Reason in Faith

This could have been taken straight out of Newman’s Grammar of Assent, with its proper nuance of reason’s role in the apprehension of the truths of our faith. These distinctions not only guard against fideism broadly (unhelpfully) construed, but against the “radical” characterization of faith as wholly alien, subversive, yada yada. The italics are mine.

“‘Tis rational to suppose, that it should be beyond a man’s power to obtain this knowledge, and light, by the mere strength of natural reason; for ’tis not a thing that belongs to reason, to see the beauty and loveliness of spiritual things; it is not a speculative thing, but depends on the sense of the heart. Reason indeed is necessary in order to it, as ’tis by reason only that we are become the subjects of the means of it; which means I have already shown to be necessary in order to it, though they have no proper causal influence in the affair. ‘Tis by reason, that we become possessed of a notion of those doctrines that are the subject matter of this divine light; and reason may many ways be indirectly, and remotely an advantage to it. And reason has also to do in the acts that are immediately, and remotely an advantage to it. And reason has also to do in the acts that are immediately consequent on this discovery: a seeing the truth of religion from hence, is by reason; though it be but by one step, and the inference be immediate. So reason has to do in that accepting of, and trusting in Christ, that is consequent on it. But if we take reason strictly, not for the faculty of mental perception in general, but for ratiocination, or a power of inferring by arguments; I say if we take reason thus, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellency no more belongs to reason, that it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors, or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food. It is out of reason’s province to perceive the beauty or loveliness of anything: such a perception don’t belong to that faculty. Reason’s work is to perceive truth, and not excellency. ‘Tis not ratiocination that gives men the perception of the beauty and amiableness of a countenance; though it may be many ways indirectly an advantage to it; yet ’tis no more reason that immediately perceives it, that it is reason that perceives the sweetness of honey: it depends on the sense of the heart. Reason may determine that a countenance is beautiful to others, it may determine that honey is sweet to others; but it will never give me a perception of its sweetness.”

Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader (Yale, 1995), pp. 121-122.

Paul Moser on Kerygmatic Philosophy

The blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society has an interesting interview with Paul Moser, professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago (published books). It serves as a good intro to Moser’s work, especially his formulation of, what he calls, “kerygmatic philosophy” (see The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology, Cambridge 2008). I particularly liked this bit from the interview:

Who are some thinkers that have influenced your reflection and development of kerygmatic philosophy and its significance?

My perspective on philosophy and epistemology is based on various New Testament writers, particularly Paul and John. I read the Gospel of John as an inherently epistemological gospel, offering the basics of an epistemology of human knowledge of God. I read some sections of Paul’s letters as similarly epistemological, for instance, 1 Cor. 1-2, Rom. 5, 8. It’s noteworthy that the New Testament writers show no need of arguments of natural theology. They do, however, make important cognitive use of the human experience of God’s call, and they acknowledge the importance of the human will in apprehending evidence of divine reality (see, e.g., Jn. 7:17; 1 Jn. 4:8). For some Pauline remarks on God’s call, see, for instance, 1 Cor. 1:9; cf. 1 Cor. 1:2, 26, 7:17–24, Rom. 1:6–7, Eph. 1:18-19. For 20th-century efforts to preserve the central role of God’s call in philosophy and theology, see Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative, and the works of two evangelical Quaker Christians, Rufus Jones and Thomas R. Kelly (especially the latter’s Testament of Devotion).

Theology’s Use of Philosophy

From The Theology of Karl Barth by Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 218-219:

Critics of Thomas Aquinas have often accused him of being at heart an Aristotelian philosopher who would recast revelation in this mold, thereby constricting it. Nor have critics been slow to accuse Barth of the same thing: taking a fully formed picture of the world — this time, that of German Idealism — and making it the standard for shaping and containing the biblical message.

But this comparison with Thomas Aquinas should give us pause, especially at this most critical juncture of our investigation. Barth himself after all accused Thomas of philosophism, clearly, then, something he wanted to avoid. For at least one fact about Barth is indisputable: Barth has always wanted to be a theologian and nothing else. He has always been aware, increasingly so, of this objection raised against him. He has taken it into account, confronted it: in this respect he is anything but naive.

He knows, and he has repeated it often, that every theologian has no choice but to work with human concepts and thought forms. And if he uses those concepts in which he first learned to think theologically, then he does so in clear awareness of the consequences and because he can find no better. He has made use of them, not as a philosophy per se, but as a helpmate for theological work, transposing them and submitting them to a necessary critique, sterilizing the instruments before using them in his theological operations.

He has made use of them the way Thomas did the Aristotelian categories, which to philosophy would seem illegitimate or at lest “supererogatory.” Fundamentally, we cannot object to such a transposition of categories. Revelation has never revealed that it has been predestined to be expressed in one, single human thought form (this is not to say anything against the content of a “perennial philosophy”). The Old Testament itself thinks and expresses itself in Babylonian and Iranian thought forms. Paul and John use Hellenistic, Platonic and perhaps even Philonic schemata and concepts. Was Platonism not a form of Idealism and is Schleiermacher not a Platonist? And has not Joseph Maréchal proven that certain basic intuitions of modern speculative philosophy are in complete agreement with those of Scholasticism, that the ontological and the transcendental modes do not finally contradict but complement each other?

The Necessity of Extra-Theological Norms

©2007 Tenteri, tenteri.deviantart.com

Kent at Theology Forum has posted a quote from John Webster’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology. It’s a good, succinct statement of Webster’s approach to theological method. It ends with, “In particular, dogmatics can help to prevent the distortions of perspective which can be introduced into an account of the faith by, for example, pressure from polemical concerns or excessive regard for extra-theological norms.” I doubt anyone reading this blog would have any problems with that. Of course, actually implementing this, trying to form a standard, is a bit harder. This was especially brought to my attention when reading that R. C. Sproul has become a Creationist (6-day YEC) after a career of openness to evolutionary claims. This is tragic. It would not be quite as tragic if Sproul’s reasons were actually scientific. What were his reasons? Pretty much, the Bible says so and the WCF says so — biblicism and confessionalism, in the bad sense of those terms:

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four–hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning in Genesis 1-2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days. (Truths We Confess, vol. 1, pp. 127–128)

So, the plain sense of the text proves it. Not the plain evidence of nature, as attested by 99.9% of the scientific community. Nope, we got to go with an account that is followed by a talking snake and a fruit of “the knowledge of good and evil.” Now, most would say that we’re obviously dealing with a mythological account intending theological truth. That’s what I say. That’s what real Christian scientists say. But, wait, theologians have a different standard, so they can justify their scientific claims with their “higher” biblicist and confessionalist committments. So, what is Sproul doing? He’s taking the dual paths in our acquisition of truth — revelation for divine truths; nature for scientific truths — and collapsing the latter into the former, creating a false dualism at the natural level where our apprehension of nature becomes fundamentally suspect and untrustworthy.

Sproul is not alone, of course. Al Mohler and Russell Moore at Southern Seminary have said the same thing. They don’t — and can’t — offer scientific evidence for their Creationism. They point to Genesis 1-2, they point to Romans 5, they don’t point to creation itself. That’s a problem. It’s a problem because our commitment to truth is a commitment to reality as a whole. The natural sciences thus produce extra-theological norms to which we must be committed and which we cannot bracket off when we do our exegetical and dogmatic work, not as competitive norms but as complementary in a single reality. This, of course, is easier said than done, as witnessed by those who have (rightly) re-worked protology in light of contemporary science, but it is a necessary task. The alternative is to throw off science (real science) and, thus, throw off truth — retreating from God’s glorious creation and into an ecclesial hermitage. Webster is right in that we need to be aware of an excessive regard for extra-theological norms (e.g., we need not reject Original Sin entirely or make it purely existential with a purely existential solution), but we cannot just say F.U. to science.

Leaving Church, pt. 2

©2008 Ben Heys, sifu.deviantart.com

Back in May, I did a post quoting Bishop Robert Vasa’s comment that rationalism is the primary reason for why people leave the Church. Vasa ends his observations with, “Modern man finds faith unreasonable and therefore unbelievable. In America there is a very strong notion that what we believe must make perfect sense to us, and that we are somehow automatically absolved from believing that which does not seem to be rational.” I think this is spot on. While postmodernism has certainly captured certain segments of academia, even the most Foucauldian of my professors would cite standard (modernist) rationalist and historical-critical arguments against the Christian faith. Doug Chaplin disagreed with me (and Bishop Vasa), citing the fact that many people simply slip away from the Church due to social circumstances and not any real rejection of Christian tenets. As I said in response to Doug, while this is true for many, most of those I’ve encountered who leave the Church “do put forward arguments from reason, whether moral, existential, logical, historical, or a mixture….[They] cite rational obstacles. They will cite the immoral God of the Old Testament, the contradictions in the gospel witness to the Resurrection, or, if they do not know the historical arguments, they will cite the problem of evil or the simple fact that all we see in the universe is the blind mechanical forces of nature.”

Why am I repeating all this? Over at Parchment and Pen, C. Michael Patton has been posting emails that he has received by young adults who have rejected their Christian beliefs. Obviously, the type of person who would email a lay catechetical apostolate is the type of person who is intellectually-engaged to some degree in the Christian claims. Regardless, I am convinced that these reasons are standard fare for ex-Christians. Michael’s latest email is from a guy who cites, among other things, the following:

Two more aspects encouraged me to truly shed my faith.

First. I read the bible. Contrary to fundamentalist beliefs, the bible promotes many hideous acts: genocide, sacrificing children, raping women, slavery, incest, etc. Indeed these ideas are mixed with many wonderful morals. Yet, they reveal the bible as just another book authored by humans.

Second: Science. The same empirical method that allows modern technology (laptops, medicine, spaceships, etc) shows the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The evidence also shows all life evolved from a common ancestor. This is not philosophy, culture, or modern opinion. These are scientific facts supported by libraries, museums, and universities overflowing with evidence!

So, there you go. The immoral God of the OT and the blind mechanical forces of nature. No surprise. And what baffles me is that Church leaders, especially evangelical pastors, ignore this. They don’t take it seriously. They think you can entertain instead of educate, or “educate” in as entertaining a medium as possible. What even more baffles me is that pastors will say that they do not know why so many, especially young adults, are leaving the Church. So, here’ s the point of me writing this post: We know. We know why people leave the faith. It’s not a big secret. It’s not some elusive, deep personal or social force. Ex-Christians all cite the same damn things when they explain why they are not a Christian. So, listen to them. Don’t get me wrong: Personal and social forces are in play; especially sin (pride) is always in play. But, our pride does not need unnecessary alibis, and (to use an obvious example) showing Ken Ham videos to your youth creates an unnecessary alibi when they grow-up and realize that the scientific community is not conspiring against Creationist “evidence.”

Leaving Church

InsideCatholic recently did an interesting survey of the reasons Catholics (and, for that matter, Christians in general) leave the Church by asking several prominent Catholics (bishops, professors, lay authors, etc.) for their opinion on the reasons and solutions. I think the bishop of Baker, Oregon, Robert Vasa, gives us the most acute explanation:

“We, as Americans, tend to look for rational reasons for action or for failure to act. There is inherent in the question a search for ‘reason,’ but perhaps it is reason itself, cut off from faith, that is precisely the cause of the abdication of the Catholic Faith. Have we not, after all, made the concept of assent to the truths and teachings of the Catholic Faith much more a matter of reason than faith? Phrases like ‘I just cannot believe that’ manifest a great confusion between reason and faith. What we believe as Catholics is certainly reasonable, but raw reason, without any input from Faith, would of necessity reject a vast majority of what the Church believes and teaches. Modern man finds faith unreasonable and therefore unbelievable.

In America there is a very strong notion that what we believe must make perfect sense to us, and that we are somehow automatically absolved from believing that which does not seem to be rational.”