The Neo-Orthodox View of the Bible
Image via Wikipedia Jesus answered, “It is written: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God ” (Matthew 4:4). Early in the twentieth century, two European theologians mounted an assault on nineteenth-century liberalism. The nineteenth-century liberals had tried to find the “historical Jesus” by discounting the testimony of the Bible and filtering the biblical evidence through their own conceptions of what must have happened. They had used “literary science” to “prove” that the Bible is merely a collection of human opinions about God and not the Word of God at all. The two theologians who attacked this idea, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner , were called “neo-orthodox” because they seemed to be affirming the orthodox Christian faith against the more liberal mind set. They maintained that the Bible was the Word of God and that God inspired it—but what they meant by these statements was radically different from true Christianity. Barth and Br...