Book Review of Jaap Durand: Dead-end Streets of Faith 2006

koot van wyk Seoul South Korea 14 January 2008

There is a tendency in Adventism to call for socalled sympathy for post-modernism as there were those who called for sympathy for modernism. This phenomenon is not unique in Adventism alone. The phenomenon has shown up in the Reformed Tradition in South Africa by a group of scholars and teachers who tried to initiate what they termed: the New Reformation. Prof. Jaap Durand was a lecturer for years at the Calvinistic Theological Seminary in Stellenbosch University. Durand takes a critical look at Modernism and Post-Modernism. He feels they interface actually. We know that Modernism continued until about 1980 when Post-Modernism tried to squash the appeal of Modernism for universal normativism with a Post-Modernistic call for relativity. Durand discusses all this in his book mentioned below. The title of his book indicates that he thinks it is all a Dead-end Street Theology. Adventism thinks similar to Durand in this regard.

Van Wyk emphasizes the old controversy since the Fall of Man between hermeneutics of suspicion and hermeneutics of affirmation. Modernism and Post-Modernistic phenomena are just natural fruits of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Affirmation can only be the Living Word of God, the consonantal text of the Masoretic Tradition and the Greek New Testament. It can only be normative and particularistically only embodied in the Sola Scriptura.

Source: Auke Compaan, "Die 'Nuwe Hervorming': Voorwaarts na die verlede!" Tuisblad (2007-02 -15) online. English translation of the article: "The 'New Reformation': Forward to the Past!" (2007-02-15).

J. Durand, Doodloopstrate van die Geloof (Stellenbosch: African SUN media, 2006).

Dead-end streets of Faith 2006

1. Jaap Durand considers in this new book, the doubt of people inside and outside the Reformed Tradition, to answer satisfactory the suspicion questions raised by modern man.

2. Durand focusses on this criticism, these questions, but also the critiqueless presuppositions of the critics.

3. Pastors, and churchleaders seems to run to large mega-churches in the US and try to import in a pragmatic manner programs that are considered successful.

4. These importers focus on light liturgical experimentation.

5. Durand's book help the intellectual Christian to understand the criticism and changes that are happening in a broader modern and post-modern frame.

The book is inductive and creative

1. Durand does not choose one or two dogmas to talk to his audience.

2. He does not use a downward approach but construct the criticism from two sources:

(i) the popular, intellectual reaction on the distintegration of fixed and known theological perspectives among Afrikaans people that was carried out in the book "Die omstrede God".

1. Die omstrede God, questions main doctrines of Christian faith but also try to make them rediculous.

2. He focusses on the New Reformation that is led by a group of theologians and Biblical scientists.

3. One group is young with intuitive criticism, emotional, unbalanced, fragmentized, repetative, downtalking, superficial.

4. The other group are older, more theological and their criticism is well thought through, systematized and argued theologically.

(ii) Durand connects these two groups and both groups are influenced by the understanding horizon of modernism as well as a closed worldview.

Both groups are argueing against the historical revelation of God in Christ, the idea of a personal God and with it together also the soteriology and Christology.

Durand questions whether this name "new Reformation" is valid to use for such views.

He also wonders if they can provide new hope and a home for those who are spiritually foreign and disappointed int he church. His conclusion is negative.

Rise of the "closed" world view

To explain his point of view, Durand explained the history of modernism and the socalled post-modernism in a simple way.

Already the problem started in the late-Middle Ages with the separation between nature and grace, between the natural and the supernatural, between reason and faith. The problem continued with the rise of the neo-scientific ideal at Oxford in the 16th century that continued into the Enlightment ideal of the 18th century. Reason was made the only source of truth. [van wyk adds] Especially since 1740 at Halle University in Germany this process was well under way pushing Pietism to the borders.

The 19th century was only a fuller completion of what was begun already earlier according to Durand. Scientific method and understanding apparatus were promoted as the only criteria to truth. The understanding horizon of modernism is based upon a closed worldview and a scientific rationality. It is closed because it does not allow room for any form of transcendental concept.

Rejection of modernism

In his analysis of the New Reformation [a movement in South African Reformed Tradition the past 8 years] Durand pointed out that the movement accepted the results of modernism fully and they are operating with a closed worldview (Durand 2006: 34).

What is against the scientific world is unacceptable for the New Reformation Movement members. It cannot be a building block for religion and spirituality. Doctrines like the virgin birth, the historical Jesus, the resurrection etc, is simply untrue and the Biblical message must be reinterpreted for the modern world (Durand 2006: 39-46).

Durand could see in his research that the members of the New Reformation Movement did not want to see themselves as modernists.

The modern worldview has a dark side that they strongly reject. The rationality of modernism makes claims on universal values, that means, that the scientific worldview of modern man should be valid for people of all times. With this swing of the modern worldview, the members of the New Reformation Movement wants to break. They replace this universalism principle with a relativism principle that is a signal that leads post-modernism (Durand 2006: 39-45).

The members of the New Reformation feel that it must be accepted that truth is relative to social-cultural systems and that what is accepted in one system as reality is not reality in another system and is not valid either for other systems. Contingency, particularism, discontinuity and diversity is for these New Reformers important and it cannot be erased by rationalistic insistance towards universality. Thus, these socalled New Reformers.

The conditionality of knowledge and the difference between cultures and people must be celebrated as a source of cultural creativity and a larger freedom of choice, or selection options.

New Reformation Modernism and Post-Modernism

The question is how the members of the New Reformation bring the successes of the modern scietific worldview and the relativity of post-modernism together?

Is this possible? Durand aswers in the negative. He indicates a fundamental inconsistency in the thinking of the New Reformation members that, ironically enough, they cannot stand the test their own test on rationality. The New Reformers do not want to be known as modernistic but refuse to take the relativity of the post-modernists to its fullest extend when they consider the Biblical wordview. Modernism reappears after they have rejected it.

Closedness of the post-modernists

One of the strong contributions of Durand in this book, is the concept post-modernism that is used these days by pastors and practical theologians as a "fashion word". It is fashion to use the word to indicate changing tendencies within a church and to explain reactions on it as well as to justify it.

Durand indicates that the insistence by New Reformers to emphasize the post-modern points of departure, does not break free totally from Modernism. Why not? Since Post-Modernism is just a critical reaction on the dissappointed ideals of Modernism. According to Durand, Post- Modernism was already given in Modernism (Durand 2006: 74).

Post-Modernism and Modernism are not following chronologically, but is an inherent tension in western thought that is brought to the light by Modernism.

Post-Modernism cannot deny Modernism which was its source of origin. The two movements are historically connected within the same ground motif, namely, the human desire to control, on one side, and his desire to freedom, on the other.

The reaction of the Post-Modernists against the Modernists is according to Durand against the arrogance and exceptional declarations about universal normativity. It is not against the basic closeness of the worldview.

That is why the deconstruction paradygm of Jacques Derrida, that represents the strongest critical reaction against Modernism, is for Durand also not able to loosen itself from the closed, transcendentalless worldview of modernism (Durand 2006: 73).

Image of God of the New Reformers

Durand feels that the New Reformers choose deliberately a transcendentalless worldview, but they also refuse to pull the consequences of such a choice through, namely, that God created the world and left it to its own destiny.

In their insistence on post-modernism, it is rather seeking a new spirituality for post- modern people. In line with the post-war thought patterns in Europe with the rise of existential philosophy, their answer is that if modern man cannot find the answers to the sense of life outside themselves, then they should find it somewhere in themselves.

Durand indicates that the New Reformers chose a panetheistic view of God (God is all in all and all in all is in God) (Durand 2006: 78-79). It borders to pantheism (God and the created world is one and the same), which means that in their thinking there is no room for any form of transcendental.

According to the New Reformers, people who are operating within a modern worldview, and who wants to be serious with spirituality, have no choice than to leave the church with its worship of a transcendental God and seek rather a religious self-fullfilment in mystical unity with world-immanent deep dimensions that they call an unpersonal "mysterious life".

Back at gnosticism

The question is, how this spirituality looks that the New Reformers are clinging to. Durand found that the rationalism and intelectualism that was part of gnosticism and certain traditions of mysticism, througout many ages, is back in their thinking (Durand 2006: 79). According to the finding of Durand, the New Reformers are ending at a very ackward point, namely in their quest for a new form of spirituatlity for post-modern people, it was gnosticism that appeared already in New Testament times and was part of the pre-modern worldview of that time.

Durand then continues to show the controversy in the early church and the continued struggle to get rid of elements of Greek philosophy and Greek worldview that can be found in the early church. He emphasizes that the early church for a period of 2000 years was not able to escape the characteristic intellectualism of the Greek heritage in the west (Durand 2006: 82-93).

This worldview reached its height of developement in the Enlightenment Period and went over in a closed worldview and positivistic scientific method (with only experience as the basis of knowledge) and the New Reformers could not escape this trend.

The New Reformation is then according to Durand a Dead-endstreet Theology in two ways for people who contemplate God currently. It does not provide a home for confused intellectuals, that understood themselves as atheists, who is not at all interested to seek for a inner immanent spirituality in which you should be busy through meditation only in yourself.

In a second way it is also futile since it is a rationalistic dead-endstreet which was already from the first centuries of the church unmasked as unacceptable.

Durand feels that the church should not run away from the responsibility to lead people to the difficult path of Scripture to understand subjects like homosexuality, evolution, and other issues like gender issues.

Whereas Durand's view of the Word of God is more of an Encounter Theology view, not wordinspiration but thoughtinspiration, SDA concept of Inspiration includes both words and thought. That does not make word perfect in themselves but efficient, perfect communicators of the thoughts meant by the Holy Spirit to convey His messages. In a way, SDA's would not agree with his emphasis of Scripture as not the Living Word of God per se, [a notion that Adventists do not agree with him]. Gerhard Hasel's book is Understanding the Living Word of God. Although Durand and Hasel belong to the same side on nearly 95% of the issues, it will be Durand's Scripture concepts that will seperate the two. Durand's notion that the Reformers did not identify the Scripture with the Living Word of God, is church-historically not correct. They died for it because it was the Living Word of God. They were willing to die for their conviction not separated from the Scripture which was the source of their convictions.

Responsible cosmology

Theology will keep considering the claims of science in astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology and archaeology.

Van Wyk notes that Adventists realize that epistemology determines one's methodology and that includes descriptions of scientific data. Whether descriptions of phenomena or data should be identified with reality of the claim, is a situation that Adventists have carefully distinguished. There are also fables in science especially at the close borders between the known and the unknown. The telescope has a limited range. The microscope has a limited range as well. Human understanding has a limited range. Visual zones have limitations as well as what the ears can hear. The fact that a thousand or millions of limited eyes and limited ears conlude that they see the same, does not make it a reality per se, especially when it comes to borderline issues between the known and the unknown.

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