C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 72 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Last session left the stage of truth empty. This one begins the rebuild: what the culture is actually asking now, why the old apologetic answered questions no one is asking anymore, and what a Christian view of truth looks like when both mystery and revelation are given their place. Expect unusual honesty, especially when the conversation reaches the doctrine of hell, and expect a ruler, a Smithsonian metal bar, and two goldfish along the way.
The program pauses to say plainly what it is doing: theology is always developing, looking at the culture and back at Scripture, helping each generation interpret the word in its own moment, and it will not be finished until Christ returns. Truth does not change, but answers written fifty years ago can become irrelevant because they answer questions no one is asking. So although the formal apologetics course comes at the end of the program, apologetics is being done right now, and some of the culture's questions will turn out to be questions the students have quietly carried themselves.
The modernist objections were concrete and objective: what about the contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, or between the Gospels' accounts of the cross; religion was invented by man as a crutch; Jesus was a man and could not have been divine; the Bible you hold cannot be the same after two thousand years of copying; nothing should be believed that cannot be seen or scientifically tested, for certainty is the standard; evolution has disproven Christianity; Adam and Eve, the snake, and Noah's ark are myth; miracles cannot happen because natural law explains everything. Fair questions, the teachers insist, many deserving real answers, and Bibliology will take up the alleged contradictions and the transmission of the text.
The new questions are abstract, relational, and moral: if God exists, why is there evil, the question many call the key apologetic issue of the age, since letting go of either God's goodness or his control resolves it only by abandoning orthodoxy; the Inquisition and the Crusades show Christianity oppressive; Christianity may be a way but not the only way, and claiming otherwise is arrogant; how do you know your Bible is better than anyone else's scriptures; why do bad things happen to good people; what about those who have never heard; the church is full of hypocrites, an objection fed by a fundamentalism that kept its doctrines and lost its heart; and the God of the Old Testament, who commanded Canaan's destruction down to the children, seems cruel. The teachers refuse to wave these away: enter into the struggle.
Patton names the doctrine of hell as the hardest thing in Christianity for him personally, harder than suffering, above all its eternity, and hardest of all when someone you love has died without Christ. He confesses the pull of annihilationism, the view held by some prominent evangelicals that the lost are finally destroyed, and says his emotions want it to be true but he cannot find it in Scripture. What postmoderns need from the church here is one thing above all: authenticity. He tells of a man who joined the one church whose preacher wept while preaching on hell; every other pulpit had sounded almost glad. Sadness, fear, and unresolved tension are permissible, and honest, where the doctrine is this heavy, and God himself surely hates hell more than we do.
The contrast between the generations comes down to three pairs: facts against fairness, rationality against relationships, evidence against emotion. The modernist calls the postmodernist an idiot; the postmodernist calls the modernist naive; the lecture's wry verdict is that both are right. And in an aside, Patton observes that the postmodern turn resembles the relational side of the his-needs-her-needs divide, and suggests, half seriously, that women may be the church's keys to reaching postmoderns.
Modernism held a correspondence view of truth: truth is an objective reality whether anyone believes it or not, and statements are true insofar as they correspond to that reality, which modernism grounded in nature. The tree falling in the empty forest makes a sound, because sound waves do not wait for hearers. The law of non-contradiction governs: A cannot equal non-A at the same time in the same relationship, so God cannot both exist and not exist, and Allah and Yahweh cannot both be God in the same sense. The motto: man can and will know all truth. Yet even modernism's own standards wobbled, as Dyke's tale of the standard inch shows: the exact metal bar, kept at an exact temperature, proved inexact under better instruments, until the meter was redefined by a reproducible wavelength. Even the exact inch was never exact.
Postmodernism holds a relative view: truth is the perspective of a group or an individual, grounded not above time but in time. There is no metanarrative, no overarching story such as the Bible's that everyone must live by. In profession, the law of non-contradiction no longer applies: Allah and Yahweh can both be God, God can exist and not exist. The motto: truth cannot be known. The teachers add the caveat that few people live their professed system consistently; no one drives home on whichever side of the road he chooses.
If the sins of the culture become the sins of the church, so do its epistemologies. Universalism, the hope that all will finally be saved, spreads at the popular level partly because hell has simply stopped being taught. Pluralism holds that many ways lead to the one God. Syncretism blends systems, grace from here, tolerance from there, liturgy from somewhere else, down to the Catholic Buddhist church Patton has heard of. Most influential of all is inclusivism: salvation only through Christ's blood, but that blood covering some who never heard, those who follow the light they have; the lecture points to the Second Vatican Council's teaching that those who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel yet sincerely seek God may attain salvation. The inclusivist presses hard questions at the exclusivist, about infants who die, the mentally unable, the saints of the Old Testament, Melchizedek; the traditional Christian position, exclusivism, answers from Romans 10 that they cannot call on him of whom they have never heard. All of it is tabled, deliberately, for the Soteriology course.
The Christian holds a correspondence view of truth with a different ground: truth is an objective reality that exists whether anyone believes it or not, and that reality is grounded in the eternal God. He is the inch and the meter, the standard all things must measure up to. The law of non-contradiction stands, grounded not in nature but in God's own rationality, a communicable attribute we have inherited; God himself cannot violate it, any more than he can lie, act unrighteously, or deny himself. That is why the fathers at Nicaea chose their words so carefully: one God in three gods would be contradiction, one God in three persons is paradox and mystery, and mystery is not contradiction.
The key motto of Christian epistemology is Deuteronomy 29:29: the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever. The lecture's point is where the emphasis falls: not on the secret things, which we sometimes quote and stop, but after the but. There are secrets, and Isaiah's word stands that God's ways are above ours; yet God has gone to great trouble to reveal much, and the revealed things are given to be kept and carried out. Christian truth holds mystery and revelation in balance.
Church history names the two emphases. Apophatic theology, the way of negation favored in the Christian East, stresses the mystery of God, defining him by what he is not, immutable, uncreated, and warns that God is beyond our positive assertions. Cataphatic theology, dominant in the West, Catholic and Protestant alike, makes positive affirmations, all-powerful, omniscient, trusting that God communicates in language and concepts truly analogous to what he is. Postmoderns lean apophatic, moderns cataphatic. Responsible theology, the lecture argues, begins cataphatically with what God has revealed and moves to mystery only where revelation gives out, as with the Trinity, rather than starting in mystery because mystery is comfortable.
The closing method: begin with a soft skepticism, the closed gates that demand good reason before opening, the discernment Proverbs urges on the naive, never the hard skepticism that says nothing can be known. Move through perspectivism, because the way of a fool is right in his own eyes but the one who listens to counsel is wise: like the daughter who counted two goldfish from her side of the bowl, each of us sees truly but partially, and the counsel of the community corrects and completes. And end at objective truth, which Scripture commands us to buy and never sell. The whole path is guided by the perspicuity of Scripture, Luther's point that a great many things are so clear that no debate is needed, and its goal is direction toward the truth rather than the total certainty modernism demanded.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why can theology never simply be finished, according to the opening of the lecture?
2. What kind of questions characterized the modernist objections to Christianity?
3. Why does the lecture say the problem of evil is so hard to resolve cheaply?
4. What does Patton confess about the doctrine of hell?
5. Why did the man in the story join the church where the preacher wept over hell?
6. Which three pairs sum up the difference between the modern and postmodern minds?
7. In the modern correspondence view, where is objective truth grounded?
8. What is the point of the story about the standard inch at the Smithsonian?
9. What does postmodernism mean by denying any metanarrative?
10. What is inclusivism, the view the lecture says has influenced the church most?
11. Where does the Christian correspondence view ground objective truth?
12. Why is the Trinity a mystery rather than a contradiction?
13. Where does the emphasis fall in Deuteronomy 29:29, on the lecture's reading?
14. How should responsible theology relate cataphatic and apophatic approaches?
15. What is the three-step method with which the session closes?
16. What did the goldfish story illustrate?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 5 is complete.
Which of the postmodern questions on the lecture's list, evil, exclusivity, hypocrisy, the unreached, hell, presses hardest on you or on someone you love, and what would an authentic answer, tension included, sound like from you?
The lecture says the church loses its witness when it professes black-and-white certainty about things it has not actually resolved. Where are you tempted to sound more certain than you are, and where, on the other hand, is Scripture so clear that hesitation would be false humility?
Walk through the method with a live question you carry: what would soft skepticism, then the counsel of other perspectives, then the pursuit of objective truth actually look like for it?
The motto of Deuteronomy 29:29 as the lecture reads it: the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, and the weight of the verse falls on what God has revealed.
The lecture's own signposts for the road ahead: the alleged contradictions and the transmission of the text belong to Bibliology and Hermeneutics, and the fate of those who never heard, along with hell and the inclusivist challenge, is tabled for Soteriology and for Ecclesiology and Eschatology, so carry the questions forward rather than forcing quick answers now. The course turns next to the essentials of theology: what must be believed.