Neo-orthodoxy

Ross Woods, 2022

Neo-orthodox theologians believe that man can have personal religious faith because Scripture testifies to a revelation of God and of Jesus Christ.

Neo-orthodoxy has been the prevailing paradigm of the theological left for most of the last hundred years.

As a movement, neo-orthodoxy derives from two different sources.

1. First, it inherited many ideas from old liberalism. Neo-orthodox normally holds a low view of Scripture, believing that that the Bible is fallible and that the historicity of Christianity cannot be established. This allowed neo-orthodox theologians to entertain many different “criticisms” of Scripture and share a network of academic circles.
2. Second, it took influence from existentialist philosophy, which is the idea that meaning is a personal experience in a meaningless, deterministic world. However, existentialism has many forms. (Kirkegard, Heideger, etc.)

Neo-orthodoxy is not uniform. For example, views vary between Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, Emil Brunner, and many others. During his lifetime, Karl Barth moved to a more conservative Reformed position. Tillich was quite mystical, and Bultmann was most famous for his idea of “demythologizing”, which is the idea that Scripture is a set of myths that can be analyzed to find religious meaning.

People holding neo-orthodox beliefs tend to brand evangelicals as “fundamentalists” and accuse them of bibliolatry, that is, worship of Scripture.