Edwards proclaims the ‘Cruciality of Christology’
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman Online, May 18, 2001
DUBUQUE, IA – Jesus Christ has become the chief stumbling block in post-modern religious discussions, a conference of church leaders at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary was told last night.
“We have been witnessing an explosion of experimental theologies that are committed to freedom, personal fulfillment and self affirmation,” said James Edwards, professor of religion and philosopy at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash. He also observed, however, that “we are seeing a powerful resurgence of those who are committed to Scripture and the great Reformed Confessions.”
There can be no negotiation between these positions, Edwards said, because their starting points are incompatible.
A seismic shift
Edwards identified postmodern theology as constituting a seismic shift from “Christocentric” theology to “theocentric” theology. When the Jesus Christ whom we know in Scripture is removed from the center of one’s theology, he said, the result is a radically different religion, the re-emergence of an ancient heresy called Marcionism.
Today’s in-vogue theocentric theology shifts the focus from transcendence to immanence, from transformation to affirmation, from conversion to one’s insistence on “being who I am.” Having removed Christ the Redeemer from center stage, he said, theocentrists find their god in nature and in a self who neither desires nor is capable of change.
‘Natural religion’
Edwards traced modern liberalism’s drift into theocentrism from its roots in the “natural religion of the Enlightenment.” Today’s clearest expression of this point of view, he said, can be found in the ideologies of gay, lesbian, transgendered and radically feminist activists, whose message is that of immanence.
“Theirs is the affirmation of the natural self,” he said. “They say, ‘We know of no time when we were not the way we are now, so this is our natural state.’ They say God made them this way and, therefore, they cannot be different.”
The flaw in this kind of thinking, Edwards said, lies in its failure to take into account the doctrine of original sin. Dismissing various attempts to explain the origins of abnormal behavior, he said, “We do not know why the world is as it is, why things are as they appear to be … but the assumption that God intended things to be this way is false. No one was born with a perfect genetic code. But the glory of the gospel is that we are neither judged nor saved on the basis of what we bring into this world. The final word is not what we are, but what we can become in Jesus Christ.”
God’s final word, Edwards said, is that there is a new order of being made possible by Jesus Christ.
“Pitting a theology of creation against a theology of redemption unleashes the Marcionite heresy again,” he said. “In Christ, all things were created. At the very heart of creation is Jesus Christ, not a mere divine attribute, but the divine Person, and only this God who created us has the power to redeem us.”
Barmen got it right
Edwards said the liberalism that has infected “mainline” churches constitutes a repeat of earlier heresies that tried to replace Christology with mere theology. This was the mistake of the German Evangelical Church during the reign of Hitler, he said. The so-called German Christians effectively removed Jesus Christ from their theology, replacing him with an emphasis on “naturalism.” This worship of the creature over the Creator was used by the Third Reich to baptize policies based on “race, blood and soil.”
The theologians at Barmen saw this heresy clearly, Edwards said, and they named it in the first paragraph of the Barmen Declaration. Quoting Princeton theologian Ulrich Mauser, Edwards said the first article of the Barmen Declaration is as necessary for our time as it was for the German church in the 1930s. Barmen got it right, Edwards declared. Truthful theology begins and ends with this affirmation: “Jesus Christ is the only revelation of God.”
James Edwards was the keynote speaker at a Word and Spirit conference sponsored by InterVarsity Press, Reformation and Revival Ministries, the University of Dubuque Campus Ministry and the Presbyterian Lay Committee.