Many a year ago, when I was a young Baptist pastor in my first church, from the very start I read widely. The Principal of our Baptist College urged us to occasionally read books with which we fully expected to disagree – and to do so prepared to change our minds by allowing the evidence and argument to be heard, therefore reading each book fairly and intelligently.
By fair and intelligent he meant be aware of your own presuppositions and prejudices, be open to new information, and allow the same weight to the strong points of the argument as you do to perceived weaknesses. By the time I was in R E O White's classes I had already completed a degree majoring in Moral Philosophy and Comparative Religion. Those years at University and College levered open the mind's doors and windows which can easily be locked from the inside by prejudice, intellectual insecurity, spiritual timidity and assumed theological correctness.
I still have a note of the books I read over those first decades of ministry. I followed a programme which I never departed from except for my later years in theological education when reading and writing were necessarily focused on subject areas I taught. Briefly I planned a year's reading around 10 key areas of knowledge and ensured I read one or two of the more important books in these areas. And yes, some of these were books with which I had fully expected to disagree.
Amongst the books I read, and have since re-read, and am currently more than half way through for the third time is The Question of God. Protestant Theology in the Twentieth Century, by Heinz Zahrnt. Why read it 45 years later? Why even hang on to a book that was summarising contemporary theology that is no longer contemporary? I blame R E O White!
- Along with John McQuarrie's Twentieth Century Religious Thought, this book excels as a critical and appreciative introduction to the giants of those days – Barth, Brunner, Gollwitzer, Bonhoeffer, Heidegger, Thielicke, Bultmann, Tillich. Zahrnt was writing as their near contemporary, and as a theologian soaked in the theology of the times.
- The writing is lucid, and engaged sympathetically and fairly with the various figures whose thought is examined, explained and placed against the cultural and intellectual backgrounds out of which people like Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillic wrote.
- The index is superb. Most key subjects can be traced and chased throughout the volume using an index that is full enough without being guilty of the modern sins of either no index, or one that software compiles indiscriminately. This is an index intended to direct the reader to the significant mentions of the subject throughout. A well constructed index beats Google every time, because it doesn't make the searcher's decisions for them!
- The book is an intellectual history that traces the last 150 years of European theological thought from Schleiermacher and Harnack, through Barth and on into the beginnings of secular Christianity, and theological upheaval in the 1960's and early 70's. Zahrnt is like a commentator and reporter right in the mix of theological events as they happen. The result is reportage of enduring value as we have moved from modernity to post modernity and whatever else we name this other side of modernity now well into the 21st Century.
- There is much within this book with which I disagree. This isn't safe theology from my favourite restaurant that is always to my taste. I have come to Barth late in my life, and still with many questions and at times inner dissent. Bonhoeffer I admire and have learned from repeatedly and deeply. Bultmann's great project of demythologisation was a storm centre throughout mid to late 20th Century New Testament scholarship. I never bought into Bultmann's approach, but I know of no more critically appreciative account of what Bultmann aimed to achieve than Zahrnt's relatively brief but sympathetic and corrective explanations of Bultmann's methodology and motivation as a man of profound faith and evangelical loyalty to the gospel of Jesus as he understood it.
- All of this, and much more, makes Zahrnt's volume well worth paying the time for another guided tour through a period of theology that, if it is now consigned to a museum, it's a museum of contemporary theologians whose influential reach continues to challenge, influence and question our own contemporary attempts at theo-logos, God-talk.