David W. Congdon

In this work of exceptional erudition, David W. Congdon shows that Christian apologists from ancient times to the present have failed to acknowledge the historicity of their own constructions of Christianity. Although Who Is a True Christian? is primarily a work of intellectual history, it is also a vigorous critique of recent and contemporary Protestant and Catholic efforts to clarify the essence of the faith. Written in the grand tradition of Harvey Cox, Peter Berger, and Charles Taylor, this capacious and contentious book promises to enliven and instruct a generation’s debates about the destiny of the Christian faith in the United States and beyond.

In this ambitious intervention in the contemporary culture wars, David Congdon situates current debates in the context of a much longer contestation over the boundaries of orthodoxy. Disruptive and thought-provoking, Who Is a True Christian? offers an incisive critique of attempts to define what is true, “historical,” and “traditional” and calls instead for a transgressive Christianity—a dynamic conception of faith that is compatible with a commitment to pluralism.

In this compelling challenge to any final answers, political or religious, David Congdon breathes life into a transgressive Christianity: the creativity of his relational, pluralist theology delivers a tour de force of prophetic polydoxy!

Congdon’s deeply erudite book is far more than merely another contribution to the debate over the meaning of Christianity that has raged particularly hot in the United States the last ten years. Rather than simply more heat, Congdon brings light. Rather than resolving the debate, Congdon grounds it historically and philosophically, sorting through prescriptivists and descriptivists, revealing what is at stake for all sorts of claimants to the term. And finally, rather than throwing up his hands at the intractability of the problem, Congdon offers a solution that both honors the concept of orthodoxy and preserves the vitality of heterodoxy. I hope it is read, and widely.

Nietzsche famously quipped, “There was only one true Christian, and he died at the cross.” David Congdon’s monumental investigation into the inventions and negotiations of “true Christianity” in the US draws out this indictment with great material force. Uncovering the antimodern anxieties, power plays, and polarizing effects that have animated historical and contemporary investments in the essence, identity, and boundaries of Christian faith, Congdon also gestures toward the deeper hope on the other side of Nietzsche’s sentiment, as he opens the door toward a diverse and pluriform, “normatively transgressive Christianity.”

“In this substantial work, David Congdon has produced the most creative and scholarly study of Rudolf Bultmann’s theology for more than a generation. In refuting the standard charge of a capitulation to modernity, he shows how Bultmann’s demythologizing project is rooted in a robust set of convictions about God as subject and the act of faith as existential and practical. This reassessment of Bultmann as a dialectical theologian is long overdue. In an increasingly secular culture which too readily dismisses Christian faith as ‘believing six impossible things before breakfast,’ Congdon’s work promises to rehabilitate Bultmann as an important resource for theological understanding.”

“Who better than David Congdon to take us into the work of Christianity’s greatest interpreter of Scripture in the modern period? With an expert’s grasp of the entire architecture of Rudolf Bultmann’s thought, Congdon leads the reader through its conceptual entry points. Here is a reliable primer, likely a classic, to guide both beginning students and well-schooled theologians away from the misconceptions, even myths, so often bedeviling treatments of Bultmann.”

“The Mission of Demythologizing systematically deconstructs the slogans with which New Testament scholars have long caricatured Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutic. Yet this is no mere demolition job, as David Congdon replaces the stereotype with a Bultmann fully invested in a missiological hermeneutic on behalf of dialectical theology. This book and the discussion it generates will be with us a long time.”

“Congdon has authored a sophisticated and ambitious dogmatic essay full of insight and bristling with provocation. He invites us to join him in a sustained experiment in radically soteriocentric thinking: what if the work of the God of the gospel on the cross were truly the Archimedean point from which all things are moved and so saved? Congdon’s aim is to limn the revolution in Christian theology that should follow when Christian imagination and intelligence are animated and disciplined anew by faith in the God whose very being is at stake in his advent ‘for us and for our salvation.’ The God Who Saves is an important intervention in contemporary doctrinal debate.”