The Neo-orthodox Theology of W.W. Bryden
By John Vissers
Princeton Theological Monograph Series
Pickwick Publications
The Principal of Presbyterian College opens his book on Walter Bryden with a fight scene at General Assembly; well, almost a fight scene. On the one side, Dr. Bryden, Principal of Knox College, on the other, Dr. Stuart C. Parker, Minister of St. Andrew's Simcoe Street, Toronto. The provocation for this almost altercation was a lecture on the Westminster Confession of Faith. After listening to Bryden for almost two hours, Parker had to be restrained. Although Bryden did not advocate naïve confessionalism (he didn't regard the Westminster Standards as “once for all” statements of faith), Parker was enraged that Bryden would look to this historical document to buoy up the current life and witness of the church. Parker was “intercepted” before he got to Bryden. It is possible to imagine that on the other side of the sanctuary of St. Paul's, Hamilton, Ont., another equally enraged delegate had to be held back. This person, shaking a copy of the confession at Bryden, was aghast that he could speak of the provisional nature of the Westminster Confession of Faith. On the one side of the sanctuary, delegates hold back Parker, the liberal clergyman raging against the irrelevance of historic confessions. On the other side of the sanctuary, a confessionalist restrained, held back from playing the pugilist with a speaker, who had offered a critical assessment of the truths of the Gospel “once and for all” inscribed.
Take this vastly oversimplified scene as a summary of Visser's sophisticated genetic account of the life and work of Walter Bryden. Over the course of his long tenure in The Presbyterian Church in Canada, first as congregational minister, and then as professor and principal at Knox College (1925-1952), Bryden searched for the middle path between theological liberalism and theological conservatism.
On the one side, theological liberalism, as Bryden saw it, accommodated itself too readily to the thought forms of the day. Once applied, the solvent of philosophical idealism dissolved God into a rational principle unfolding in history, Jesus into an exemplar with the highest religious and moral consciousness and the human predicament as one settled by development. Bryden rejected theological liberalism in this form, and as Vissers notes, thereby identified himself with a large early-20th-century theological protest called neo-orthodoxy. In contrast with the reigning liberal theology of his time, Bryden, deploying the resources he mined from neo-orthodox theology, especially Karl Barth, and drawing on the moderate Calvinism to which his British teachers had introduced him, emphasized above all else the definitive revelation of God in the Judging-Saving Word, Jesus Christ. (What student of Bryden could forget that formulation?) Vissers finds similarities, “a family resemblance,” between important neo-orthodox theologians at this point, but also notes that neo-orthodoxy is by no means a homogenous school. Moreover, through his genetic treatment of the development of Bryden's thought, Vissers opens a venue on important influences on Bryden besides Barth. And finally, Vissers helps us to understand that Bryden's objections to Church Union were rooted in his critique, fortified by Barth and neo-orthodoxy, of philosophical idealism. Bryden wasn't willing to accept at face value the notion that Union was a natural unfolding in history, and he objected to the absence of theological warrant for the move.
Bryden, while rejecting the over-determination of Christian theology by modern thought forms, was no obscurantist. Vissers notes that Bryden “knew he could not simply embrace old orthodoxies,” that the neo-orthodox impulse that Bryden followed sought to overthrow liberalism not by going around modern thought, “but [by] going through it” and that Bryden deployed a “modern theological method.” Bryden, for example, did not repudiate historical-critical inquiry — although he did note that searches for the historical Jesus tended to project into the texts what they wished to find. Hence with Barth, Bryden maintained that historical critics ought to be more critical. Bryden distanced himself from fundamentalist (Protestant Orthodox) views of revelation as propositions on the pages of the Bible. Bryden articulated a more dynamic view of revelation as encounter with the free sovereign word of God through the Spirit of God. Experience of God, in Bryden's thought, was always self-authenticating, as in Calvin, and not subject to the approval of human reason, as in liberal Protestantism. Vissers' highlighting of Bryden's doctrine of the Spirit in the knowledge of God is particularly welcome and, on Bryden's part, crucial. For Bryden needed to distinguish his treatment of the Holy Spirit from liberal Protestant theology in which the Holy Spirit and the human spirit were often descriptively confluent.
We owe a debt to John Vissers for this interesting and well-written account of an important figure in the recent history of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. The sense of crisis that hovers in the background and motivates Bryden's rearticulation of theology feels a lot like our own time. Important theological books now describe our time and the theology being done as post-liberal. The figure of Karl Barth looms large in this movement. My worry is that in our current crisis, of identity and attendance, instead of engaging in critical theological work that mines the sources and reads the Bible and turns to God, we will happily adopt marketing language whole hog, and continue to talk about audiences, do needs assessments and strategic planning (talk about ourselves) and not talk very much about God at all. Vissers' book on Bryden is about wrestling with God in a crisis; would that no one would “intercept” us on our way to the match.
