Faith in God means the union of commitment and criticism. Commitment recognizes the vast difference between God and human beings in which no boasting is appropriate. As a result every idea, thought, deed, and institution is subject to correction.
Countless theologians have discussed this theme. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, articulated one of the most distinctive features of Christian faith: the impossibility of completely understanding the mystery of God. He wrote, "Yet the ancient complaint that man cannot comprehend what is from the Spirit of God is never taken away" (p. 242). Christian faith does not re move human limitations. From this recognition Schleiermacher drew the implication that Christian faith, therefore, is "through and through polemical." This implication also includes the further thought that "it turns at last its polemical power against itself (p. 244).
A half century earlier, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, living amid an orthodoxy certain of its divine authorization, put the theme this way: "If God held all truth in His right hand and in His left the everlasting striving after truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, 'Choose,' with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, 'Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for Thee alone' " (Eine Duplik, Lachmann—Muncker, xiii, pp. 23, 24).
In Christian faith, commitment and criticism are united. It is an unusual union. It is strange to think of a commitment that, if one is to be true to it, calls for the most rigorous criticism even of our understanding of this commitment.
Commitment and criticism seem in compatible. The stronger one's commitment, the less susceptible it would seem to be to criticism; and on the other hand the more critical one is, the harder it would seem to be to hold a firm commitment.
But when the church overemphasizes commitment, it confers upon its own organizations and expressions or on other organizations and expressions the authority that belongs to God alone. During the ascendancy of Hitler the church did not distinguish itself. To be sure, there were some remarkable and heroic statements of opposition, but one is baffled and depressed by the number of theologians who hailed the advent of the Third Reich as an act of God. It is a complex riddle, but one observation is universally applicable. Every theologian who wrote theologically in support of the Third Reich abandoned the critical principle. Commitment in this case, they argued, requires that we set aside criticism.
It is the responsibility of the church to hold these two together in a creative tension that it might receive the strengths of both commitment and criticism. In pro posing this, I do not intend to praise criticism even if we acknowledge that criticism is not always negative. Rather, I urge the full use of the critical intelligence to help bring greater clarity to the meaning of Christian faith and its existential implications.
The proclamation and living of that faith is the purpose of the church. There fore, this union of commitment and criticism is necessary if the church is to remain relevant to today's world. —Rex D. Edwards.
