It’s funny, I am sitting in the lobby of Union Theological Seminary, having come up here from Princeton Theological Seminary, reading a reflection about theological study at Yale Divinity School in the early 80′s. In it Rusty Reno talks about the joys of discovering Michael Wyschogrod in his graduate student days:
We were all the more attracted to Wyschogrod because he spoke up for the authority of revelation when the modern Protestant tradition in which most of us had been raised had gravitated to the liberal theological project. Put simply, theological liberalism tries to distill essential, timeless teachings from the historical forms of traditional teaching, thus liberating a supposedly greater and more profound religious truth from the limitations of its historical, communally authoritative formulations and allowing for a more plastic, mobile, and critical relation to church teaching…We knew the liberal theological project had to be resisted. The church’s universal mission can tempt her to deracinate her own teachings. This temptation becomes all the more powerful in the modern era when an emerging secular culture begins to compete with the church for the intellectual loyalty of educated people. Feeling torn between two masters, modern Christians seek a third and higher set of principles, a view of Christian faith that allow us to manage the difficult relations between the doctrinal truths that church teaches and modern life.
Reno describes Wyschogrod as a Jewish Barthian. He’s not the first one to do so. But what he sees in Wyschogrod’s theology that in his mind Barth lacks is carnality:
The Body of Faith read like a Barthian “No!” to liberal theology, which had its own career in nineteenth and twentieth-century Judaism. It showed us that Jewish faith is rooted not in universalizing abstractions but in the concrete reality of the seed of Abraham and the particularity of God’s commandments, what he refers to as the “carnal election” of Israel. Wyschogrod points out that the Christian notion of the Incarnation implicit in the I am that Jesus pronounces plays a role similar to the Jewish doctrine of the election of Israel. Both say that God puts all his eggs in one basket, with Jews pointing to the Jewish people and Christians pointing to the Jewish body of Jesus on the cross. Both involve a “carnal election,” or, as he puts it elsewhere, a “carnal faith”–that line of biological descent, that man hanging on the cross…Carnal election, carnal faith–the formulations arrested us. Most of us had decided to study at Yale because the program in theology participated in the Barthian “No!” to liberal Protestant theology. Yet, for all the influence Barth exerted, in retrospect I can see that we were vaguely dissatisfied with Barthian theology. His theology certainly reflected an intense and rich affirmation of that man hanging on the cross, but there was something troublingly thin about Barth’s undoubtedly impressive achievement. He once said of Schleiermacher that the great founder of modern liberal theology tried to talk about God by talking about man in a loud voice. Perhaps we were unconsciously suspicious that Barth tried to talk about God by talking about theology in a loud voice. In a word, Barth’s voice seemed to lack “carnality.”
I might want to quibble with Rusty’s assessment of Barth, but the piece made me want to go re-read Wyschogrod.