage. This is because there are moments in which the line is very clear.

For example, where is Jesus the Jew in Nicaea or Chalcedon? I affirm the

universal implications of the terms ‘humanity’ or ‘flesh’ as involved in the

incarnation (I am grateful to Rahner here), but not at the cost of the speci-

ficity of Jesus’ Jewish identity and social location. It seems to me that the

dogmatic witness to Christ in history has participated in that gradual bifur-

cation between Jesus and Judaism that has plagued the witness of the church

and provoked the modern attempts at restating the hypostatic union. Blum-

hardt had this wonderful image of Jesus walking ‘alongside’ the develop-

ment of the church’s witness in history, revealed in it, but also transcending

it.17 And this transcendence for him was not just a theological principle

that made no real difference in how we treat dogma. It was a source of

prophetic criticism that would ideally keep the church oriented not only to

the past but also to a new future. Can I encounter Jesus among the Rabbis

or among Buddhist monks in ways that call the dogmatic heritage of the

church into question and that suggest certain limitations in the witness of

14. Note Yves Congar's section entitled, ‘Tradition, Scripture, Traditions’, in Diver-

sity and Communion (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985), pp. 283-307.

15. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 (trans. G.W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T. &

T. Clark, 1975), pp. 309-10.

16. See Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, ‘Pentecostals and Christian Unity: Facing the Chal-

lenge’, with a response from Kilian McDonnell (Collected Papers of the Annual Meet-

ing of the Society for Pentecostal Studies; Southeastern College, Lakeland, FL, March,

2002).

17. Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen, Predigten, Reden, Briefe: 1865–1917 (Neu-

kirchen–Vluyn: Herder, 3rd edn, 1980), III, p. 70.



dogma historically to Christ? For me, this is a given. Now, I know you

will be quick to point out the dangers here, and I am aware of them. I too

want to guard against turning prophetic criticism into a cavalier rejection

of dogma or a reductionistic treatment of it as simply the results of social

and political domination (or a sell out to an antiquated culture). Again, I

am deeply grateful for the dogmatic heritage of the church and to the way

in which it has protected us from heresies on the left and on the right. And

I agree with you, Dale, that Pentecostals need a deeper memory, one that

predates Azusa Street and roots spirituality and theology in a more ancient

and ecumenical source. Yet, our renewed orientation to the past must include

an equally committed orientation to the future. In an essay on Christoph

Blumhardt entitled ‘Past and Future’, Barth wrote that the prophetic appeal

of Blumhardt was in how the past and the future ‘met each other, sup-

planted one another’ and continued to qualify each other.18 This is my

struggle. Any thoughts?


Frank, Dale and Amos, here we might be registering Catholic/Protestant

differences. Dogma certainly does not say everything, e.g., Jesus’ Jewish-

ness. But it does say what is necessary about what cannot be said about

divine truth and what can be said (although not all of it). Even though

Catholics would give a stronger place to dogma than Barth (Frank, you

can return to Barth, although it was fun to pull your chain by invoking his

archnemesis), we would recognize the contingency of the language used

and even the development of doctrine. Yet, I cannot conceive some new

event (like interreligious dialogue) calling a dogma into question as if

there was error in it (our bottom line—no error in dogma, even if more can

be said and it can be said better). For example, is it possible that the defi-

nition of Chalcedon will be demonstrated to be wrong in light of the pro-

phetic Christ who walks alongside of the Church and its dogmatic history?

Will Jesus not be seen to be truly human and truly divine? Certainly some

theologians engaged in interreligious dialogue move in that direction

(Hick, Knitter).19 Is that where Pentecostals want to end up? I seriously

18. Karl Barth, ‘Past and Future: Friedrich Naumann and Christoph Blumhardt’, in

J.A. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, 1 (trans. K.R. Crim;

Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1968), pp. 35-45 (45).

19. John Hick, ‘An Inspiration Christology for a Religiously Plural World’, in

Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Encountering Jesus: A Debate on Christology (Atlanta, GA:

John Knox Press, 1988), pp. 5-38; see also his ‘Jesus and the World Religions’, in John



doubt it. While Chalcedon did not say everything and we need to say more

in order specifically to engage in dialogue, I do not think we will go back

on it. In fact, it will still serve as a useful guide to keep us out of foul

territory…

From: Irvin 3/22/02

Wow! This has gotten to be quite a discussion… I’m ready to argue fur-

ther the point that the line between dogmatics and living Jesus cannot be

so clearly drawn. Let me pick up Frank’s point about Jesus the Jew in

Nicaea and Chalcedon. The problem with that statement for me is that it

fixes something called ‘Jewish’ as a first-century realty and then poses

over against it the fourth- or fifth-century reality, which is different. What

is concealed, however, is how the former—Jesus’ first-century Jewish-

ness—became fourth-century Christianity. A genealogical investigation is

needed, certainly, to demonstrate the shifts and ruptures that took place in

this history. But it is a history, and I would no more say that Nicaea is not

connected with Jesus’ Jewishness than I would say Rabbinic Judaism is not

connected to the Judaism of the first century. On the other hand I would

also go so far as to say that Rabbinic Judaism and Nicaean Christology

have more things in common with each other in some ways than either of

them do with the Judaism of Palestine in the Second Temple period.

For me, dogma is not representational in the end (Rorty’s Philosophy

and the Mirror of Nature20 is in the back of my mind). Dogma is perfor-

mative. It is a living practice that continues to be inscribed within and

upon the living body of the Christian community with which the Risen

Christ has identified himself in a distinctive manner. I do not believe that

the church is the only place where there is salvation. I believe salvation

infuses the entire universe. But I think the church is baptized into a par-

ticular calling and has the mark of that calling upon its life. The dogmatic

statements of Nicaea or Chalcedon are a part of the living history of this

body.

This is something I learned from Rabbinic Judaism. The Rabbis believed

that all of Israel was the incarnation of God in the flesh, and when Israel

read Torah, God was figured or formed in the flesh in a particular way.

Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), pp.

167-85; and Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes

to the World Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), pp. 171-204.

20. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1979).



That is why for the Rabbis the Torah is to be inscribed upon the living

body. But this is the same for Christians for whom the creed of Nicaea

became inscribed upon the living body as its baptismal memory. To carry

this idea along further, when Catholics genuflect they are inscribing Phil.

2.10 upon the living body at worship, and when Church of God in Christ

folks kiss they are inscribing 2 Cor. 13.12 upon the body of the church in a

similar manner. The effort to clarify, regulate and expand (amplify, Rahner

would say) such practices through dogmatic reflection does not remove

them from the primary performative arena where they are carried out—

what John Chrysostom called the liturgy and the liturgy that comes after it,

or worship and service in the world.21 On this point, by the way, I think we

seriously have been led astray by Harnack on the history of dogma.

What this means for me is that approaching another faith tradition with

a receptive heart and an openness to learn more about its life, practice,

hope and demands does not require a setting aside of my own ideas about

who Jesus Christ is. Jesus is a living reality who is through the church—

through my individual witness perhaps—meeting the other in history. Of

course, he has also always already met the other, as the Risen Christ or as

the eternal logos. But as he was born from the father in eternity and yet

born from Mary in time, so I think he encompasses the religious other in

eternity and still can encounter the religious other in time. How about that

for a bit of dogmatic stretching?

It is as possible to connect Nicaea with Jesus’ Judaism as it is to connect

the Talmud with Jewishness—and Jesus shows up in both Nicaea and the

Talmud. (I do not mean those supposed Talmudic references to Mary, by

the way. I mean the Rabbis’ belief that all of Israel was the incarnation of

God, and that when Israel reads Torah, God is formed—figured—in the

flesh in their midst.) Rabbinic Judaism teaches that the incarnate body of

God is a living community that continues to grow, retaining its identity

with itself over time by its commitment to reading what was said and done

before.


… As a historian, Dale, you are ten steps ahead of me. I need time to

digest your last e-mail. But let me offer a few preliminary remarks. First,

the kind of historical analysis with all of its complexity that you imply is

important when analyzing the journey of christology from Jesus of the first

21. Ion Bria, The Liturgy after the Liturgy: Mission and Witness from an Orthodox

Perspective (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1996).



century to Nicaea. My point was not to blame Nicaea for not viewing

Jesus through the lenses of first-century Palestinian Judaism. That would

be absurd as a historical judgment. My judgment was more theological,

namely, that the early rise and development of logos christology and the

concomitant loss of essential aspects of Jesus’ Jewish identity (as the man

of the Spirit, as apocalyptic visionary, etc.) are connected historically

(among other things) to the tensions between Judaism and Christianity to

the detriment of both. I would maintain that christological dogma bears the

scars of this historical tension and that radical implications for Jesus’

significance for the church were lost or at least somewhat eclipsed in the

process. Dogma not only protected the church from heresy, it also kept the

church, in a sense, from certain radical implications of Jesus for its life and

mission. Imagine, for example, how a widespread recovery in the fourth

century of the apocalyptic Jesus could have affected the rise of medieval

Christianity. Imagine how insights into Jesus’ Jewish identity would have

challenged growing antisemitism in the church. Schweitzer starts his

classic on the historical Jesus by maintaining that Jesus’ Jewish identity

was not rediscovered until Reimarus in the eighteenth century.22 Rediscov-

ering this connection has led in part to the renewal of christology in the

20th century (including the so-called christology from below). I raised this

point only to illustrate the ambivalence that I have toward the history of

dogma. I can agree with Ralph that dogma is revelatory, but only in the

sense that Barth meant it, namely, that dogma ‘strove after’ revelation and,

by God’s grace, was able to bear witness to it effectively enough to keep

the church from defecting from the gospel. But my judgment toward

dogma would go deeper than merely saying that dogma did not ‘say every-

thing’. That judgment is not radical enough for me. Again, I say this as one

who deeply loves the dogmatic landmarks of the church and who is pro-

foundly grateful for them. What you say, Dale, about dogma as inscribing

the living Christ on the church is awesome. I need to think about this. I

encountered a form of the Christ immanent in the church in Bonhoeffer’s

theology, and I loved the way he developed this (the church is the church

‘for the world’ as Christ was for the world).23 But I guess my Barthian/

Reformed side wants to exercise a certain ‘reservation’ (Vorbehalt) and

22. See the chapter on Reimarus in Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical

Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 13-26.

23. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Outline for a Book’, from ‘Notes, July/August, 1944’,

in Eberhard Bethge (ed.), Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan,

1972), pp. 379-83.



leave enough room for human fallenness and the otherness of Christ who

is for us by being against us…

From: Irvin 3/23/02

… Frank, I am in complete agreement with you on what you say in this

last email, including the concluding point regarding the Vorbehalt. Yet I

think it is not merely a matter of ‘fallenness’—although it perhaps might

be considered so if seen in the full Heideggerian sense of the word. It is

the locational and localizing nature of what you said that struck me. (And I

think ‘locating’ or ‘localizing’ would be the word now I would offer in-

stead of ‘bracketing’, which your heading on this email suggests we get

beyond again).

Here I think it is especially important to keep the German term in our

discussion. Vorbehalt carries connotations of being a prior restraining

order, whereas the English term ‘reservation’ seems to me to come only

after the fact of dogmatic formulation (or fixation) and gets taken up in the

hermeneutics of remainders. According to the latter, after we finish the

statement and set (fix) it in writing, we then register our reservations (or

try to fix it again). On the other hand, engaging in genealogical investiga-

tions into particular dogmas that led up to their moment of being ‘fixed’

seems to me to be a way of carrying on much more fruitful ecumenical

conversations. I think that such genealogical investigations into the history

of dogma are an important way of locating pre-arresting insights.

On the loss of Spirit and apocalyptic vision, the only thing I would offer

is that I have heard Eliot Wolfson articulate almost the same concerns

about Rabbinic Judaism, from a kabalist point of view24 (I have heard

kabalism described as the Pentecostalism of Judaism). I think the entire

question of Jewish and Christian relations in the first four centuries is in

need of being rethought along the lines that Daniel Boyarin and others have

been doing. I have just finished reading his latest book, Dying for God,

and find it to be another stunning piece of work.25 Boyarin keeps showing

us how blurred the lines were between the Rabbis and the Nazarenes until

the fourth century…[and] between Christian dogma and Christian church

life…

24. I have heard these articulations in personal conversations.

25. D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and

Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).



Part II

From: Yong 3/25/02

Gentlemen…first let me preface my project by saying that its been moti-

vated by my own experience of seeing the ideological abuse of the name

of Jesus at the level of popular Pentecostalism—the kind of Pentecostal-

ism with which I grew up attributed everything either to God or the devil,

depending on whether it was experienced as good or bad. Needless to say,

I have over the years developed a knee jerk reaction toward all Christian

claims, and, as such, developed what I might call a pneumatological her-

meneutics of suspicion which questions all Christian claims in the name

of the Spirit who blows where she wills (rather than where I or any other

Christian would will). Of course, I recognize the danger of going overboard

in skepticism, but at least you know what motivates my own project of

‘bracketing’ or ‘suspending’ Christian claims up front. And, Dale, I like

your suggestion about ‘localizing’ our witness, which I take to mean dis-

cerning carefully the context of the dialogues wherein our confession is

required.

From this, I take it that we also agree on the following: (a) whether we

wish to or not, all Christian claims are local in the sense both that they

arise out of specific socio-historical contexts and that they are addressed to

questions that arise out of those contexts; (b) all Christian claims are ideo-

logical in some sense, insofar as they are socio-historically located and

motivated… (c) dogmas are at least performatives, if not also referential in

some senses (this may be the debated claim).

Now, here are some questions: First, would we all agree that ideological

elements are featured not only in individual theological opinions but also

ecclesial dogmas? Further, if I heard Dale correctly, then dogmas are

performatives (Lindbeck26) first and foremost, and referential secondarily,

if at all. Let us tease this out. If dogmas, which include confessions, are

only performative, then bearing Christian witness will not be a matter of

proclamation but of service, since the proof of our dogmatic pudding will

be found in the acts of kindness and justice, etc., which we conduct in the

name of Jesus. Now I am all for Christian service in the name of Jesus as

measuring our Christian witness, but I am not sure I am comfortable with

reducing dogmas to functional grammars of Christian life. In the interreli-

26. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Theology and Religion in a Post-

liberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).



gious arena, however, this move makes eminent practical sense, not only

in that it provides space for representatives of many religious traditions to

work together toward the common good, but also in that it provides the

space for mutual participation in spiritual exercises, etc…which will authen-

ticate the confessions we bring experientially. Put in pneumatological terms,

we meet each other first and foremost not on the plane of proclamation but

on the planes of participatory service and engagement. But, after such

initial connections, what then about the referential aspect of dogmas and

our Christian confessions—i.e. what about Christian proclamation?

Second, is the Christian mission first and foremost the task of bearing

Christian witness to the Christ, or is it first and foremost that of identifying

the Logos that is already there who lightens the hearts of all persons (Jn

1.9)? Another way to ask this question is whether the Christian mission is

first and foremost proclamation or dialogue? I know that framing this as an

either/or is already sabotaging the question. But I think that practically

speaking, the question is a valid one. Put concretely, we cannot both listen

and speak initially. We have to do one first and the other second. Which,

and why? In light of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critiques

of Christian mission, my sense is that at the present time, Christian mis-

sion should be driven by dialogical concerns first unless the context very

specifically calls for proclamation first.

Third, if all confession (dogmatic claims included) is ideologically

tainted, then what is to prevent the bearing of false witness to the living

Christ? Would it be better to claim that Christian confession of the living

Christ is partial and always in expectation of the eschatological revelation

of the living Christ? Not only that, but following a Barthian line of

thinking, the Christ is always already the universal Christ through whom

God’s ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen’ are said to each person. In that sense, are all reli-

gious confessions always already about the living Christ (hence the Barthian

thrust toward universalism)? But what about the fallibility of not only our

confession but also that of religious others? Does fallibility pertain only to

individual confessions and not to conciliar or dogmatic ones? I think we

all agree that we do not yet know the living Christ as he is (and thus see

through a glass dimly), but we will, eschatologically, see him as he is. Yet I

am not sure that, as a Protestant, I am willing to affirm dogmatic infallibil-

ity (so here, Ralph, you may be right about this being a Protestant–Catholic

issue).

Fourth, in discerning the Spirit(s): if our Christian confession is already

ideologically tainted, then discernment is all the more a charismatic gift.



We cannot discern the spirits without christological criteria, but (1) our cri-

teria are tainted; and (2) our Christian criteria can only be charismatically/

pneumatologically confessed (1 Cor. 12.3). On the other side, if indeed the

Logos is already present in the religious other (Jn 1.9, or because the risen

Christ is the universal ‘son of man’—or second Adam—through whom all

other persons are elect), then how right is it for us to apply our

ideologically framed criteria in discerning the living Christ in the religious

other? Why should the criteria not be generated from our living engage-

ment and encounter with the other? From the dogmatic end of things,

perhaps dogmatic criteria function only negatively (i.e. the four fences of

Chalcedon). From the perspective of the contemporary interreligious dis-

cussion, perhaps the moral criterion of humanization is the only positive

one we have: does the ritual, belief, practice, etc., build human community

or not? In this case, Christian baptism is not baptism into a particular com-

munity of faith but into the universal new humanity, the body of Christ

(with particular expressions, for sure), designed to nurture commitments to

universal humanization. But the question that arises here is how we avoid

landing in Rahner’s ‘anonymous Christian’ thesis or into a Hickian ver-

sion of pluralism.

So, here is where I am: discernment has to run through a complex pro-

cess that I call Spirit, Word, and Community.27 Each moment is checked

and balanced by the other two. Spirit is the field of intersubjective en-

counter which preserves the distinctiveness of the participants, even as the

Day of Pentecost preserved the capacity of the diverse languages to give

testimony to the wondrous works of God (and, by extension, to the living

Christ). Word is the living Christ, as testified to (albeit in broken ways) by

the apostles and prophets (the Scriptures) and the living ecclesia whose

vision is always already the new humanity of the kingdom of God. Com-

munity is the various localities where we find ourselves giving Christian

witness, whether that be academic, ethnic, socio-historical, etc. Discernment

is always about what the Spirit is saying (what Word?) to the churches in

and through the various localities within which we find ourselves. At one

moment, listening is of the first order; at another, proclamation; at a third,

service, etc. Which is which? There is no pre-written script—only the

capacity to listen to the Spirit’s leading. Thus, for me, the import of a

pneumatological imagination…

27. See Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian

Perspective (Burlington, VT, and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).



From: Irvin 3/26/02

Amos, I am with you all the way, I think, in your direction here. I think the

only remaining pieces for me are points of clarification or points of

nuancing… First, to clarify what I mean by performative and to try to free

the term a bit from Lindbeck’s post-liberal grasp, I mean by performative

what I think the New Testament carries along as the sense of confession—

both confessing your sins to one another and confessing Christ before the

world. The statement (dogma) that ‘God raised him up from the dead’ is

the divine confession—God confessed Jesus before the world, thereby

making his the name above every other name. Jesus was made—in eternity

begotten of the Father, in time born of woman. This dogma gets performed

in kergyma, leitourgia, koinonia, diakonia—it is carried out in the same

way that the Hebrew text understands ‘dabar’ to be active in performing

what God intends it to do. So I am much closer to Habermas and commu-

nicative praxis28 than I am to Lindbeck—although on universal reason

over against particular life-worlds I am far from Habermas. I think this

idea of dogma is more than ‘ortho-praxis’ that liberation theologians talk

about, because I think their idea of praxis too often accepts the Kantian

relegation of religion to the second critique, as being a practical matter of

ethics, and turns praxis against liturgy. Moltmann is right on this point,29 I

think. It is a legacy of the European Enlightenment and does not help us

understand the way dogma is lived in the world.

Second, on the performative dimensions of dialogue, my thinking is much

more informed by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s I am an Impure Thinker and

the more substantial Out of Revolution,30 where philosophy is given social

form in the credo ‘respondeo etsi mutabor’ (Rosenstock-Huessy offered

this as the replacement for ‘cogito ergo sum’ and ‘credo ut intelligum’); by

Levinas’ Nine Talmudic Readings31 where he argues that one cannot study

holiness without first practicing holiness; and by Henry Gates insights

about African American culture where the semantic axis of meaning gets

overtaken by the rhetorical axis (Signifying Monkey and the section on the

28. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press,

1981).

29. Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper & Row,

1981), p. 8.

30. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I am an Impure Thinker (Norwich, VT: Argo Books,

1970); idem, Out of Revolution (repr.; New York: Four Wells, 1964 [1938]).

31. Emanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (trans. Annette Aronowicz; Bloom-

ington: Indian University Press, 1990).



‘Talking Book’ in particular).32 I do not like calling these ‘post-modern’,

but they are often thrown together in this category, so I will go with it.

The third is to put the dialogue in a context where I think confession as

witness can be better understood as a way of identifying the Christ who is

already present as performative. It is the same as bearing witness to the

Christ who is known from the Scripture, however, for these two are not

separted. Proclamation always already entails a prior act of listening—

Bakhtin,33 Kristeva34 and others make this clear. As human beings we are

‘heard into speech’ (Nelle Morton35)—our speech, our consciousness comes

from another (Vygotsky36). Rosenstock-Huessy’s main complaint about

Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ was that Buber got the order wrong; one is called by

name as a ‘Thou’, from which the experience of being an ‘I’ emerges.37

I would go beyond this and suggest that speaking and listening take place

simultaneously, insofar as they are mutually constructing. This is, I think,

the movement in a social trinitarian model that gets beyond the subordi-

nationism that inheres in eastern monarchical models. This is where I think

the ordo salutis that is still implicit in a Spirit–Word–Community model

(which I very much like—don’t get me wrong) needs still to be examined.

I think it is Spirit/Word, Community, or maybe Spirit, Word, Community,

Spirit…in a connected circle rather than a directional line. This insight is

brilliantly illuminated for me in Gibbs book on Correlations in Rosenzweig

and Levinas.38 Gibbs looks at the Rosenzweig/Rosenstock dialogue on

precisely this point: speech is the content of the soul, spirit is the capacity

to hear and respond. Without the one, there is not the other.

32. Henry L. Gates, Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary

Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press 1988).

33. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. M. Holquest;

Austin: University of Texas, 1981).

34. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (trans. M. Waller; New York:

Columbia University Press, 1984).

35. Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

36. L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (trans. E. Haufmann and G. Vakai;

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962).

37. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.), Judaism Despite Christianity: The ‘Letters on

Christianity and Judaism’ between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig

(Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1969), p. 26.

38. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1992).



The question I think you are posing, Amos, is to whom should we listen?

The driving missiological question for me that is before the churches in

the north—and I think it is the same one you are asking—is why the

refusal of the churches of the north to be missionized today? This question

for me is the same as why they are abandoning the task of missions.

However, asked in different contexts, the question of mission and dia-

logue and witness become configured differently. I just spent a couple of

days with Charles Amjad Ali who is now teaching in St Paul at Luther

seminary, but he goes back to Pakistan for several months every year.

Charles does so to join the protests against the blasphemy laws in his

native country. Every time he does, his life is in danger, for he is a convert

from Islam. When he converted in the early 1970s he was at Oxford. But

he decided to return home to his native Pakistan to undergo baptism, for to

do so outside the historical context of Pakistan, he said, would fail to do

justice to the meaning of his conversion and witness. Since his father can

trace direct heritage to the prophet’s son, Ali (of the house of Said), his

baptism carried both a political and a theological challenge to Islamic self-

understanding. Charles could not find a pastor in Pakistan who would

perform the rite for some time, as they were all too frightened of violating

the blasphemy laws that are punishable by death. He eventually did find

someone, a pastor of an independent holiness Church, who would baptize

him. He then joined the Anglican church, finished his degrees at Princeton,

and returned to Pakistan to head the Christian study center at Rawalpundi,

living for 15 years under the threat of a death sentence. The dialogical

implications of this for Christian mission are where I would want to begin

my listening to Islam today. I think that the cross has a way of hearing—

cruciform ears…


… I am not up on all the hermeneutical issues, but I will try. Here is my

major concern: I am all for making the dialogical situation as authentically

dialogical as it can be. There is no question here. That means being attuned

to the other, letting religious others frame their tradition as they choose,

being aware of our own situation, not imposing categories that are not

appropriate, etc. When I meet a Muslim or Buddhist I expect (and want) to

encounter a real Muslim and Buddhist—someone who exemplifies her or

his religious tradition in all of its difference from my own. I expect that

such a person desires the same sort of encounter on our side. So it would be

disappointing, to say the least, to encounter a Christian who was a member



of the ‘Church of Jesus Christ without Christ’ (Flannery O’Connor39). It

may be the very difficulty of discerning that makes for an authentic, inter-

esting and transformative dialogue. If Christ is a stumbling block, a scandal,

then let him be so in the dialogue! Also, I am in no rush to identify a Mus-

lim’s and/or Buddhist’s experience of God, enlightenment, whatever as the

saving grace of Jesus Christ or the presence of the Holy Spirit. I do pre-

sume that God may be present among them and that I am not bringing the

true God into the dialogue. But I also presume that we are in the dialogical

situation because God has called us there in Jesus Christ. I can say it only

in Christian terminology, because that is what by faith I am accountable

to, namely, the judgment seat of Christ. That is a given, better yet, that is

the gift given in the Holy Spirit, so I cannot presume otherwise. As for

dogma, I simply see no separation between the dogmatic Christ and the liv-

ing Christ. Christ comes clothed in Scripture, tradition, liturgy, dogma and

praxis. I do not want to play off one against the other. I do not think dog-

mas can be reversed; neither do I think they bind us (in the negative and

constrictive sense). In fact, they liberate us to think the faith. So when Amos

wants to bracket Jesus or Frank wants to leave open the door to the falli-

bility of dogma (very Reformed!) I am in a different theological cosmos. I

keep wondering what needs to be changed about Ephesus, Chalcedon, etc.

It certainly has not stifled the theological enterprise. So when I come to the

table it is not as if I slam down Chalcedon or some other dogmatic defini-

tion or proposition. Yet these inform me and obligate me in what I say

about Christ, the Trinity, etc., and they also help me in the discernment

process of how I might recognize the Christus praesens and Spiritus prae-

sens in the other tradition. All of this is fairly close to home in SPS. For

example, in the Oneness/Trinitarian dialogue I am adverse to Dan Rami-

rez’s hermeneutics of suspicion in that dialogue. Whatever social placement

will shed light on that exchange, it will not obviate the dogmatic issues that

need to be addressed and negotiated. So too, this is the case, it seems to

me, in interreligious dialogue. Amos, surely we want something more than

universal humanization and tolerance (by implication). Praxis is no prob-

lem with anybody of good will including other religionists. But it is inter-

esting that Hans Küng and company with the Chicago Parliament really

did not have much to say in common apart from a few basic ethical com-

mitments. I trust we want to say something more when we engage in

dialogue…

39. As her character Hazel Motes preached in her novel Wise Blood (New York:

Harcourt, Brace,1952), p. 105.



From: Irvin 3/26/02

My only reservation: Chalcedon does not need to be changed, but Chalce-

don was terribly misunderstood. I favor full communion with non-Chal-

cedonian and East Syrian churches without requiring them now to affirm

Chalcedon. I think we need to move forward and find our dogmatic com-

monality in the future in many cases. I think this is the direction in which

the Orthodox churches are moving (when they move) and is certainly the

spirit of the recent conversations between Rome and the East Syrian patri-

archate—including last October’s decision to allow Roman Catholics to

participate in the Chaldean liturgy…

From: Yong 3/26/02

About Dale’s point in the email earlier today, yes, the import of pneuma-

tology is its dynamism so that Spirit Word Community Spirit

etc. implies a continuous spiral so that the hermeneutical movement never

stalls. This is why for me, Spirit comes first, and by doing so, drives the

process of interpretation and discernment, making way for the particular

claims of the other and our confession of Christ (both within the second,

Word, moment).

But Ralph, yes, your point about our confession of Christ coming always

already clothed in dogma, ritual, etc., is well taken. Alternatively put, we

have no direct access to the living Jesus apart from the witness of the

Spirit, the enscripturated Word (to which the hermeneutic of suspicion

needs to be applied at its own moment, even if interpretation does not stop

with that move), and the living ecclesial tradition—always already ideo-

logically framed. I do not think we are far apart. I am happy to see/hear

proclamation of the name of Jesus alive and well amidst other non-clas-

sical Pentecostal Christian traditions. I am also continuously wary about

all of the many rhetorical claims about Jesus made from within my own

classical Pentecostal traditions—witness Toronto, Pensacola, Brownsville,

etc.—that are at the same time stumbling blocks to genuine interreligious

encounter, and that not because of Jesus as the scandal of particularity…


… Dale, you are causing me to think about looking again at modern Jew-

ish authors. I never forgot Buber’s remark about history being an ongoing

conversation between God and humanity, the future of which is by no

means fixed.40 It is this metaphor that I find helpful in understanding

40. See Martin Buber, ‘Prophecy, Apocalyptic, Historical Hour’, in Nahum N.



dogma. What I hear from Ralph is that this conversation between God and

the church is not one that takes place between equal partners. God has

spoken in the prophets, in Christ (decisively), and in the apostles. The

human response of faith given in the dogma of the church is not one drawn

from our own resources. Ours is not an autonomous word, it is a word of

response. It is a word drawn from the speaking of God in Word and Spirit.

It is witness. As such, dogma is worthy of functioning as the very clothes

through which Christ comes to us (to use Ralph’s language). Dale, your

view on the performative nature of dogma is close to Ralph’s Catholic

understanding of the revelational nature of dogma. Dogma like dabar

speaks and in speaking carries out the divine will in the church, in history.

Allow me to respond to this…

First, Dale, I like the way in which you locate dogma in the broader life

of the church, in koinonia, liturgy, etc. As Dulles noted in Survival of

Dogma, the Western church’s understanding of dogma has become too

juridical, given from the top down.41 Dulles wanted to see a place for

prophetic and scholarly voices in the church to contribute to the church’s

understanding of dogma. We can talk about the whole issue of sensus

fidelium, its limits (after all, something is not true because it is popular) as

well as its necessity (the apostolic tradition needs the common prophetic

voices to keep it alive and relevant).

Second, the ‘catholic’ side of me warms up to this emphasis on dogma

as the clothes of Christ or the performative word of God in the church. I

agree with Ralph that the witness of dogma is vital to the church and that it

is part of the apostolic heritage from which I witness of Christ across the

ecumenical table. But the Protestant side of me wants to exercise the Vor-

behalt (here we go again!). I would like to press you, Dale and Ralph, about

the primacy of Scripture in relation to dogma. Despite my Pentecostal ten-

dency to see the experience of the Spirit as the link between the experience

of the risen Christ among the communities that produced the Scriptures

and communities of faith today, I still think there is value in the distinction

between the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’ witnesses. The problem that I

have with what you both have said is that you have slipped too easily from

the one to the other—and that has made me nervous (hence, the Vorbehalt).

As Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen has shown Pentecostals, Vatican II is not op-

posed to the primacy of Scripture in our interpretation of the gospel of the

Glatzer (ed.), On the Bible: Eighteen Studies (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), pp.

172-87 (178).

41. Avery Dulles, The Survival of Dogma (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1973).



risen Lord.42 I want to press this a bit, because this is an issue between

Oneness and Trinitarian sides. The Oneness adherents believe that dogma

has defected from the gospel, because they feel compelled from Scripture

to make this judgment. They are not basing their charge on radically ‘new’

revelations. Hence, their charge must be taken with utmost seriousness.

But here is my ambivalence: I agree with Rahner that dogma develops

inside and not outside the biblical witness to the eschatological finality of

revelation given in the risen Christ.43 The ongoing development of dogma

in the church brings to explicit expression that which is implicit within

the revelation of God in Christ. Hence, in a sense, there is development, in

a sense there is not. So, I cannot agree with the adversarial relationship

between Scripture and dogma assumed by the Oneness. But Rahner’s

implicit/explicit metaphor can be misused. After all, a church in history

can justify a broad spectrum of beliefs by saying it is ‘implicitly’ there in

the revelation of God in Christ as witnessed to in Scripture. Hence, I think

this case for the explication of that which is ‘implicit’ must be made on

exegetical grounds in showing how dogma does indeed develop the seeds

of the biblical witness. The seeds have got to be shown to be there. Other-

wise, we have an insufficient case. In my view, one cannot accept a dog-

matic announcement simply on dogmatic grounds (i.e. the infallibility of

dogma) unless it can be shown to be implicit in the scriptural witness.

Otherwise, dogma then justifies dogma. This practice will lack credibility.

I am not casting aside my enthusiastic gown and disowning the importance

of communal/pneumatological discernment. However, there is a text there

that is not fully captured by my community’s discernment in the Spirit and

with which this community will, therefore, constantly need to converse, or

the discernment will not warrant the tag ‘of the Spirit’. And this text can-

not be neatly captured in any dogmatic or creedal statement (have you

heard that the Bible can be the heretic’s most effective weapon? Even the

heretic might point to a neglected feature of the biblical witness to the

gospel).

Let us get to a concrete example of discernment. What about Mary’s

bodily ascent to heaven? Does the scriptural witness warrant and mandate

this doctrine to the point that we can call it infallible? What about the

42. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, ‘Authority, Revelation, and Interpretation in the Roman

Catholic/Pentecostal Dialogue’, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal

Studies 21.1 (1999), pp. 89-114.

43. Karl Rahner, 'The Development of Dogma’, in Theological Investigations, 1

(New York: Seabury Press, 1961), pp. 39-77.



‘infallible’ doctrine of infallibility itself? Is this God’s performative word

in the church, or a detour?… So, what is the relationship between the

living Christ and dogma? Is dogma the clothes of Christ? OK, I agree, but

how well they fit depends on how they match the clothes of his gospel and

the primary scriptural witness to it. Now we are back to the issue of dis-

cernment, a discernment that will entangle us in arguments over Scripture

among other things.

Third, I return to Buber’s metaphor of history as a conversation between

God and humanity. Despite the many difficulties discussed already, I think

what Amos is highlighting is that the conversation is with humanity. The

question that I get from this focus concerns the relationship between

the conversation in the church and the conversation in the world outside

the church. The distinction between the living Christ (and I would add the

scriptural witness to him) and dogma is important in order to allow those

outside the church to function as ‘alien voices’ (Barth) that genuinely have

something to say to the church which we have not yet spoken or heard

very clearly, even with our dogma. Barth makes it clear that these alien

voices do not go beyond the Word decisively spoken in Christ or wit-

nessed to in the church, but they could, according to Barth, return us more

profoundly to this Word and Spirit at the center of the church’s life. Of

course, the witness of Scripture and dogma help me to discern the value of

that alien voice, but I must be open to allow that voice to surprise me by

improving upon (even critically) the witness of dogma (the very criteria

used to embrace it). If all that can be heard outside the church has already

been spoken more loudly and clearly in the church, then what we have is

monologue not dialogue. I do not say that alien voices can displace or

supersede the witness of dogma, but they may reveal their limitations and

scars, their weaknesses and blind spots, even help us to understand their

witness better. Hence, in my witness from the vantage point of dogma, it

becomes urgent that I hear as well—not just so that I can witness more

effectively, but so that I can better understand the Christ clothed in my

dogma, and to see these clothes as humble and in some ways inadequate.

What I hear from you, Amos, is the question, What is the pneumatologi-

cal basis for these alien voices? So we return to the process of discernment,

one that you, Amos, want to expand to make room for a pneumatological

dimension not yet identified by the dogmatic tradition of the church.

Despite the potential difficulties involved in how this has been articulated

(e.g. in the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit, which I hold with

Dale and Ralph to be perichoretic and not in any way autonomous), I see



value in the direction of this thinking. As Buber said, the future of this

conversation is not yet fixed. And it will lead to a much more intimate

communion one day. After all, these dogmatic clothes of Jesus are pil-

grim’s clothes, which, as Barth noted, will be shed, along with all lan-

guage of faith and all other gifts this side of eternity, at the appearance of

Christ. For faith will be replaced by sight—relationship by union…


… I agree with Dale’s point about interpreting dogma. This is why we

need theology. Dogma includes theology and requires theology. And

indeed new situations may emerge such as that between Chalcedonian and

non-Chalcedonian churches in which the essentials of the dogma need to

be discussed anew. The same thing is happening between Oneness and

Trinitiarian Pentecostals. In doing so we discover how to interpret the

essentials without denying what the church affirmed. We also look for

ways in which the other side may be closer to us that we anticipated for

historical reasons of interpretation. In this regard I am also open to Frank’s

concern to allow the primacy of Scripture to inform our interpretation of

dogma as well as our interpretation of alien voices (personally I think

Oneness folks are at a disadvantage regarding a sola scriptura position,

since the tendencies in the New Testament tend more in a subordinationist

rather than a modalist direction!). But let me get back to bracketing for a

minute. Frank brought up the Catholic dogma of Mary’s assumption into

heaven. I rarely have raised the Marian dogmas in SPS circles, although I

firmly believe them and practice them in my devotion and spirituality.

Does that mean I bracket them? I don’t think so! It may not be profitable

to raise them as I dialogue with Pentecostals, but they do inform my faith

and theology. So they are at least implicitly present whenever I talk about

grace, ecclesiology, election or a host of other theological themes. I could

not bracket their influence if I wanted to and still remain Catholic. That is

what I am suggesting about Christology and pneumatology in interreligious

dialogue. With all due respect to Husserl, the formative influence of Chris-

tology on pneumatology will indeed arise for us. So why try to bracket it

out? Let’s simply acknowledge its influence even as we try to hear those

alien voices. At the appropriate time, for example, I might make more ex-

plicit what I think is already implicit in my theological discussions with

Pentecostals, namely, Mary’s exemplificatio of holiness and the efficacy of

her presence and intercession in the life of the church. So too, with Amos I

might begin with Spirit language, but at some point Christ language will



come into the conversation. For example, I am sure none of us would feel

comfortable with gnostic-like predications of the Spirit and its implicit

docetism regarding human life and spirituality. Why? It is because we are

informed by an incarnational spirituality even without mentioning the

name of Jesus. This is not something to avoid but celebrate. One more

thing on dogmas: I am informed not only by Scripture and tradition but

also by a magisterium. Are there any equivalents for you folks?…

From: Irvin 3/27/02

… Frank notes my notion of performative is close to Ralph’s notion of

revelational. I would totally agree. I think it is equally indebted to Barth’s

doctrine of revelation, however. What is revealed is not information about

God but God’s own self. If, as Barth said, God’s being is revealed in

God’s act,44 then revelation is performative. I would accept this further as

being the mighty acts of God in history… The historical events of the

Exodus and the Cross and Resurrection are revelatory. Sacraments re-

present them, and this is what draws me to ritual studies as a basic method

for doing theological reflection. However, I think Barth would say that

preaching re-presents them as well, and from kerygma I find my way (via

Basil, remember) to dogma as what is handed on to shape preaching.

On infallibility: can we (must we?) talk about an infallible act of God in

order to talk about God’s infallible being? Here I think the answer is no.

Catholic doctrine applied the notion of infallibility to the pope at about the

same time that Protestant doctrine applied it to the Bible and Marxists to

material history—the period of 1860 through 1880, with Vatican I, the

Communist Manifesto, and the high period of Princeton Seminary’s bib-

lical doctrinal formulations…I would put such moments in the category of

‘ideological reductions’. They are efforts to fix revelation and deny its open-

ended character, what Bonhoeffer called the ‘New’ of history is foreclosed

by them45—and this New is precisely what I think we are looking for in

this conversation. So, yes, Frank’s Vorbehalt creeps back in to create the

negative space necessary for the New to emerge. Sometimes it comes in

strong doses—even Nietzschean in flavor- as it challenges dogma and

even practice… Isn’t Amos’ ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ such a moment of

Vorbehalt? But as such, it always already depends on the existence of

44. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Edin-

burgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–69), pp. 260-62.

45. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (trans. Bernard Noble; New York: Harper

and Brothers, 1956), pp. 119-36.



something already to be suspected or suspended. Hermeneutics, like

Hegel’s owl of Minerva, always takes flight at dusk (unlike Marx’s Gallic

rooster which crows at dawn). As a spiritual practice, and action of the

Spirit, such hermeneutics works upon something that is always already

there—Tillich’s concept of the ‘me on’ in his ‘The Demonic’46 is critical

for me here. That something else for me—if it is not idealized, if it is truly

historical—always already is filled with Logos…

Now, what about the primacy of Scripture? I cannot imagine I am far

from you on this, Frank. For me it is historical more than anything else.

But the apostolic privilege that I would grant is not a function of the near-

ness of the apostles’ witness. Being closer to Jesus in time did not seem to

matter all that much for the makers of the canon. Apostolic privilege is a

function of the whole of Christian life and the multitude of its traditions

through the ages. It refers to the text not as something that is transcen-

dent—there is no Text for me—but as something located within a field of

intertextual discourses that by-passes condensation and displacement (twin

practices of ideology). Bourdieu’s habitus comes to mind here47—

Scriptures emerged from and continue to exist within a wider cultural field

whose borders are porous, not stable and certainly not sovereign. I do not

think even the borders of the Scriptures themselves are sovereign—do we

count the Weeks of Enoch and the Protogospel of James? Do we read the

end of Mark 16 or the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery?

Nevertheless, the way Scriptures are read and referenced—by Catholics,

Orthodox, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even Ralph’s Mormons—

gives them their privileged position.

Finally, Frank, I totally agree with you regarding Buber’s conversation

being carried on by humanity. The only small point I would add is that

humanity is not a transcendent category. There are only human beings

formed in their historically conditioned locations, not as Christians and non-

Christians—this later category I am now ready to reject as a dangerous ideo-

logical construction.48 Human beings come as Christians, Jews, Muslims,

Voodun, secularists, atheists, and so on. Our dialogue with Judaism is fun-

damentally different than our dialogue with Islam. Pentecostal Christians

have a different dialogue with Judaism than do other evangelical Christians

46. Cited in note 7.

47. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. R. Nice; Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1977).

48. See Stuart Hall, The West and the Rest: White Predators, Black Slavers, and

the African Elite (New York: Random House, 1975).



whose churches claim as their direct inheritance the sixteenth-century

magisterial reformation.

This in the end is why I am still uneasy with conceptualizing the Spirit

as ‘first’ even in our experience. The pneumatological basis is Christ.

Ralph ought to hear the filioquian ramifications here. It does not foreclose

the multiple formations of the Word always already given in history. Yet

Word and Spirit always go together—they are mutually constitutive in their

diversity/diversification. I am back to Amos’ spiral, or better Bahktin’s

centrifugal and centripetal movements taking place simultaneously in the

dialogue49…


… Ralph, I agree that the Oneness will have difficulty with the biblical

text in their attempt to garner it as a weapon against Nicaea. It is inter-

esting that a Oneness student at Asbury (Ken Bass) recently did a paper in

which he claims that Oneness folk can essentially affirm Nicaea, since the

major point of Nicaea is the deity of Christ (the incarnation) and not the

distinction of persons (which was the Arian point of departure). But how

do the Oneness folk (or anyone) understand ‘incarnation?’ I think this

definition is difficult in the context of a Oneness Nestorian christology,

especially in the context of limiting Jesus’ sonship to his humanity. Hence,

as Rahner notes concerning ‘modalism’ in his Trinity,50 the Oneness can

properly present Jesus as the human Son to the Father, but they cannot

present him properly from a Trinitarian perspective as the Son of the

Father to humanity. An incarnational christology is necessary to view the

sonship of Jesus as both divine and human and essential if the church is to

transcend the limits of adoptionism (as important as Jesus’ Spirit-

empowered humanity is to a proper understanding of his sonship). Here is

an excellent example of discernment based in Scripture. Which direction

does the scriptural witness seem to imply, the Trinitarian or the Oneness?

Which direction fulfills that for which this witness reaches? (And I agree

that the Scripture tends toward a ‘mild’ subordinationism—just look at the

‘Father-centric’ thrust of 1 Cor. 15, which is my attraction to the Orthodox

understanding of the Trinity—I know I am stirring a hornet’s nest here).

The issue of Mary and, one might add, papal primacy, is complex. I

cannot deny that the Scriptures grant a ‘privileged’ place to both Mary and

Peter. In places, they both figure prominently in Jesus’ life and ministry.

49. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, pp. 270-75.

50. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroad, 1997), p. 65.



Yet, I cannot help but believe that the elaborate dogma that has developed

historically in the Catholic Church about them both exceeds that which is

implied in the biblical witness. To apply Rahner’s criteria, the seeds

cannot justify what is assumed to have grown from them.

Dale, you hit the nail on the head in two places. First, about infallibility:

I feel that the infallibility of dogma ends the dialogue with the ‘other’.

That was exactly the point I was making. Second, I think your approach to

revelation is implicitly Barthian, and that is part of the attraction for me.

Allow me, however, to approach the issue of text from a Barthian angle.

Barth did not deny that revelation is in some sense ‘verbal’ or ‘textual’.

Barth claimed concerning the written text of Scripture that ‘God does

reveal Himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of

human speech’.51 Barth elaborated further, ‘the personal character of

God’s Word is not, then, to be played off against its verbal…character’.52

For Barth, the personal character of revelation as God’s self-disclosure is

not, therefore, to cancel out its verbal character. To do so would be to

reduce the Word to irrationality.

Let us develop this point further. How did Barth relate the personal and

the verbal/textual dimensions of revelation? Barth’s major goal in this

relation was to place the verbal aspect in the service of the personal and the

living, so that the words of Scripture are not at our disposal to penetrate and

manipulate according to our own purposes, whether they be ideological,

systematic, or anything else. Barth thus stated that ‘the personal character

of God’s Word means, not its deverbalizing, but the posing of an absolute

barrier against reducing its wording to establish and construct a human

system’.53 Barth was not against granting a human or textual dimension to

revelation. He was only against stripping the biblical text of its freedom as

a living witness. Barth was thus against making revelation a set of proposi-

tions or facts ‘ready to hand’ for the construction of human ideologies and

systems. This manipulation of Scripture would be idolatrous. Barth’s heavy

emphasis on the Spirit’s role in revelation through Scripture caused some

to accuse him of a pneumatic form of biblical interpretation that neglects

the participation of the text in all of its dynamics in revelation as well as

serious exegesis of the text in the context of theology. Others, such as Frei

or Lindbeck,54 felt that the role of the text in revelation was vague in Barth

51. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, p. 138.



54. Hans Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth



and, identifying with Barth’s lack of confidence in historical method to get

at the truth in Scripture, decided to clarify this ambiguity by focusing on

the linguistic or narrative aspects of the function of the text in revelation.

My discussion of Barth above is meant to show that there was potential in

his thinking for taking seriously the role of the text as well as exegetical

inquiry into its meaning in the event of divine self-disclosure. I agree that

the text is porous and living, as part of the community’s worship and life

in the Spirit. But it is to my mind not fluid. It is a text, a canon, that needs

to be negotiated in community discernment, and there is a basis for quar-

reling with that discernment from a dialogue with that same text. I may be

missing the subtle nuances of your view on this, Dale, but I think we are in

basic agreement. I just do not want to lose the ‘otherness’ of the text of

Scripture vis-à-vis the life of the community. God help us if that hap-

pens…

Part III


I keep wondering why I do not seem to be as concerned about the church

ossifying the gospel or, worse yet, getting it wrong as I hear in all of your

comments. Is this simply the traditional Protestant reserve? Christ over

and against the Church (if necessary) rather than Christ in the church and

the latter as his mystical body? It is not that I don’t expect and desire new

things from God that may very well shake things up in the church. I do!

The Second Vatican Council was certainly of that order, as I think Azuza

Street was as well. But there is a sense for me that Christ will always keep

the church in truth, the real basis of both indefectibility and infallibility.

The latter as applied to the papal office concerns only the freedom from

error in the pronouncement of solemn dogma in the area of faith and

morals. It extends as far as the deposit of divine revelation. I do not know

about the sociological conditions of knowledge to agree that the doctrine

as articulated at Vatican I coincided in intent with Marx and Evangelical

Reformed attempts to uphold the inerrancy of the Bible. However, it does

raise the question of whether Christ keeps his church in truth, i.e., pre-

served from crippling error. Our sensibilities here may differ considerably.

As a Catholic I trust in that promise (Christ to Peter in Mt. 16), and there-

fore I can have confidence that the dogmas of the church (not every teaching

Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Lindbeck, Nature

of Doctrine.



or pronouncement) accurately represents the truth of the gospel. It does

not absolve me of theological work; it, in fact, requires it. Also, the dogmas

of the church do not represent every word from God. They are certainly not

the last word, but then not every word from God will be concerned with

doctrinal clarification. This certainly does not make ecumenical life any

easier. I come to the table with Vatican II, for sure, but also with Vatican I

and Trent. Don’t worry, the magisterium itself is under the Word of God—

Jesus Christ as known in Scripture and tradition—and so is not autonomous

in this regard. Hence the Pope’s letter on the ordination of women—basi-

cally saying that I could not change it even if I wanted to, since I am obli-

gated by the tradition…

From: Irvin 3/27/02

… First, Frank, I think the passage from Barth here55 is extremely helpful

and clarifying. I think my attraction to the concept of ‘communicative

praxis’ in Habermas is precisely along these lines, for the verbal and

personal dimensions of revelation cannot be played off against one

another. I think placing the verbal at the service of the personal works for

me quite nicely as a formulation. And certainly the freedom of the text is a

fundamental hermeneutical principal with which I would agree. On the

other hand, I would agree with you that ‘fluid’ is not what I mean, for this

would imply total boundary-lessness for me. That is neither intellectually

nor morally defensible, as far as I am concerned. What I mean by the lack

of sovereign boundaries is that the exact boundary cannot be discerned

with total consensus. Does the ending to Mark belong in the canon or not?

It is a major question if your church practices snake-handling, as someone

at the SPS session on Mason and magic pointed out. Does the Proto-

evangel of James belong? It is a major issue for the Coptic and Ethiopian

church traditions—they believe Protestants have desecrated holy Scripture.

When I speak of the porous nature of the boundary what I mean is the

way that Scripture seeps out into other kinds of text, language, and even

ways of being. The exact words of Scripture do not stay in their holy place.

They keep slipping out into other forms of discourse—hymns, liturgies,

everyday speech—that make it impossible to draw lines clearly around

them. Quite often it is the common, everyday use that decides meaning on

a pragmatic level—how many couples have those silly heart charms split

in half with the words, ‘May the Lord watch between me and thee while

55. Cited in nn. 51-53 above.



we are absent one from another’ on them? This is not a blessing in the

original text—but it is now.

Now, what Barth might be saying that is of help for me here, at least, is

that we need to put the Scriptures back from time to time into their own

domain, their own ‘place’ that is holy (the Hebrew sense of the word –

’other’). This may very well be the best argument around for preaching

being a distinctive (Dean Trulear says sacramental56) kind of event. The

‘otherness’ of the text gets reinforced in a sermon in the way that does not

happen in ‘fireside chats’. It may be what is wrong with the ‘folksy’ sermon

that tries to erase the line between the sacred and the popular… Anyway,

the point, Frank, is that I think we can keep a center without erecting rigid

or sovereign boundaries. Let us recognize that the church windows are

open and that the exact definitions of what counts as Scripture and what

does not escape us.

Turning back to you, Ralph, my only concern—and it is a self-conscious

Protestant one—is with the witness of those who have been labeled ‘here-

tic’. Here is the way I put it…[elsewhere]: ‘Those who were burned at the

stake as heretics often had their ashes scattered to prevent their followers

from collecting their bones and making a shrine out of them. The manner

in which we continue to search the historical records of Christendom for

the names of such heretics suggests a faithfulness that transcends that of

the tradition itself’.57 Yes, it is a Tillichian moment. It is Tillich’s ‘protes-

tant principle’ (small p) that I think is at stake in the conversation… We can

pick up the point about Pius IX, Karl Marx, and B.B. Warfield on another

day. It does strike me as quite intriguing that they were contemporaries…

From: Yong 3/28/02

On the primacy of Scripture, let me push the issue. Why continue to insist

on primacy, Frank and (from the other direction) Ralph? Is this still the

concern to ground beliefs in a foundationalistic sense? I hear Dale talking

about Scripture’s boundaries being porous, but also about Scripture as

existing within the wider framework of Christian life. William Abraham

puts it this way: that Scripture should be understood as among the various

means of grace available to the church (especially the early church),

56. Harold Dean Trulear shared this with me in personal conversation in 1995.

57. From my article, ‘The Terror of History and the Memory of Redemption: Engag-

ing the Ambiguities of the Christian Past’, in Victoria Lee Erickson and Michelle Lim

Jones (eds.), Surviving Terror: Hope and Justice in a World of Violence (Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos Press, 2002), p. 55.



alongside the rule of faith, the liturgy, the sacraments, the diakonate, and

even later, iconography, etc…58

My concern with this question is to push the definition of Pentecostalism,

which may be, as Ralph has pointed out, an ecclesiological question under-

neath: I think we would all agree that Pentecostalism is not just Evangeli-

calism (and the Word spirituality/mentality) plus something. But is it then

a branch of Protestantism (again, with its focus on the second article of the

Creed) plus something else? No doubt, Pentecostals are historically linked

to Protestantism and not to either Catholicism or Orthodoxy. But, histori-

cal lineages aside, Frank’s work on Pentecostal sacramentality and Simon

Chan’s, Rybarczyk’s and Albrecht’s work on Pentecostal spirituality59

point to our much closer connections with both of these earlier traditions

than it does to the (especially magisterial) Reformers. What do Pentecostals

do with sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christos? I am not sure

they do much, or am I misreading this trajectory completely? Chris

Thomas and Jim Shelton on the Jerusalem council (Acts 15) both point to

a pneumatic hermeneutic which retrieves and reappropriates Scripture and

tradition while correlating both to the fresh encounter and experience of

God, but such is no naïve sola anything.60

My project is to explore in detail the fabric of a distinctively Pentecostal

spirituality/world-life-view, which my intuitions point to as a robustly

pneumatological spirituality, which opens up, I claim, to a robustly trini-

tarian spirituality, but one which does not exclude Oneness convictions.

58. Abraham, Canon and Criteria in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to

Feminism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

59. Frank D. Macchia, ‘Tongues as a Sign: Toward a Sacramental Understanding

of Pentecostal Experience’, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies

15 (1993), pp. 61-76; Simon Chan, Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual

Tradition (JPTSup, 21; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Edmund J. Rybar-

czyk, ‘Spiritualities Old and New: Similarities between Eastern Orthodoxy and Classi-

cal Pentecostalism’, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 24.1

(2002), pp. 7-25; and Daniel E. Albrecht, Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to

Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality (JPTSup, 17; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,

1999).

60. John Christopher Thomas, ‘Reading the Bible from within Our Traditions: A

Pentecostal. Hermeneutic as Test Case’, in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds.),

Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 108-22, and James B. Shelton, ‘Epistemology

and Authority in the Acts of the Apostles: An Analysis and Test Case Study from Acts

15.1-29’, The Spirit & Church 2.2 (2000), pp. 231-47.



On this latter point, I am intrigued by the Oneness hermeneutic—what

David Reed calls an early Jewish–Christian hermeneutic61—especially

because of the connections it may open up both for Christian self-

understanding, and for the Jewish–Christian (Pentecostal) dialogue. Don’t

get me wrong, I know we cannot ignore the dogmatic tradition, just as we

cannot ignore Christ (no matter how much I try to ‘bracket’ both, I know

they inform my Christian identity). But, in a multitude of counselors there

is safety, and in the cacophony of voices (Acts 2), there is the testimony to

the wondrous works of God. Here, we are back to pneumatology, a

pneumatology which I envision as that which hovers over the void and the

darkness and through which the Word is spoken, a pneumatology in which

I believe (at least) Jews participate, but certainly not in terms of the ‘Spirit

of Jesus’. Yet, if the multitude of voices/perspectives is precisely what

bursts open our categories, then do we not need to be informed by these

other (Oneness and Jewish—perhaps what Barth would call ‘alien’) voices?

This connects, I think, with Dale’s call for open-endedness… My sense

is that whether we are talking about the primacy of Scripture or of the

magisterium, we are looking for epistemic grounding (and here we are

back to the late modernist, nineteenth-century debates) to provide closure.

Here again, Peircean fallibilism and Tillichian protestantism would rise up

against any attempt to short circuit the open-ended character of dialogical

conversation by any fideistic appeal. Genuine open-endedness is not rela-

tivistic in the sense that it tolerates all voices, but it is dialogical in the

sense that it agrees to listen to and attempt to discern the pluralism of

voices rather than cut off voices on a priori (fideistic) grounds. As all

voices are grounded in tradition in some way, so no voice is completely

new. In that sense (to push Ralph a bit), we need to listen closely to ‘new’

voices that are both discontinuous and continuous with previous voices

(e.g. Gnostic, Chalcedonian, Montanist) precisely because they are usually

not ‘just the same old heresies’ (see, e.g., Walter Wink’s attempt to retrieve

gnostic ‘son of man’ christologies in his new book on christology and theo-

logical anthropology62), but attempts to retrieve and reappropriate previous

traditions, perhaps this time in legitimate ways. And here, Dale, I am in

complete agreement with your reminding us of all the voices that have

been violently silenced in the past.

61. David A. Reed, ‘The Origins and Development of the Theology of Oneness

Pentecostalism in the United States’ (PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1978).

62. Walter Wink, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).



All this is quite vividly real for me in my context here at Bethel, and

especially in the debates surrounding the validity of open theism both here

and in the Evangelical Theological Society. There is vitriolic language and

hostility displayed in the way that some ultra-conservative evangelicals are

responding to the openness proposals. What is interesting, of course, is that

the openness hermeneutic is a naively biblicistic one that charges the clas-

sical tradition (not only of Catholic Scholasticism, but also of the magis-

terial wing of the Reformation) with having being misled by neo-Platonic

philosophy, especially through Augustine. The pietists whose theology is

generally classicist in being Arminian are, in this case, siding with the open

theists not on theological grounds but on ecclesial and political grounds,

calling to remembrance the fact that the Radical Reformers were persecuted

by the magisterial Reformers, and not wishing to see a repeat of these pre-

vious acts of violence again. So, in this debate, we have one party appeal-

ing to Scripture (the open theists), another appealing to Scripture and

tradition (ironically, the classical theists, calling on the history of dogma to

claim that orthodox Christianity has never entertained any notion of divine

omniscience being limited in any way), and another to the ethical impera-

tive (those who are trying to mediate peace between the two groups).

But precisely for these reasons, I do not see Pentecostals within the

same theological universe as these in the Evangelical Theological Society.

The foreknowledge of God is not our debate, just as the division over the

doctrine of justification in the sixteenth century is an issue dismissed by

the Orthodox as none of their business. Instead, I want to explore Pente-

costal Christianity as its own spirituality and theology of the third article

(to use Lyle Dabney’s phraseology63), both continuous with and discontinu-

ous from previous spiritualities/theologies. As such, I am uncomfortable

with the notion that the content of pneumatology is reducible completely to

christology. It is connected, yes, even perichoretically so. There is patrology

as well. In this sense, Pentecostalism connects well with the Fathers, al-

though not slavishly, yet it is aptly designed to re-engage Christian life in

a modern and postmodern world. In other words, the concerns of the

Fathers are not simply our own, even if our own theological intuitions

dovetail well with their vision at places.

To re-engage with the Fathers is not to swallow the tradition whole or

63. See D. Lyle Dabney, ‘Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit: A First Theology for

the Twenty-first Century’, in Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg and Thomas Kucharz

(eds.), The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 154-63.



uncritically. Here is where I have a problem with (Ralph’s) magisterium,

besides the questions raised in preceding discussions. Without denying the

important role of the magisterium in providing for contemporary Christian

faith a visible expression of Christian unity, the history of the magisterium

is fraught with difficulties—e.g. the schisms of the eleventh and fourteenth

centuries, and so on. That said, the tradition also confronts us as an

‘other’—even if it is an ‘other’ within which we are constituted, and not

just an ‘external’ other. Here, I want to apply Frank’s Barthian insights to

the ‘otherness’ of Scripture as a parallel to the ‘otherness’ of tradition.

However, to push the envelope a bit further in line with the previous

emails: insofar as we participate in a common humanity with all others,

including Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, etc., to that extent those ‘othernesses’

are also not completely foreign but also in some mysterious way a part of

ourselves. In Christian theological terms, they are perhaps part of the

imago Dei or (more out on a limb theologically, to use Ralph’s phrase)

‘the mystical Christ’ whose full glorious splendor will be revealed escha-

tologically. As such, for me, the notion of Christian identity today cannot

be discussed apart from non-Christian identities, thus the import not only

of intra-Christian ecumenical but also extra-Christian interreligious engage-

ments. In the same way as historic Christian identity was forged over-and-

against the ‘heresies’, so today, concrete, material, historical Christian faith

will be forged only in dialogue—complete with similarities and differ-

ences, continuities and discontinuities—with the other faiths. In and through

this crucible of encounter will emerge the criteriologies, the content(s), and

the dynamics of incarnational Christian faith. (And I think I do not use

‘incarnational’ here in a aprioristic sense, but in the historical sense.)

So is this a ‘third’ way? Insofar as the Reformation (at its best) did not

supercede the Fathers and the Scholastics but included their best insights,

can Pentecostalism not supercede but reconfigure altogether—discontinu-

ities within continuities, or vice-versa—the first two historical moments

(reductionistically defined, of course) of Christian faith? I think this is my

larger theological question, motivated by my Pentecostal experience. Or

am I making mistakes similar to Joachim of Fiore’s, Hegel’s, and the

hermeticist-theosophical movements, among others, who have attempted

such ‘third’ ways? Yet even if I am, is there a ‘faith’ once for all delivered

to which we return? Are not all of our returnings only partial at best,

especially if there are no transcendental truths (Dale) to which to return

and to grasp?…



From: Irvin 3/28/02

This is like drinking a $65 bottle of wine, not the cheap stuff they sell in

the bins at the front of the wine store! You have pulled together a lot of

pieces here, Amos, in a very coherent way. You have given me a platform

to rest upon and think about all that we have been saying over the past

week or so. I will wait to see what the others say in response. Right now, I

will savor the aroma of this fine wine. Thank you.


… Let me start by responding to Ralph. The issue of infallibility is one I

had to wrestle with in relation to Scripture. As Hans Küng has shown, that

problem carries over for Catholics into magisterium and tradition as

well.64 Again, I appeal to Barth (surprised?). In relation to Scripture, Barth

said that every verse is infallible. But Barth qualified this by stating that

Scripture is infallible in its living witness to the infallible God revealed in

Christ (in participation in that infallibility). What I am against is this idea

of a more-or-less static deposit that is infallible in some unqualified sense.

In this view of infallibility, there is no possibility for dialogue. Those who

have the infallible deposit then converse with those of fallible thoughts.

We have monologue, not dialogue, since those who speak from the infalli-

ble tradition speak from a transcendent vantage point. I take my cue (as

Barth did) from Kierkegaard’s brilliant essay on the ‘Difference between

a Genius and an Apostle’.65 In that essay, Kierkegaard draws a contrast

between the witness of the Apostles to the everlasting gospel and the

history of philosophy. The latter develops in a way that allows new ideas

to synthesize old ones and, in this synthesis, to supersede the older ones

and to relegate them to the trash heap of the antiquated and irrelevant. On

one level, church dogma and Scripture itself can also be discussed in this

way, and must be, i.e., as part of the development of civilization and phi-

losophy in the West (East, etc). On another level, however, there is a living

witness that has called forth the Scriptures and later dogma of the church

and sustained them (and apart from which the real burden that these Scrip-

tures and, secondarily, this dogma attempted to carry cannot be under-

stood). It is this witness that allows the Scripture and, in a way accountable

64. Küng, The Church Maintained in Truth: A Theological Meditation (New York:

Vantage Books, 1982).

65. Soren Kierkegaard, ‘On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’, in

idem (ed.), The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises (trans. Alex-

ander Dru and Walter Lowrie; New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 137-63.



to Scripture, the dogma to ‘participate’ in the infallibility of God’s self-

disclosure. But this understanding of infallibility raises the discernment

and hermeneutical issues that Dale and Amos have highlighted so well. In

this view of infallibility, Scripture can be interpreted according to a center

(or centers) that helps us to discern the living witness that conveys the

infallible God to us. For example, Ephesians 5 isolates women as having a

special obligation to submit to husbands and supports the headship of men

in the home. If this is regarded as infallible without qualification, we have

permission to divinize an oppressive social structure and to extend its

existence indefinitely into the future. But a close examination of the text

reveals that husbands are to exercise their headship as ‘Christ loved the

church and gave himself for it’. In this one line, husbands fall under the

mandate of the cross to give of themselves without qualification to their

wives so that these women can be all that God wants them to be. There is a

witness in this text to the gospel that calls the text itself in which it is

housed (and the original social context that informed its language) into

question! It is what Barth called the ‘strength’ of the Scripture’s witness

revealed in the text’s ‘weakness’. One determines the strength (the text’s

living witness) in the light of its ‘chief subject matter’—the gospel. How-

ever, unlike Luther, Barth felt that this strength is there in every text (for

example, the prayers for vengeance in the Psalms and the Apocalypse. As

M. Volf has noted, they are prayers, and, as such, they leave justice into

the hands of God, and, as prayers, they place those who pray in all of their

weakness before God’s justice66). Surely, no less can be said of the history

of dogma. Here is where infallibility does not remove dialogue with alien

voices; it invites it. And dogma can be embraced critically, interpreted in a

new light, and even ‘pruned’ in the light of new contexts—Scripture schol-

arship, and confrontation with alien voices—for the living witness to God’s

self-disclosure is not confined to the Scripture and dogma, though both

have a special elect calling in history to convey this witness to the world

and will serve a criteriological function. I do not think Congar is very far

from this in his notion of tradition that exists historically in dialectical

tension with tradition67… Tomorrow, I want to address Amos’s pneumatic

interpretation and remarks about the Reformed tradition. I also want to say

something more about ‘bracketing’ (Can you believe it?)…

66. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,

Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), pp. 123-24.

67. Yves Congar, ‘Tradition, Scripture, Traditions’, in Diversity and Communion

(Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985), pp. 283-307.



From: Irvin 3/28/02

No!! Frank, No!! Don’t say anything about ‘bracketing’ or we will have to

go back to the very beginning and start this all over again!!!

I continue to agree in general with the line of argument you follow in

Barth. The only point of disagreement concerns his notion of ‘infallibility’

at the level of each verse. I think this raises again the horrible beast of

historical-critical method that lurks at the cave of modernity, guarding the

treasures of biblical scholarship. Are the last verses of Mark 16 part of the

original text or not, and, if not, does infallibility extend to those verses? I

would prefer to go in the other direction, to argue (thank you, Gerald

Sheppard68) that infallibility could apply only to the widest sense of the

Bible—to its widest horizon. An infallible whole (infallible only in Barth’s

sense here, not Warfield’s) is made up of fallible parts, in other words.

That I think I could live with—not happily perhaps, but I could live with

it. But then you would need a good dose of Luther to be able to discern

grace sub contrario.

Okay, back to bracketing: here is the only way I will let the concept

back in the room if I can help it. Habermas says that in developing any

analysis, there comes a point where we do not have the necessary infor-

mation or theoretical insight. Yet we cannot simply quiet the analysis.

What we do, he says, is select a theory or a bit of information that we

know to be problematic and use it in the analysis as a ‘placeholder’, an ‘x’

that marks the spot to which we will return when our theoretical formu-

lations become more adequate or our information improves. There are

place holders in every one of our theologies—formulations that we know

are not yet complete, adequate, totally honest, and so on. We use them to

hold a place so that the total project of thinking/living can go on. If I do

not totally understand what you say, I insert a placeholder in the form of

my own idea about what I think you mean and then respond to that. If the

placeholder does its job well, the time will come when it can be discarded.

It is a different way of understanding the bracketed [X] than Derrida

employs when he ‘x’s out things across the text in his phenomenological

bracketing. So if you go with place holders, Frank, I will take a run and

kick the ball (a little bit of football humor here—get it—‘placeholder’?)…

68. Gerald T. Sheppard, The Future of the Bible: Beyond Liberalism and Literalism

(Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1990).




Infallibility is primarily a gift to the church, so I want to consider it within

the context of receiving and being grateful for this charism (very Pente-

costal, yes?). First of all, as I said before, this gift is quite limited and by

most accounts of Catholic theologians has not been exercised except per-

haps once—the dogma of Mary’s assumption into Heaven in 1950 by Pius

XII. I really do not think such exercise has to do with foundationalism or

closure. It does have to do with the recognition of truth, even a certain

‘deposit of faith’ that opens things up before and in God. Yes, some ‘No’

is implicit or explicit, e.g., Mary was not assumed or Christ is not divine

(Arius)… Long live papal primacy!…


Dale, let me quickly respond. I have difficulty with the Lutheran ‘fallible

parts’ language. I agree with Barth that it is all fallible but infallible in

living witness.69 The problem that I have with Luther is the easy way that

certain texts can be discarded because the interpreter from a limited

context may not be able to see where the gospel witness is (so these texts

can be termed as consisting of ‘straw’ not Christ, or, as Bultmann stated,

as coming from alien spirits not the Spirit of Christ,70 or merely as ‘texts

of terror’71). For example, we can do that with the slavery texts in the New

Testament. But, as I heard Chris Thomas say once, if parts of the world

were to change to the degree that slavery were to be institutionalized again,

would we want to take those texts away from those enslaved? I like what

Jerome said when he proposed that every biblical text contains the light of

truth in some way. The interpreter must seek it out as the hunter seeks prey

and captures it. Barth said that every text, even those most disturbing to

modern sensibilities, carries in some way the burden of the gospel and

points to it, though in places only weakly or perhaps indirectly. Actually, I

like the metaphor of an orchestra. All canonical instruments contribute to

the symphony, but not all instruments contribute to the music with the

69. For Barth, the Scriptures are infallible only in their witness to the infallible

Christ. In this witness, Barth says of Scripture: ‘…although they seek no authority,

even with their fallible human word they continually claim and enjoy the most unheard

of authority’, Dogmatics I/1, pp. 113-14.

70. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s “Römerbrief” in zweiter Auflage’, in Jürgen

Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie, 1 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag,

1977), pp. 119-42 (142).

71. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (London: SCM Press, 1992).



same strength. Yes, this does give historical-critical analysis and decisions

about the limits of the canon a sense of urgency (though with limitations).

Brevard Childs and Gerald Sheppard would not deny this. Yet historical

analysis alone is not what gets us to the light or to the witness. In fact, as

Barth noted, historical analysis in a sense only increases our alienation

from the text and our feel for its weakness as a witness to the everlasting

gospel (in his Romans commentary, he states that ‘we are partners of Abra-

ham; and he is a far more “unhistorical” figure than historical analysis has

ever dreamed of’72). In general, I agree with you, Dale, that infallibility is

a concept that does not have clear boundaries, but I would add that this is

because it is related to the role of the given biblical text in pointing to the

‘chief subject matter’ of all texts, the living gospel. The problem that

Barth saw with the historical-critical method is that it limited each text to

its own historical context and made that the sole determination of meaning.

But Barth saw wisely that every text has a much more important referent

and carries a much heavier burden. Each text, if it deserves the designation

‘Scripture’, carries the burden of the gospel. So, Mark 16 is not just a

historical or canonical issue but also a gospel issue. How has the text func-

tioned in the church to bear witness to the gospel? Pentecostals have argued

that this text has played a liberating role in their churches in connecting

them to the life of faith. They understood the fundamental issue. But it is

also interesting that even the early Pentecostals saw the need to deal with

the marginal role the text has played in what we know of the early devel-

opment of the canon… The historical questions play a secondary and by

no means decisive role, but they play a role. And Ralph, as you know, the

term ‘infallible’ is being used in the Catholic hierarchy for more than just

the dogma concerning the assumption of Mary. I feel, in time, the nature

of infallibility as a functional concept that allows us to think critically

about the dogma in question is in need of review in Catholic theology.

Stay tuned for bracketing (God, help us!) and pneumatic interpretation…

From: Irvin 3/28/02

Don’t get me started in defense of Luther! I might not get to sleep tonight

over that one, Frank!!! Okay, forgetting the slights that this German pea-

sant just received, I can go with what you say about the symphony and

greater and lesser importance. I think the ambiguity of the sacred (Scott

72. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 147-48.



Appleby73) is stronger for me—the reality of the demonic (back to Amos

who got this all started) is closer to the divine than we like to acknowledge.

I am still with Tillich at the end of the day, or with Appleby’s reading of

Tillich, et al. Luther gave me a way to forgive a lot of folks for the damage

they did around biblical inerrancy…but Luther himself would remind us

that we are justified by faith, not by Luther’s Werks. So I am happy to

concede the floor on this one to Barth and Childs. Now…I’m bracing for

the bracketing…


Dale, I liked what you said about placeholders. I would only like to ex-

pand it. Ralph, I agree with you that we cannot bracket Jesus. The Spirit

would not do that. And I also agree that I should not hide my christological

commitments at the ecumenical table. However, that table was not the

context I had in mind when I originally spoke of ‘bracketing’. I spoke

from a very specific context. In Pentecostal fashion, I will give a testimony

to explain it. After my graduation from Union Theological Seminary, I

went into ministry in the Chicago area for close to four years before going

to Basel. I decided that I needed to know what I believed and why. I did not

want to be a Christian merely because I was born into it. I began to read

from other religions, especially Buddhism. I did not forget the dogmatic

tradition of the church concerning Christ, but I wondered about the experi-

ence of Christ as the risen Lord that lay at the core of this history, and I

wanted to go with that experience in mind to Buddhism to see the places

of mutual illumination. I won’t go into what I found, but I recall leaving

the Buddhist study. I was not prepared to go further. But what I did was a

source of renewal for me. I then sat down and read the first three volumes

of Pelikan’s Christian Tradition74 and the first volume (parts 1 and 2) of

Barth’s Church Dogmatics. My life was changed. Barth said that at key

points in his theological study he would back off from all that he had

learned and ‘start again at the beginning’ (mit dem Anfang anfangen75). In

a way, Welker does something similar in pneumatology in his God the

73. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and

Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Littlefield and Publishers, 2000).

74. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of

Doctrine, Vols. 1-5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971-89).

75. See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical

Texts (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 489.



Spirit.76 There is nothing in this book on Trinity or church (community,

OK, but not ecclesiastical issues). I mentioned in my review that he had

tried to liberate pneumatology for a moment from the domination of these

towering doctrines in order to renew pneumatology by going again to the

biblical witness with fresh eyes. He responded that I was one of the few

who had perceived that.77 Bracketing as I meant it (and, as I said before, I

am willing to use another word) does not mean eliminating dogma, only

momentarily putting it in parentheses so as to go back to the beginning.

That going back provides a stance of maximum openness to the alien

voices as well as to the seminal voices at the center of the dogmatic tradi-

tion. The goal is the renewal of dogma and an appreciation for the life at

its core. At the ecumenical table the partners need to know of my commit-

ments. So the ‘bracketing’ of which I speak would not be appropriate there

(at least not in the way I described it here). But for moments in my

personal quest—that is another story. I guess I am a restorationist at heart,

after all, despite my love for catholic tradition. Does the dogmatic tradition

of the church this side of eternity ever lose its function as placeholders

entirely? I ask this as a question, because I myself am not sure. Amos, is

this close to what you mean?

From: Yong 3/28/02

In response to your question, Frank, I do not recall using the term ‘bracket-

ing’ in my Discerning the Spirit(s). But I think it is close to the spirit of

what I mean. To elaborate (now it is my turn to do ‘testimony’), when I

arrived at Western Evangelical Seminary in 1990 from Bethany College

(Assemblies of God) from 1983–87, I was unprepared for the ecumenical

environment there. My ‘Pentecostal world’ came crashing down when I

read Goff’s biography of Parham.78 This exploded the handed-down tale

of what happened at Topeka and Azusa St. It ‘relativized’ my Pentecostal

identity, since there were other Christians now who did not affirm initial

76. Michael Welker, God the Spirit (trans. John F. Hoffmeyer; Minneapolis:

Fortress Press, 1994).

77. See Macchia, ‘Discerning the Spirit in Life: A Review of God the Spirit by

Michael Welker’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 10 (1997), pp. 3-28; Welker, ‘Spirit

Topics: Trinity, Personhood, Mystery and Tongues’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology

10 (1997), pp. 29-34.

78. James R. Goff, Jr, Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the

Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas

Press, 1988).



evidence, etc., who were just as validly Christian as I. But, all this raised

for me the larger religious questions: just as my Pentecostal identity was a

historical construction, why was my Christian faith also not a historical

construction? And, what then about its ultimate/transcendental claims?

This led me to ask the interreligious question beginning with my study of

Buddhism in 1992…since, as I said earlier today, the question of Christian

identity in the twenty-first century…can only be answered in dialogue

with the non-Christian faiths (and with secularism; thus the import of the

science-religion dialogue as well).

Now, back to my testimony: up through 1998 when I wrote Discerning

the Spirit(s), the problematic with which I was confronted as a Pentecostal

was the practical one of how to get Pentecostals to the interreligious

dialogue table. I am not sure now (in hindsight) that the strategy I outlined

there was the best one. My sense at that time (and now) is that Pentecostals

have not even begun to listen to religious others (much less to their own

non-Pentecostal Christian voices, of course). Why? Because, as Dale’s

opening remarks to my session put it, we have masked our ignorance behind

the pretense of evangelistic zeal. The other context that influenced my think-

ing was that which was taking place among evangelicals (and this long

before I got to Bethel). The key questions even through the 1990s for evan-

gelicals still revolved primarily around the issue of the salvation of the

unevangelized. Serious thinking about theology of religions was practically

absent. Why? It was because, in order to theologize about the religions,

one must take the time to familiarize oneself with that phenomenon. Evan-

gelicals were still thinking and talking about converting the non-Christian

rather than attempting to understand why they remained non-Christian (e.g.

the resistance to Christianity in Japan after 500 years of missionization). In

short, Discerning the Spirit(s) emerged out of my sense of futility regarding

what was going on in circles closest to my theological home—Pentecostal

and evangelical—insofar as in both traditions, no model existed which

legitimated authentic dialogue with the religious other. In that sense, my

project then (as now) was to attempt to get us to reflect theologically on

the fact of the non-Christian faiths in other than simply evangelistic or

missiological terms. The other objective with Discerning the Spirit(s) was

to raise the question of whether or not a pneumatological theology of

religions may infuse the interreligious dialogue with some vitality. On this

point, my comments were directed toward the mainline and Catholic com-

munities who have been engaged in the interreligious discussion. In hind-

sight, ‘bracketing’ Christ is impossible, and I strove in Discerning the

Spirit(s) to do so (motivated actually most deeply at that time by Georges



Khodr’s Orthodox ruminations on the distinct missions of the Son and

Spirit vis-à-vis the question of the non-Christian faiths79), even while it

informed my theologizing amidst my denials. In some ways, the book was

exploratory with regard to the pedagogical, rhetorical, epistemic, and dia-

logical aspects of Pentecostal/Christian witness in a postmodern and reli-

giously plural world. I am still thinking, and learning as I go…


First, I want to thank you Amos for that honest reflection… Let me say

something about Reformed theology. There is no question that Reformed

theology has been the dominant influence on me, especially by way of

Barth. During my second year at Basel, it was the centennial of Barth’s

birthday. Every faculty member in the divinity school offered coursework

on Barth. I had four Barth seminars that year—the early Barth, Barth’s

ethics, Barth as Old Testament interpreter, Barth as New Testament

interpreter! I read hundreds of pages from Barth in German. At the end of

the year, there was a three-day conference in which theologians, Catholic

and Protestant, gathered to give and hear lectures on Barth. On Saturday

evening there was a Mozart concert hosted by Heinrich Ott and on Sunday,

Jüngel preached in the Munster Church a sermon in honor of Barth. I will

never forget that year. Barth became the major dialogue partner for me.

Others have been important too, but not quite on that level.

I do not deny that Catholic and Orthodox theology have been important

for me (Orthodox more and more). But I found in Barth a kind of Reformed

theology different than the sterile, ecumenically closed, and dead theology

found here among some Evangelicals in the US. I found in Barth a deep

‘catholic’ form of Reformed theology, similar to the kind of Lutheran

theology I find in Pannenberg or Jenson. What has become attractive to me

is a kind of ‘catholic’ evangelicalism in the broad, European sense of that

term. What I am trying to do now is to infuse an even deeper ‘catholic’

sense for pneumatology into that identity!…

Part IV


This is my third e-mail today…and I am on a roll. Amos, I neglected to

respond to your fine e-mail (the one before last). I agree with Dale, it

79. Georges Khodr, ‘Christianity in a Pluralistic World–The Economy of the Holy

Spirit’, Ecumenical Review 23 (1971), pp. 118-28.



needs to be savored. There are some great works out there, such as

William Stacy Johnson’s, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Post-

modern Foundations of Theology, which show that the primacy of Scrip-

ture, as Barth argues it, is not a return to foundationalism.80 This is because

for Barth the text is living and one must always return to it again to hear

(mit dem Anfang anfangen!). Get Johnson’s book; it is an excellent intro-

duction to Barth from the vantage point of postmodern issues… In short, I

like pneumatic interpretation but not the kind that neglects the various

internal dynamics involved in the text’s conveying the ‘burden of its song’,

namely, the living gospel (see Barth’s 1916 sermon, ‘Strange New World

Within the Bible’81). Exegesis is not foundational but it does matter. And I

agree that Scripture functions with many vehicles of revelation but is not

just as one vehicle among others. It plays the role of the ‘canonical context’

(Childs82) in which the others play their role (in mutual illumination/incar-

nation of the truth)…

From: Irvin 3/29/02

… Frank, you ought to write a book on Barth. I liked Johnson’s book. He

is trying to go on to work on Derrida and post-Holocaust theology now…

but I think there was still more for him to mine in the Barthian vein along

the lines of what you, Frank, are getting to here in these emails. As for

non-foundational exegesis, I heard someone say once that exegesis is the

emergency repair kit that the church needs to keep on hand for when the

wheels fall off its cart—and they inevitably will do so, given the rough

roads of history they have to traverse. It is exegesis on the way rather than

exegesis as a mythical (foundational) first act, or exegesis as ‘origins’…

I understand these contexts of which you speak, Amos. My sadness is that

the western churches have been so cut off from the last 1500 years of his-

torical experience of eastern Christians in the interreligious dialogue. Take

one example: the entire last 400 years of western Christian dialogue with

80. William Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern

Foundations of Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).

81. Karl Barth, ‘The Strange New World within the Bible, in The Word of God and

the Word of Man (trans. Douglas Horton; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1963), pp.

28-50.

82. Brevard Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1984), 544. See also Childs's ‘Canonical Text or Canonical Interpreter’,

in Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection (Minnea-

polis: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 71-73.



Buddhism has taken place over against the background mainly of the

Jesuit and later Protestant encounters in China, India, Sri Lanka and so on.

Ignored in these contexts is the previous 1000 years of history of East

Syrian Christians with Manichaeans, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and later

Muslims in Central Asia and China. The theological faculty at Chung Chi

(and Chung Chi—Christ the King—college in Hong Kong now has a Bud-

dhist as its president, a fact of which the colleagues there are all very proud)

told me last year that this East Syrian history is becoming far more impor-

tant for them now as they move into the future of China. Here is one result

that I think leads to serious reconsideration of the past: last year in western

China a number of very early East Syrian figures of the Virgin Mary were

uncovered. The figures are clearly showing her in Chinese cultural forms

and are remarkably like those of Kwan Yin (the boddhisatva of compas-

sion) that appear for the first time in Buddhism around this period. Kwan

Yin was Avolokitsitvara in India. He (the boddhistatva of light) became

she (the goddess of compassion) along the silk road, after Buddhism left

India and moved up into Sogdia and then into China. I found this out

working on Kumarajiva, by the way. He was of mixed descent, his father

Indian and his mother Tocherian (western Sogdian Turkish tribe). He was

the one who translated the Lotus Sutra into Chinese from Sanskrit, and his

translation served as the basis for the development of Zen. But in fifth-

century Sogdia he would have had significant contact with Manicheaens

and probably Christians already. This history goes on and on. An eighth-

century Tang emperor visited Japan and is recorded as having a Persian

medical doctor in his entourage. Most of these Persian doctors were

Christians—East Syrians kept their translations of the Greek medical texts

as highly prized secrets in their monasteries, and under the Abbasid

dynasty Christians continued to dominate the field in the east. It makes for

a very different reading of the history of interreligious dialogue to go into

China from the East Syrian routes along the silk road, and not through the

western churches only. This is one reason, by the way, why Chung Chi’s

school emblem is now the cross and lotus found in numerous western

Chinese Christian gravestones, the so-called ‘Nestorian’ cross (that name

is still rejected by the East Syrian and Chaldean rite churches). The Chris-

tian–Buddhist dialogue I heard going on in Chung Chi is very different

than what I hear Hick and others trying to do in the West. This is why I

think we simply need to de-hegemonize ourselves and go find a new

historical location.

By the way, the Pentecostal students I met at Chung Chi were doing this

already. There is a growing Pentecostal presence in China, and in Hong



Kong there are several students working at the graduate level. They cannot

figure out why Pentecostals in the US are so wedded to the American forms

of evangelicalism, but they are interested in building further contacts with

organizations such as SPS to develop their own theological perspectives on

global Pentecostalism. Wouldn’t it be interesting to organize a Buddhist–

Pentecostal dialogue in China?

From: Yong 3/30/02

Two quick matters: first, on Frank’s reminding us of Barth’s view of the

text as living, isn’t this a pneumatological notion—i.e. that the letter kills

but the Spirit gives life? Did not the later Barth advocate complementing

his christocentrism with some kind of pneumatocentrism? As I see it, the

entire issue of infallibility and authority of Scripture, whether in Barthian

terms or not, needs to deal with two other questions. The first is that which

Ed Farley poses explicitly about when/how/why the early Church develop-

ments led them toward adopting the Jewish notion of divine revelation as

en-scripturated.83 He suggests that Judaism as a religion of particularity

(the land, the concreteness of the promises made to Abraham, etc.) in-

cludes what I call a logic of revelational particularity emergent during the

intertestamental period which focuses divine revelation in the Hebrew

Bible. Christianity, on the other hand, has always been a ‘religion’ with a

universalistic thrust (not to say that this theme is absent from Judaism or

the Hebrew Bible), and rightly so, as it is focused on a person, not on speci-

fic promises of land, prosperity, etc. As such, Farley raises the question

about how and why Christianity adopted the Jewish notion that God speaks

through a text. He suggests that this was counter-intuitive to the Christian

revelational claim. Perhaps we can say that this move was made even

among the first few generations of Christians who were also Jewish, and

who slowly made the move from the person of Christ toward writings

about Christ.

The second question, however, concerns the fact of the plurality of scrip-

tural traditions. Cantwell Smith and Harold Coward have done much to

call this fact to our attention of late.84 And, just as we as Christians are

83. See Farley, Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadel-

phia: Fortress Press, 1982).

84. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minne-

apolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Harold G. Coward, Sacred Word and Sacred Text:

Scripture in World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988); and Coward (ed.),

Experiencing Scripture in World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).



now seeing that the Christian Scriptures are not abstract propositional

deposits of revelation but that they function within the entire ‘web of Chris-

tian life’ (Abraham, Telford Work85), so also are we beginning to acknowl-

edge that we cannot just read the Qu’ran, the Gita, or the Lotus Sutra in

the abstract, apart from the practices, the way of life, the broader canonical

and commentarial traditions, etc., of these other religious traditions. In

other words, any Christian theology of Scripture, it seems to me, needs to

be developed in dialogue with the plurality of scriptures in other traditions.

We learn something about the human condition in observing how various

religious and cultural communities over vast spaces and times have nego-

tiated issues of transcendence, liberation, salvation, etc., vis-à-vis enscrip-

turated textual traditions.

But, the fact is that we cannot access these other scriptural traditions in

the abstract. Just as we would be impoverished in our understanding of

any one biblical text apart from the canonical tradition and the Christian

practices within which such a text finds meaning, so also would we be

impoverished in our understanding of other religious scriptures if isolated

from their forms of life. In short, the authority of the Christian Bible can

be demonstrated only if we enter into, live and participate in the world of

the Christian text. I call this process that of being invited into the world of

the text by the Spirit, which leads to Christian communal life. Only by so

‘tasting’ can we see that the Lord is good, and thus ‘vindicate’ the Lord’s

word. But does not vindication of the scriptural texts of other traditions

also require that we enter into their worlds, participate in their forms of

life, etc.? And, does this not raise the pneumatological question afresh—as

a question about God (the Holy Spirit), about anthropology and about the

demonic—all at once?

My point is that our confession of Christ is never static, or a rote repe-

tition of previous formulas, dogmatic or otherwise. The context of the

dialogues dictates the kind of confession that is both required and

appropriate. Otherwise, the confession misses the mark, or engenders con-

fusion at best, hostilities at worst. But even in the theological sense, the

confession of faith is one that should also be a declaration of hope (in the

eschatological and coming Christ) as well as a deed of love. In that sense,

I am with Barth insofar as he helps us to see a broadly ‘catholic’ Reformed

tradition (as does Gunton and the Torrances today, besides Pannenberg,

85. Telford Work, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).



Jenson, et al.86). In fact, I find Barth’s discussion of Amida Buddhism in

the Dogmatics…quite fascinating. This is the task of Christian theology

today, insofar as it attempts to give account to the wider oekumene about

its convictions and to present authentic witness to Christ, not just the Jesus

of history, but the eschatological/resurrected Coming One.

Dale, I am also intrigued by what is going on in Chung Chi in Hong

Kong. I would love to be put in touch with Pentecostal students there who

may be thinking about the question that McDermott puts to us: ‘What if

Paul had gone to China?’ (instead of to Rome).87 This is, again, the ques-

tion of context, except that it is not about a transcendental Christ who needs

to be contextualized but an always-already historically situated and escha-

tologically confessed Christ who rises up within history’s movements in

unpredictable (pneumatological) ways. This is not the Christ of being (Aris-

totle and the Scholastics) or the Christ of non-being (Sartre) but perhaps the

eschatological Christ who may be (see Richard Kearney).88 The possibility

of his appearing again is correlated with the possibility of his appearing

the first time, not of necessity but of divine freedom. Is God free to appear

again, and is God free to continue to appear historically as well, perhaps

this time in the most unexpected places as we encounter and engage the

(always-already religious) other?…


… Your e-mail, Amos, seems to summarize much that we have said thus

far and pushes it ahead. I agree in general with what you state. In other

words, Christianity did not begin as a result of midrash on the Hebrew

Scriptures but as a result of the resurrection of Jesus. The revelation began

from, and subsequently revolved around, the figure of the risen Christ. My

only caution is directed against seeing the rise of a revelational canonical

text as a late development that merely results from a loss of a sense of

direct encounter with the risen Christ through the Spirit (perhaps ignited

86. Representative of this movement is Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson

(eds.), The Strange New World of the Gospel: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern

World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

87. See Gerald R. McDermott, ‘What If Paul Had Been from China? Reflections on

the Possibility of Revelation in Non-Christian Religions’, in John G. Stackhouse, Jr,

(ed.), No Other Gods before Me? Evangelicals and the Challenge of World Religions

(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), pp. 17-35.

88. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 2001).



by Marcion’s challenge). There is a point to saying that canon, rule of

faith, and episcopal authority come to be emphasized from the second cen-

tury on as the immediate experience of the Spirit of the risen Christ begins

to fall into the background. But the situation is more complex in my view,

and I would tend to view the rise of a revelational text as inherent in the

original experience of the early Christians of the risen Christ. I will

explain.

First, the indication is that there was a body of teaching that Jesus left

behind and that forms the core of the kerygma after the ascension. I learned

from Raymond Brown that an early body of Jesus tradition predates

Paul.89 For example, Paul and the Gospels share a fourfold understanding

of Jesus’ work for our salvation (Jesus is killed, is buried, rises on the third

day, and is seen by witnesses; none of these can be assumed, since executed

criminals, for example, were not customarily buried). The Spirit would illu-

minate the risen Christ not only in personal encounters but also through

a preserved and expanding Jesus tradition(s). Second, as Paul testified in

2 Cor. 3, the early Christians soon distinguished themselves from their non-

Christian Jewish counterparts over how the Hebrew Scriptures were to be

illuminated. In 2 Cor. 3.15 ‘Moses’ is said to be ‘read’ with a veil covering

the eyes, because Christ is not seen reflected within. But through the Spirit,

the veil is removed and the letter which had blinded and killed now gives

life. In fact, we as bearers of the Spirit come to reflect the glory of encoun-

ter with the living Christ as we are transformed into Christ’s image by the

Spirit (3.18), for we become living letters from Christ written by the Spirit

(3.3). Here it all is. From very early, the experience of the living Christ

was located within the Hebrew Scriptures through the agency of the Spirit,

not in isolation from the sanctified life, but in continuity with it. The Jesus

tradition and the apostolic teaching evolves, not as a counterintuitive move

in relation to the experience of the risen Christ (in my view), but to fulfill

and to make explicit the ‘living’ canonical context for the Spirit’s work

within the Hebrew Scriptures for our transformation into living witnesses

of the risen Christ. Sheppard makes the case that a ‘canon consciousness’

within which the Spirit testifies of Christ emerges very early in the history

of the church, not suddenly through Marcion’s challenge, but from an ear-

lier root.90 I agree. In other words, in agreement with Pannenberg, I do not

89. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave:

A Commentary on the Passion Narratives of the Four Gospels, V.1 (New York:

Doubleday, 1994), pp. 36-93 (esp. pp.48-57 and 82-85).

90. Sheppard, The Future of the Bible, p. 29; furthermore, I am grateful to



think the experience of the risen Christ took place in a revelational or

textual vacuum but within a textual-revelational ‘soil’ drawn from the past

and alive in the Hebrew Scriptures (and augmented by the legacy of Jesus).

I would tend to see the move toward a living, revelational text within early

Christianity as a natural momentum from within.

Your further point about ‘comparative canon’ is an interesting one and

raises questions that I have vis-à-vis 2 Cor. 3. Does this passage mean that

the Hebrew Scriptures have no dignity as revelation apart from the later wit-

ness of the Spirit to Jesus? 3.10 indicates that there is a certain ‘glory’ to the

old covenant, but it is surpassed by the glory of the Spirit’s witness to Jesus.

Perhaps this ‘fading glory’ of Moses that is fulfilled and surpassed by the

glory of resurrected life in Jesus is the context from which we can talk

about the revelational value of the Hebrew Scriptures apart from their

fulfillment in Christ. Perhaps this ‘former glory’ of the Hebrew Scriptures

can be applied analogously to other canons. After all, salvation history

does not belong only to the Israelites, for the Philistines and the Arameans

had exoduses that parallel that of the Israelites, according to Amos 9.7.

Yet, in the end, as with the Hebrew Scriptures, the decisive point will be

how these other canons are to be illuminated. Sheppard spoke about the

‘competitive illumination’ that took place between Christians and Jews

with regard to the Hebrew Scriptures.91 Should texts like Isaiah 53 be read

from the vantage point of the history of the Jewish people or the story of

Jesus? Can we expand this analogously in relation to other canons? With-

out eliminating the fact that there is a ‘glory’ experienced by the Spirit

within these canons even apart from their fulfillment in Jesus, our encoun-

ter with these folks will still come down to how this glory is fulfilled, how

it is illuminated in eschatological splendor. Here is where Jesus comes in

both to illuminate and to prune the other canons. A bone of contention will

arise that cannot be avoided.

From: Yong 3/31/01

… I have a quick response to two points in Frank’s response to my think-

ing about canon in a religiously plural context. First, is the movement

toward enscripturation a momentum from within the earliest trajectories of

Christianity? I think I can agree with that, insofar as the earliest Christians

Sheppard for pointing me to David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), which argues for the formation of a biblical

canon in Greek, including a New Testament, as early as the mid-second century.

91. Sheppard shared this in personal conversations with me.



were Jews who were already committed to the notion of an enscripturated

revelatory canon. In that sense, the momentum was already set by the Jew-

ish tradition. So long as we do not end up anywhere near to the alleged sola

scriptura of conservative evangelicals today. I am convinced, for example,

that the advocates of sola scriptura will always win the debate on gender

issues and women in ministry. Why? Because no matter what kind of her-

meneutical gymnastics we do with the text, we cannot avoid the plain-sense

readings of 1 Cor. 11, 14, and 1 Tim. 2. The fact of the matter is that the

biblical authors were not (post)modern egalitarians, and to read that latter

notion back into the text is anachronistic at best and eisegetical at worst.

(Here, I am drawing not only from Jewett’s older work but also from David

Brown’s more recent work on revelation and tradition.92). This means that

like the slavery issue, we have to get beyond historical-critical hermeneuti-

cal methods and argue in some sense for the ‘ongoing’ character of revela-

tion. Wouldn’t you agree?

This brings me back to the question remaining about how enscripturated

revelatory canons can function for a religious tradition that has universalist

impulses. Lamin Sanneh has made the case that it is precisely Scripture’s

translatability which has been the occasion of its revitalizing cultures, inso-

far as those languages have been retrieved, preserved, and, in some cases,

literally ‘created’.93 Here, however, we are in the throes of language’s

capacity to make present (represent) even amidst absence (the vagueness

of the linguistic symbol). The Bible’s translatability points attention to the

power of the diversity of tongues to speak of the wondrous works of God,

yet not in the sense of a literal transliteration, but in the sense of opening

up whole universes of linguistic discourses to the living, universal and

eschatological God.

So, we are back to whether or not other languages, specifically other

scriptural canons, can be revelatory. Why not? But how? Frank, I like your

suggestions coming from 2 Cor. 3. Yet at the same time, you indicate how

this might occur by recoursing to the classic ‘fulfillment’ theory: that the

Christian revelation fulfills and completes those of other religious tradi-

tions, insofar as Christ is the one after whom all religious quests aspire.

But, at this juncture, we are back to the dialogical point: can there be true

92. See Paul K. Jewett, Man as Male and Female (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975),

and David Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 11-61.

93. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture

(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1989).



dialogue with the religious other with this kind of understanding of the

non-Christian faiths/canons if we are already decided up front that what-

ever value they possess, it is ‘inferior’ to the final revelation of Christ?

John Cobb’s ‘mutual transformation’ theory may provide an alternative

model, I think, insofar as Cobb is not in the Hick–Panikkar–Knitter plural-

ist camp.94 Rather, Cobb sees that the interaction between the religious

traditions results in creative transformation of each tradition from within

as the alterity of the other is conceded and engaged as other (not as being

fulfilled by the self). Of course, the difficulty here is how, as Christians, to

preserve ourselves from ‘conceding the farm’. In my view, this can be

done only with a robust eschatology that, from the Pentecostal perspective,

is and has been in force since the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2.17). These are

the ‘last days’ in which the Spirit is being poured out on all flesh. And

doesn’t that mean that I need to listen to those alien voices through whom

the Spirit is speaking?…


Amos, let me briefly respond. I do not think that a mutual-transformation

idea necessarily contradicts the fulfillment model. Let us go back to the

Old Testament/New Testament relationship. The Hebrew Scriptures are

fulfilled in Christ. This cannot be denied. Yet, the Hebrew Scriptures have

their own dignity as revelation, even apart from their fulfillment in Christ.

What this means for me is that not everything from the Hebrew Scriptures

is taken up in Christ and the New Testament witness, so that there are cre-

ative tensions between the two Testaments. There is not only a promise/

fulfillment relationship between them (by itself that would be too one-

dimensional) but also a mutually illuminative relationship. Can this not

also carry over into the relationship between Christ and other canons?

From: Irvin 4/1/02

Somehow, Amos, we are still getting stuck on the issue of dialogue requir-

ing that I do not already have an idea formed up front of what the other

is about. This is where I keep challenging the argument. I think this is a

liberal conception of dialogue and fundamentally misses the point that

94. John R. Cobb, Jr, Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Chris-

tianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). Cobb distances himself from

the pluralist approach in his ‘Beyond “Pluralism” ’, in Gavin D. Costa, (ed.), Christian

Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis Books, 1990), pp. 81-95.



otherness is grounded in identity and self, because it always already pre-

supposes it. Alterity follows identity, in the same way that absence always

already presupposes a mode of presence. If something were completely

and fully other, I would not even know it existed and thus could not be

engaged in any meaningful way with it dialogically. Authentic dialogue

always entails the possibility of change. Authentic conversation is a mode

of conversion. That is why Rostenstock’s respondeo etsi mutabor is so

important for us to keep in view.95 But it is out of the deepest commit-

ments that I find the capacity, the depths, and the vitality for dialogical

living. This is what Panikkar does so well (and I think you are wrong, by

the way, to put him in the pluralist category of Knitter and Hick and even

Dupuis; Panikkar has gone to great lengths to make clear that this is not

what he is about, not what his project is concerned with realizing.96 But we

can discuss him further another day.)

We sang the Hallelujah Chorus today at Riverside Church in New York.

I sang ‘The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord

and of his Christ’. I believe that. This is where I start when I enter into

inter-religious dialogue, as one who has a sure conviction and certain

knowledge (in the Kierkegaardian sense) of what the end of all creation

will be. I theorize my own limits in this regard. How I have conceptualized

that end is conditioned by my own historical location and exposure. I can

conceptualize ways for others to think of the same end differently. Rosen-

zweig said that if, when the Messiah comes, he turns out to be Jesus of

Nazareth, Jews will welcome him…as the Messiah! I fully believe that

whoever the Messiah is, he will have as his own the history of Jesus of

Nazareth, even if that entails a rupture of the magnitude that allows me to

see Jesus in light of Isaiah 53. I theorize my own surprise. I expect that the

eschaton will have as little relation to what I now conceptualize it to be as

what the disciples of Jesus expected on Friday afternoon regarding Easter

Sunday to be. But this does not limit my capacity to claim Christ is the

end, it informs it.

The content of my knowledge may certainly change. I could well become

convinced that the teachings of the Buddha are indeed a better way to

realize the goal that I sing about in the Hallelujah Chorus. But I do not

pretend this is not now who I am as I enter the dialogue with Jews or

95. Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am an Impure Thinker.

96. See Raimundo Panikkar, The Intrareligious Dialogue (New York: Paulist

Press, rev. edn, 1998); and idem, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis Books, 1994).



Muslims or Africanists. And if I do someday come to the dialogue as a

committed Buddhist, it will still be as one who was first a committed Chris-

tian and found the Buddha to be a more eschatologically true fulfillment of

what I now hold. If I pretend that I do not hold these ideas—that I do not

think Christ was raised by the Spirit, is sending now the Spirit upon all

creation, and together with the Spirit is the end of all creation in glory—

then I am being false in the dialogue. False to myself and false to the other

whom I wish to take me seriously.

I do not ask the Muslim to suspend her commitments and beliefs that

God is not Three in order to have dialogue with me. Nor do I doubt the

vitality and transformative reality of the dialogue I have had with Muslims

in many different parts of the world over the years. If I meet a Muslim

who acts as if this belief that God is not Three is not ultimate for her or

him, I suspect this is a lapsed Muslim or one who has been infected by

western liberal secularism, an ideology that does not understand there is

room enough for several ultimates to exist in the same universe. And with

that person I have interesting chats (Heidegger’s ‘chatter’97) but not dia-

logue, for dialogue entails risking all that I and the partner believe. That is

why I defend it and why I respect the Muslim defending it as well!

I have participated in African voodun celebrations where others around

me were visited (and ridden) by the deified ancestors. I believe the spirits

that we encountered those evenings were lesser spirits that derive their

creative energy from the Holy Spirit, from God. I did not stop working all

evening—in myself, and in conversations later—trying to understand how

the penultimacy of such spirits relates to the ultimacy of Christ (the open-

ing hour ceremony was the key for me—the priestess had to take care of

Jesus and satisfy him before the other spirits could come and visit us).

I have worshipped with Muslims. I consider the Christ to be a servant of

all people and expect that he would want us to treat the Muslim neighbor

as we would treat Christ himself. For me, respect means honesty. And if

I say I am making room for what you believe, I will consider it (which I

honestly do when in dialogue with Muslims), but also I will confess that I

come into this conversation already committed to Jesus Christ being the

ultimate reality, the end of all creation, the eschatological One on whom

the Spirit of God rests in eternal fullness of glory, and would like you to

hear that—if I am unwilling to put that on the table from the beginning—

then I am not being honest, and I am not in dialogue. So for me the

97. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. J. Stambaugh; Albany, NY: State

University of New York, 1996).



eschatological commitment is the beginning of authentic dialogue. There

is no other place for it to take place—there is no neutral ground of reli-

gious space between us. Otherwise that is just another dialogue partner,

akin to Athanasius’ mediations between God and Logos. There is a third to

every dialogue—both Levinas and Bahktin insist on this. For Bakhtin this

third is the Super Addressee,98 for Levinas the ethical other who has

become the object of our conversation and thus is at risk of being harmed.99

Yet in neither case is this the Spirit of whom you, Amos, are speaking.

That Spirit is always already found in the depths of the formed ideas, the

words that both partners in the dialogue offer. The Word is always already

pluralized in history—that is what Athanasius is trying to get to in his

book On the Incarnation; and it is explicitly what Cryil of Jerusalem is

saying regarding the Spirit in history…

Frank, regarding your statement on fulfillment…extend this now to Juda-

ism being in the same relation to the written Torah by virtue of the Oral

Torah and Talmud as Christians are to the First Testament by virtue of the

New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures have an integrity of their own, but

both Judaism and Christianity engage this integrity differently—and both

are ultimately compelling and I think, in the end, will meet in the eschato-

logical reality that is revealed in Jesus Christ. By the way, this is close to

where Luther was going… This is another conversation—and, yes, I am

still trying to sneak in…Luther, through a back door, if I can.


Amos, my last e-mail…should be understood within the context of Christ

as witnessed to in the New Testament. There can be no self-disclosure of

God that is not taken up in the ultimate fulfillment of redemption in the

resurrected and living Christ. Now with that important qualification in mind,

let me address your problem of other canons being ‘inferior’ to Christ. This

in my mind cannot be avoided, and any attempt around it will ‘sell the

farm’, as you put it. What we are talking about is election. I love what

Barth did with election (naturally!). Barth criticized both Calvin and Armin-

ius for arriving at understandings of election that were not sufficiently

christological.100 For both Calvin and Arminius, God selects who will be

98. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York:

Routledge, 1990), pp. 38-39.

99. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader (ed. Seda Hand; Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1989), pp. 75-87.

100. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, pp. 67-70.



saved from all eternity in God’s hidden decretum absolutum (absolute

decree)—the only difference being that for Arminius this act is based on

foreknowledge. But Barth took from Calvin a significant reference to Christ

as the ‘mirror of election’. Barth took this to mean that Jesus, more specifi-

cally, God’s action through the Spirit to wed Godself to humanity in Jesus

is election. There is no eternally-hidden decretum absolutum. Election is the

incarnation (and, we could add, the reception of the Spirit at the Jordan).

What this does is shifts election from the scandal indicated in the question,

‘Why me?’ (‘Why did God chose me or the church?’) to the more signifi-

cant, ‘Why Christ?’ Why, among all of the other paths and significant

figures available, did God choose to redeem the cosmos through this first-

century Jewish prophet? Why would this Christ be the one who would be

the hope of all religions and all canons? Why would he be the criterion of

all truth and its ultimate fulfillment? This is the scandal of the Gospel. I

have learned from Barth that there is no way of getting behind this elect

act of God in Christ to answer this question. It is the assumption of the

Gospel and all those who are faithful to it are asked to bear its scandal. (I

am getting preachy here). What becomes mutually transformative is not

the person of Jesus and other canons but the New Testament witness and

the witness of the church to Jesus and other canons. As not all of the Old

Testament is taken up into the New Testament, so that there is more than a

mere promise-fulfillment relationship between them (but also a mutually-

illuminative relationship), something analogous can be said of the Chris-

tian canon and other canons…

From: Irvin 4/1/02

I was with you all the way till the end there, Frank, and I really do mean

with you. This is solid theological thinking, and I totally agree with noth-

ing being ‘hidden’ behind the cross in eternity. It is what Walter Benjamin

was criticizing with respect to historical materialism in his Theses on

History,101 the notion that historical materialism has of there being a pup-

pet master behind history, pulling the strings and reducing history to a side-

show vis-a-vis the real event which, in Barth’s case, would be the election

going on over in eternity. This point is also why I think, in the end, Rahner’s

notion that in Jesus Christ we have received God’s ultimate self-communi-

cation102 is too weak. I do not think Rahner is wrong, just that self-

101. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.),

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253-64.

102. Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969).



communication and self-giving do not seem to me to be as closely tied in

Rahner as they are in Barth.

Now, as regards other canons, I think there needs to be said still that

the First Testament has a privileged place which is not like that of other

canons. There are lateral relations with other canons—the Greek poets

Paul quotes in Acts 17 come to mind, or the Hindu Vedas that sound so

close to Genesis 1. But I would be concerned about crypto-Marcion ten-

dencies creeping in—and here I think Panikkar, in his book on Icons of

Trinity is entirely wrong and showing himself to be extraordinarily anti-

Jewish—with any attempt to move other canons into the same relationship

with the New Testament as the Old Testament has.103 Not that you are

saying this—I do not think you are at all. I just want to be sure that we

keep in view Jesus’ relation to Israel that keeps the entire Old Testament

revelatory and canonical even as we begin reading other texts as canonical

along side this one Bible…


It is difficult to keep up with you guys. The last time I sent something I

closed with ‘long live papal primacy’. The discussion has gone much

further, although the last e-mails returned to the question of interreligious

dialogue. I am struck by how the discussion has had a Protestant bent to it.

Nearly all of you want to complement sola scriptura with an appreciation

of tradition as well as openness to how revelation requires all dimensions

of ecclesial life. I agree. But it does seem that ecclesia has not been a

formative dimension of your deliberations. By ecclesia I do not just mean

hierarchy or magisterium, although they would be included. I do mean

how Christ and the Spirit are present in and, to some extent, are mediated

by the church—the latter being qualified in the sense that Christ and the

Spirit constitute the church and actualize its existence. Perhaps Schleier-

macher is right: ‘[Protestantism] makes the individual’s relation to the

church dependent on his relation to Christ, while…[Catholicism]…con-

trariwise makes the individual’s relation to Christ dependent on his rela-

tion to the church’.104 The Protestant concern is that we not try to contain

or control Christ, to lord it over him, so to speak. As Pentecostals you can

103. Raimundo Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon-

Person-Mystery (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973).

104. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (English Translation of Second

German Edition; ed. and trans. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T. & T.

Clark, 1928; reprinted Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 103.



extend this to the Spirit as well. I do not deny the danger here, but if we

cannot bracket Christ in our pneumatic imagination then we cannot bracket

church either. I suppose I am closest to Dale on this one. I do not think this

inhibits dialogue. It simply makes for a real dialogue between two com-

munities—so, yes, not just texts but communities in which the texts are

read. I need not divest myself of any of these things in order to be open. I

think we are most open when we come as ourselves and they come as

themselves in order to register difference, hear the other and perhaps find

or discover something in common. So then, what theology does one bring

to the dialogue? I actually think Dominus Iesus is very helpful. In its

implicit rebuke and correction of Dupuis,105 it rules out alternative

soteriological schemas other than what is revealed in the incarnate and

crucified Christ, e.g., a pneumatological schema separate from a chris-

tological one, or a logos asarkos schema, or a presumption that the other

religion already represents a complementary or additional salvation his-

tory. I actually think these latter schemas inhibit a true openness to the

Spirit. The Spirit might very well be present in the tradition. What is holy

and good must be recognized and acknowledged. Yet how to do this can

be discovered only in dialogue and in faith. The last element is key: in

faith. Our only posture can be in faith, that is, in humble confessional affir-

mation that God has come to us and to the world. The former alone is

entirely too subjective: Christ was offered for our sins and for those of the

whole world (1 Jn 2.1). I need to hold to the latter because that is the

extension and scope of faith, not simply the salvation of Christians but of

the entire cosmos. Otherwise where would our eschatological hope be? In

effect, I am arguing for dialogue based on no presuppositions except those

that inform Christian identity. That is where your discussion on dogma,

interpretation and revelation became so interesting. If I read you correctly,

the issue is that what we say to others already informs what we say to

ourselves. If God is acting outside of the church, then it will be consistent

with how God acts in the church. This is where Barth is very helpful with

his sense of open dogma, or dogma as witness. I am not closed to this,

except that I would invoke the concept of mystery. Dogma is infallible

only to the extent that it reveals the mystery. With that intact, the mystery

is free to open other vistas in our dialogical situations and horizons. Some

perspectives on that mystery, e.g., Arianism, are not so open, because they

105. Reference to Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Plural-

ism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997).



deny the mystery (hence, I am not as sanguine about recovering those

conversations)…

From: Irvin 4/2/02

… Okay, I for one will own the Protestant bent, at least to what I have

been saying. I think the issue resides in my uneasiness with the church

being regarded as infallible. Given my own free-church commitments to

local authority and non-hierarchical (or congregational) ecclesiology, it

becomes rather dangerous to commit to a strong belief that Christ and the

Spirit constitute the church as it now lives in history. There are just too

many forms of church life out there that I do not want to go on record

affirming as being formed by Christ and Spirit. There are places here in

New York City where folks sacrifice chickens and call what they are doing

‘church’. So, yes, it is in some ways an intellectual short-circuiting, avoid-

ing the problem of answering in what sense this activity constitutes a wit-

ness to the living Christ. On the other hand, many of us in the free church

tradition…take very seriously the notion that the gathered community is

the body of Christ constituted at this time and place. There are elements of

this ecclesiology that sit well with Orthodox understanding as well—that a

local church gathered with its bishop for eucharist constitutes the fullness

of the mystery of the church as church—that, I think, I would also affirm

(the point being for me to find a way around some Roman Catholic ways

of understanding the essential nature of the hierarchy, making it an expres-

sion of the total life of the church more than a separately-constituted

reality; and yes, I realize that the entire doctrine is more complex than this

for Roman Catholics, and that this is still a Protestant way to read Catholic

dogma). The point in the end for me is that I think the current crisis in

Roman Catholic life is the result of an unhealthy commitment to the infal-

libility of the church as church, which too easily slides into a license for

bishops to cover abuses. I much prefer the Orthodox doctrine of the ‘econ-

omy of the local bishop’ that makes room for errors, as well as pastoral

adjustments concerning decisions that need to be made and sins that need

to be dealt with. Maybe another way to ask this is what Nicaea-Constan-

tinople means when it says we believe in a church that is ‘holy’. However,

I have to be honest and say that I do not think Dominus Iesus was helpful

at all, that the attack on Dupuis was ill-conceived, and that what went on

in the events surrounding Dominus Iesus demonstrates precisely what I

think the danger is in Roman ecclesiology… Meanwhile, the Vatican does

not seem to me to understand that the unfolding scandal of priests abusing



children threatens to do much more lasting damage to the life and ministry

and witness of the church on earth. How can you find a point to leverage

that criticism from within, Ralph? I know, this has already been discussed

thoroughly in the 16th century. So let us discuss it again! Luther rules!…


It seems…that you guys have more of creeping infallibilism than Cardinal

Ratzinger and the Roman Curia. I do not refer to the infallibility of the

church as if its breadth extends beyond very precise and nuanced conditions.

Dominus Iesus and many other papal, episcopal and curial pronouncements

are not infallible. They are authoritative and must be considered seriously

by the Catholic theologian. Yet we may respectfully disagree. I happen to

agree with Dominus Iesus on Dupuis, a criticism I exercised before Domi-

nus Iesus came out. I even used his book in one of my classes. So I will

debate that point. However, there is an issue when you have a magisterium

that is not shy to exercise its authority. I would love to see reforms in the

Roman Curia. All of that can happen and should happen. I often do not

like the way they operate. Yet I also appreciate having a magisterium. I

believe in episcopal and papal authority to teach the faith and pronounce

on doctrinal matters. The problems many Catholic theologians have with

the magisterium involve when they prematurely close an open theological

question. I can appreciate that. I do not think Dominus Iesus did that. It gave

guidelines along which to think. The problem for some with a magisterium

is when it begins to teach. Yet for me the key is that theologians are in

service of the faith and therefore of the church under the pastoral charge

of the bishops. The academy does not decide for the church. The church

decides, and that includes the sensus fidelium of the laity as well. I am

content with that. So, yes, let us debate magisterial pronouncements as

well as theological opinions of the academy. Yet ultimately the church is

in the care of the Christ, the great Shepherd and the bishops who exercise

their ministry under the Word of God, not over it. So I welcome the purg-

ing of the church relative to the recent scandals. Let judgment begin at the

House of God! The Church needs reform and renewal! No question! But

that does not relativize sacramental practice (unless you are a Donatist!)

nor does it diminish dogmatic truth. Continuity with the past is not an

enemy of the future breaking in through new ways—witness John XXIII

and even John Paul II on the new millennium. The issue from this side of

the Reformation is the unity of the church and whether new confessional

approaches (the magisterial Reformers), new communities of discipleship

(the radical Reformers), renewals in piety and holiness (pietism and holi-



ness movements, and a new sign of the Spirit’s outpouring (Pentecostalism)

warrant those divisions to continue…

PS: Dealing with ecclesiasts can be a bear; just ask Mel Robeck (and the

Assemblies of God magisterium?).

From: Irvin 4/3/02

Okay, which of us has got creeping infallibilism? I want to know—come

clean!… Only I am not sure who ‘you guys’ are. I think you refer to our

earlier discussion of infallibility and the Bible, which I danced around

gingerly. I will let Frank take up that conversation some more (if indeed

he is one of the ‘guys’ to whom you are referring). I also do not want to

defend Dupuis. I liked his book, but I am not willing to go far to defend it.

I think he is a better thinker than Knitter on these matters, but both (I

understand) are pretty nice guys, and I have no real desire to fight for their

ideas. Furthermore, God forbid that I end up defending the academy over

the church as the proper place for theological teaching… My concern

about Dominus Iesus—never mind the theological issues—was the way it

was used (or ‘was written’, as I heard some respectable folks like Peter

Phan say) to force Dupuis into a corner, threatening to silence him if he

did not recant…

I am not uneasy with the exercise of ecclesiastical power in the real

world. I am uneasy with the identification of this—via its identification

with the hierarchy and thus with the essence of the church—with Christ

and Spirit. That is what I was trying to say here. Yet I am also quite will-

ing to admit that it is a more general problem that attaches itself to the free

church notion, as well, of the church being the body of Christ, and the

church being a Spirited community. Bill Burrows told me of a time a

couple of years ago at one of these evangelical-Roman Catholic dialogues

that the issue of authority was being discussed. One of the evangelicals

said, ‘you have to understand, we believe that every individual Christian is

a pope’. To which a Roman Catholic responded, ‘we Catholics have one

pope, and many of us think that is more than enough; and you want every-

one to be a pope?’

I am more comfortable with a notion that holds the church to be broken

in time, glorified in eternity. I am quite willing to acknowledge the church

eschatologically to be fully the body of Christ, filled by the Spirit. I under-

stand the nuancing that the notion of fallibility is being given, Ralph. I

wonder if we could not dispense with it altogether and find another way to

get to the same affirmations of Christ and the Spirit in the church. Perhaps

it is not possible. Maybe we are doomed to falling into one form of infalli-



bilism or another. My friends who are Marxists certainly do so when they

assert with such clarity and conviction their belief in ‘History’…

From: Yong 4/3/02

… Ralph, you are talking with at least three…Protestants, so, yes, the con-

versation has been pretty one sided so far. Yet you raise the great eccle-

siological question. From the Protestant side, insofar as we agreed in our

earlier exchanges on the notion of the living (versus dogmatic) Christ and

remembering not to divide unfairly what is better seen together, then yes,

to that extent, we want a living (versus dogmatic) ecclesia—consistency in

moving from christology to ecclesiology. But on the other side, that makes

for a very slippery christology and, of course, ecclesiology as well. Now

let me go to bat on behalf of the Catholic ecclesiology using a different

mechanism and drawing from earlier in our conversation again: if peri-

choretically Spirit and Word are distinct but interdependent, then applied

ecclesiologically, there are both pneumatic/charismatic and christic or

sacramental dimensions of the Church. In short, the Church has to be in

some ways both concrete and dynamic, both material and spiritual, both

visible and ‘invisible’, both hierarchical and democratic, etc. So far, we

have no great revelation. However, read Pentecostally’, I go back to Acts

2.42-47. What accounts here for the christic and sacramental dimension of

the Church? Surely, at least, there are the daily breaking of bread, the

concrete gathering together in homes and in the temple, and the devotion

to the apostles’ teaching. Here is where I agree in principle with the Cath-

olic magisterium as being a visible, concrete, vehicle for the teaching of

the apostles. The Orthodox notion of the collegiality of bishops may serve

a parallel or analogous function. But what about the Assemblies of God

‘magisterium’? Or what about the World Council of Churches? Or the

Lausanne meetings? Or, better, the Evangelical Theological Society!? Etc.,

etc. From a pneumatological perspective, what disqualifies these ‘magiste-

riums’ from being the visible, concrete vehicle for the teaching of the

apostles? Is it the claim for a visible, concrete succession from the first

twelve?

I am trying to draw Jamie [James K.A. Smith] into the conversation…

Jamie has been doing a lot of work and thinking about Christ as the icon of

the Father (Col. 1.15). I read a piece by Gerard Loughlin today about

image, imagination, and religious pluralism.106 He says that the Hick

106. Gerard Loughlin, ‘Image, Imagination and Religious Pluralism’ (paper pre-

sented at ‘Faith and the Religious Imagination’ theological symposium at the Faculty



proposal reduces all phenomenological claims of the religions to imagistic

distortions of the Real—so far so good. The difference is, Loughlin here

uses Tillichian and Rahnerian language that Christ is not just the image of

God but the icon and real symbol of God. Pointing to the Johannine wit-

ness, there is no need for Philip or Thomas or anyone else to look ‘beyond’

or ‘behind’ Christ in order to see God. In seeing Jesus, one sees the Father.

Now Jamie has been working on the notion of revelation occurring in and

through what we engage as the other. Let me throw this out: to the degree

that we agree that Jesus reveals the Father iconically, symbollically, imag-

istically, etc., to the same degree our ecclesiologies will fall into place, or

at least, for the sake of theological consistency, they should. If, however,

our christology also has an eschatological dimension to it, then so will our

ecclesiology. In other words, the historical Jesus reveals the Father but yet

not exhaustively. Or, if such revelation was exhaustive, then we do not

need an eschatological dimension to our christology (nor ecclesiology).

So, here is the rub: can a robust doctrine of incarnation yet avoid this

eschatological dimension? I say no, since christology and pneumatology

perichoretically intertwine, which means that even the revelation of the

glory of Jesus is mediated pneumatically (or pneumatologically) and

hence, also eschatologically. If that is the case, then our ecclesiologies are

also going to have this unfinished, eschatological character. In fact, no

revelatory icon, symbol, reality, can avoid this eschatological dimension

because no revelatory reality—including the historical Jesus, and, by exten-

sion, his living body, the Church—gives us an unmediated experience of

the Father. How is that for a Pentecostal denial of ecstatic immediacy?

of Theology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, 8–9 March 2001). My thanks

go to Barry Linney for forwarding this piece to me and to Gerard Loughlin for permis-

sion to reference it here. Note also that a revised version of this conference paper has

now been published as ‘Breezes: Religious Images in the Age of Mechanical Repro-

duction’, Louvain Studies 27 (2002), pp. 265-79.

With Frank D. Macchia, Ralph Del Colle and Dale T. Irvin, “Christ and Spirit: Dogma, Discernment and Dialogical Theology in a Religiously Plural World,” Journal of Pentecostal

Documents