Neo-Orthodoxy (2 of 4 notes)

Part One
INTRODUCTION: 5 CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY
A DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY
By Charles F Baker

Neo-orthodoxy, along with Bultmannianism, accepts the findings of the liberal, destructive critics, as far as the Bible is concerned. Ryrie quotes Brunner, a neoorthodox Swiss theologian, “Orthodoxy has become impossible for anyone who knows anything of science. This I would call fortunate.’’⁶ Ryrie also quotes from Hendry, The Rediscovery of the Bible, p. 144, to show that Neo-orthodoxy thinks it can combine the views of both liberalism and orthodoxy into a synthetic system of a new-orthodoxy:

If there is anything to which the name of ‘rediscovery’ may be applied, it is surely to this view of the Bible (which is but the Bible’s view itself) as a witness to the Word of God. It liberates us from the false antithesis which had been set up by ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘liberalism,’ through each concentrating its attention on one aspect of the Bible, to the detriment of the other, and enables us to see it in both its aspects, without detriment to either.⁷

Note the dialectic: Orthodoxy, the thesis; Liberalism, the antithesis; and Neoorthodoxy, the Synthesis.

6            Charles Ryrie, Neo-orthodoxy, What It Is and What It Does (Chicago: Moody Press, 1956), p. 45.

7            Ibid., p. 46.

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