In what ways did Dorner and Bushnell try to find a theological middle ground between theories of God’s accessibility and inaccessibility? Base your answer on the textbook readings, lecture videos, and any other relevant sources that might aid class discussion.
Response
Modernism brought the doctrine of God back to life after lying dormant for centuries under the influence of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Schleiermacher appears to have adopted a classical view of God’s robust immutability, actus purus, pure actuality with no potentiality. In other words, God cannot change, become, or evolve in any way. Alternatively, Hegel takes the opposite approach. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is constantly evolving and changing; God and the world live in an interdependent panentheistic reality. Mediating theologians, such as Isaak Dorner and Horace Bushnell, see value in both orthodox Christianity and the views of Modernism. Dorner sees value in Schleiermacher’s immutable God and Hegel’s mutable God but believes that both miss the mark. For Dorner, Schleiermacher’s God is unaffected by the world, and thus relegated to an unrelatable, static God. Alternatively, Hegel’s God is hyper-accessible to the point where God and the world are practically indistinguishable, thus limiting God’s ethical freedom to choose and love.
Dorner built his mediating theology of God upon two axioms. First, not only does God have the attribute of love, but the very essence of God is love, and if God’s essence is love, then He must be relatable and accessible to humanity. In other words, God’s love is not just a descriptor or an attribute, but an ethical substance. Second, if God’s relatability is real, then He must in some way be affected by the relationship without diminishing His perfection. In other words, God’s love must not be required, but ethically free. Thus, according to Robert Williams, since Dorner’s God is both an ethical substance (immutable) and ethically free (mutable), He can “enter into reciprocal relation with the world without loss or diminution of being.”[1] In sum, Dorner’s God is both an immutable other whose very essence is love and a highly accessible mutable being who freely extends His relational love to the world.
God in Christ
Like Dorner, another mediating theologian, Horace Bushnell, attempts to find value in both Protestant orthodoxy and Modernism. Whereas Dorner focused on God’s immutability, Bushnell attempts to synthesize rationalism with experience by finding value in both. Bushnell opposed conservative positions that emphasized propositional truth over Christian experience, and simultaneously, opposed liberal positions that undermined the supernatural by reducing God to a force of nature or mental state. Bushnell’s progressive orthodoxy did not avoid doctrine, but made propositional truth the slave to spiritual experience. Regarding Christian dogmatism and propositional truth, Bushnell states, “Language, under the laws of logic or speculation, does not seem to be adequate to any such use or purpose.”[2] Bushnell was not suggesting that truth did not exist, but that the appropriation of God’s truth occurred through metaphor, images, poetry, paradoxes, and the imagination in ways that were inaccessible to language of reason. In sum, God is not accessible primarily through propositional truth via reason, but by experiencing communion with the Divine via the imagination.
The payoff of Bushnell’s theology is its ability to reconcile opposing views. For Bushnell, the age-old debate between predestination and free will may never be adequately resolved through the language of reason, but through metaphor and paradox, both concepts may be held concurrently. Similarly, apparent contradictions in Scripture, competing theories of atonement, and the nature versus supernatural debate may resolve using Bushnell’s progressive orthodoxy. Ultimately, Bushnell’s God is accessible through the life-giving metaphors of God’s revealed truths in all its paradoxes and apparent contradictions, which transcend the rational and are made manifest through experience.
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[1] Robert R. Williams, “I. A. Dorner: Ethical Immutability of God,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 735.
[2] Horace Bushnell, God in Christ: Three Discourses Delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1876), 914, Kindle.
Bibliography
- Bushnell, Horace. God in Christ: Three Discourses Delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1876. Kindle.
- Williams, Robert R. “I. A. Dorner: Ethical Immutability of God.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 721–38.
