- Subjectivity and objectivity: The subjective nature of scientific knowledge is increasingly being recognised. Scientific methodology is based on assumptions that cannot be examined scientifically, reflects the perspective of the observer in experiment and observation and utilises metaphor and worldview in creating hypotheses. The divide between subjective and objective and between scientific and faith knowledge is increasingly redundant, with all knowledge beginning to be understood as involving both subjectivity and objectivity. Historical-criticism, therefore, can no longer be credibly viewed as objective while the assumptions that Bultmann and many New Testament scholars have made about the Early Church and the gospels are now open to question in a way that was not previously the case. As a result, scholars and theologians are increasingly working again with the whole received text of the Bible as opposed to a sole concentration on pericopes.
- Metaphor and history: Bultmann’s view that myth equates to human imagery of the divine and must be interpreted to be acceptable to contemporary culture screens out knowledge. No longer is metaphor viewed as a pretty husk that can be discarded or interpreted, increasingly it is being recognised as a vital component in knowledge. In deconstructing to the nth degree, scientific methodology has been reductionist and has often lost from its reconstructions the subtlety and nuances of the metaphors and myths being deconstructed or interpreted. The combination of history and metaphor in the Bible, Christian doctrine and Church tradition can again be valued equally while there is now also awareness of the different ways in which both need to be handled in order to be understood. There is also an additional challenge to that of understanding the resonances of these original metaphors. That is, of creating contemporary metaphors or metaphor systems that communicate and resonate in the same way that the original metaphors did within their culture.
- Worldview and knowledge: Worldviews are increasingly seen as the lens through which human beings view the world. As such, they are fundamental to human knowing. God’s self-revelation in history cannot be understood without understanding the worldviews within which God chose his self-revelation to occur. Nor can we truly know without an understanding of the worldview through which we view the forms and content of God’s self-revelation. However, worldviews are in dialogue with each other both within contemporary culture and throughout time and pose challenges to each other. For example, Lesslie Newbigin has argued that: “The community of faith makes the confession that God raised Jesus from the dead and that the tomb was empty thereafter … [and that this] statement … can be accepted as a fact only if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called into question”. Newbigin suggests that such “conflict between the two views will not be settled on the basis of logical argument [but on the basis of] [t]he view … that is seen to offer … the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience”. It is this witness that is required of the Church within contemporary culture, not the acceptance of a contemporary worldview that underpins Bultmann’s demythologization programme.
- Dialectical theology: For Bultmann and Karl Barth dialectical theology was about the gap between God and human beings. However, for a contemporary Old Testament scholar such as Walter Bruggemann, dialectical theology has become about traditions held together in tension. This can be understood as symptomatic of scriptures that are both human and divine – as containing both, at the same time, human understanding of God and God’s partial self-revelation. Both then being in conversation, in tension and in relation with the other. Within this understanding there is no need to screen out the dialogue with history and science in the way that Bultmann attempts through demythologization because the essence of scripture is relation. However, this does not mean that both human understanding and divine revelation co-exists without challenge. The counter-testimony of the Old Testament is eloquent witness to the way in which God encourages and engages in debate with human beings while revelation, by its holistic nature, challenges the partialities and limitations of human understandings of God and of being.
- Whole and part: When the Bible is viewed as a whole and the form of this whole considered, it appears a very different document from that presented through form-criticism and demythologization. It can be seen as both a document formed through human historical, literary, sociological and theological processes and as the inspired, partial self-revelation of God. Seen as the former, it can be critiqued as can any human document. Seen as the latter it can be understood as normative, but normative in ways that respect its form. Its form can be understood from two perspectives. First, as a story moving through five acts – Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and Church and second, as a series of fragments held in relation one to the other. The former provides a participatory fifth act in which we, the Church, continue the story within the parameters set by the previous four acts and at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. The latter is indicative of the style or language in which God self-reveals. A language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. A language or style reveling in unities within diversity, revealing connection and pattern as much through the gaps between stories, genres, metaphors and what is not said (thereby maintaining God’s otherness), as by what is actually said.
Ultimately, where Bultmann emphasises individual encounter with God only within the immediate present, these approaches envisage relation – within God, between God and human beings, between the varying voices and stories within Scripture, within the Church throughout the ages, between worldviews within time and history, and within the interpretive community. Foundational to these approaches is the idea of God in relation within himself as Trinity, the ‘ideas of ideas’ from which the transcendentals identified by Colin Gunton – relationality, substantiality and perichoresis – derive to underpin all pattern and connection within the created order. Jesus’ death and resurrection reverses separation of human beings from God, from each other and from the created order and sets up a new community able to begin exploring within the unfinished fifth act, the style and substance of the pattern and harmony that God originally set within the world in creation. As Jesus said and as the Early Church demonstrated such love is the true and effective testimony to the reality of the encounter with God.
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