“Dogmatics lies at the periphery of modern Anglo-American Protestant divinity, and I am acutely aware both that what many of my contemporaries regard as self-evident I find to be puzzling or unpersuasive and that matters which I regard as self-evident make many of my contemporaries feel bewildered. I console myself with the fact that I can find good company in some of my forbears. In 1935, Günther Dehn, who two years previously had been ejected from his chair in Practical Theology in Halle, gave a rather startling set of Dale lectures in Oxford under the title Man and Revelation. His hearers were certainly startled: in his preface to the published version, Dehn remembers the gentle head-shaking of the audience, and goes on to say:
I have endeavored to deal with certain questions of Christian thought and life, not as a free scholar but as a theologian bound to the Church. This must seem strange to those who are told that theology is to be ranked among the branches of general knowledge, and that its problems can be treated in the same manner as those in other branches of spiritual knowledge, i.e. in accordance with the cultural consciousness of the age. The theologian most assuredly participates in the cultural consciousness of his time, but for his work this has none but formal significance. Theology is not promoted by culture but by the belief in God’s revelation as an event beyond all human history, to which Scripture bears witness and which finds confirmation in the Confessions of our Church. Only a theology that clings inexorably to these most essential presuppositions can help build up a Church that really stands unshaken amidst all the attacks of the spirit of the age. And such a Church alone will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; any other Church will perish along with the world.”
[John Webster, quoting Günther Dehn, in Holy Scripture, 2]
