Only insofar as we are able to evisage how things might be different from the way they are in the world, how they might change in the future, how they are intended by God ultimately to be, do we have any final grounds for refusing to accept the way the world presently is.
— Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope; Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium.
This recent commentary on Pete Enns’ blog, I think, hits the nail on the head:
I have said this on other occasions and it bears repeating: the tensions in conservative American Christianity that began in earnest in the 19th century were not so much “caused” by higher-critical scholarship, but by the clash of some very legitimate newer insights into the Bible (e.g., pentateuchal authorship, the ANE background to Genesis, etc., etc., etc.) with older theological paradigms that were not suited to address these newer insights. I understand that the matter is a bit more complicated than I lay out here, but the general contours are clear to me. The resulting liberal/fundamentalist divide was perhaps an inevitable perfect storm, but neither option does justice to the rich possibilities before us.
If I may continue a rather reductionistic analysis (which is not accurate on the level of historical analysis, but is alive and well, nonetheless—indeed, perpetuated—in some popular circles): liberals looked at our developing knowledge of the ancient world of the Bible and said “A ha, I told you. The Bible is nothing special. Israelite religion is just like any other ancient faith. You conservatives need to get over yourselves.” The fundamentalist response was (fingers firmly planted in ears) “La la la la la la, I do not hear you. There may be a millimeter of insight in some of what you are saying, but if what you are saying is true, our theology—which is the sure truth of Scripture, handed down through the ages—is false, and that is unthinkable.”
Battle lines were drawn rather than theological and hermeneutical principles reassessed.
“Neither option does justice to the rich possibilities before us.” Exactly.
Ted Davis of Messiah College writes an excellent overview of John Polkinghorne in First Things.
Pope Benedict on markets and justice (Caritas in Veritate, para. 35):
In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires. The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today it is this trust which has ceased to exist, and the loss of trust is a grave loss. It was timely when Paul VI in Populorum Progressio insisted that the economic system itself would benefit from the wide-ranging practice of justice, inasmuch as the first to gain from the development of poor countries would be rich ones[90]. According to the Pope, it was not just a matter of correcting dysfunctions through assistance. The poor are not to be considered a “burden”[91], but a resource, even from the purely economic point of view. It is nevertheless erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best. It is in the interests of the market to promote emancipation, but in order to do so effectively, it cannot rely only on itself, because it is not able to produce by itself something that lies outside its competence. It must draw its moral energies from other subjects that are capable of generating them.
This passage sets up an important contrast between “markets within a moral framework” and “markets as a moral framework.” Most “conservative” pundits today suggest that “markets” are the most moral form of economic structure because markets preserve individual liberty. It is true that individual liberty is an important value, and that free markets emody that value. However, that is not the end of the story, pace the conservative / libertarian wags. A truly Christian vision of the good society recognizes that individual liberty is only one virtue within a broader constellation of virtues. “The greatest of these is love,” St. Paul said (1 Cor. 13:13). Markets are only “moral” when liberty is governed by love.
An extensive new Papal Encyclial was just issued concerning social teaching in light of the current economic crisis. This is an important document, which all Christians should carefully consider. I hope to do a number of posts on it. A taste:
We recognize . . . that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense of both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.
Recently we watched the movie Freedom Writers, which is about a high school teacher who works with inner city students. It’s a little hokey, but not a bad movie. At one point, the teacher brings the kids to a holocaust museum, and they meet with some camp survivors. A somewhat incongruous thought struck me at that moment: can my theology handle the Holocaust?
Of course, no theology, no reasonable system, can “handle” the Holocaust. That kind of evil by definition defies reason. What I mean is, does my theology provide a system of justice that can account for the victims of the Holocaust?
I’m starting to think of this disturbing question as the “Holocaust Test.” A theology that can’t pass the Holocaust Test seems too small. Human history is filled with holocausts. The Nazi Holocaust is unique in its focus on the Jewish people. Yet we can also speak of African slavery, of communist dictatorships and gulags, of the killing fields of Cambodia, of Rwanda and Uganda, and so on. What does our theology say about the innocent blood — the blood of men, women, and young children — that cries out from the ground of human violence?
I’m afraid the very conservative brand of Evangelical theology I’ve inherited fails the Holocaust Test. The individual eschatology in this system is simple: those who have heard and responded to the Gospel are in Heaven; those who have not are in Hell. Anne Frank, and the millions of other Jewish children who died in the Holocaust, simply are lost (assuming they passed the “age of accountability,” whatever that might be). All of the Jewish adults who died in the Nazi camps, simply are lost. We should state the logic of this theology in terms that are as unflinching as its teaching: the residents of Berkenau and Auschwitz went straight from the gas chambers to the flames of Hell.
Obviously, I’m not the first person, or the first Christian, to realize that this view of eschatology is grossly inadquate. There are many ways of thinking about Christian eschatology that avoid the simplistic poles of hyper-exclusivism and universalism. On the Roman Catholic side, after Vatican II, there has been much reflection on how the grace extended in Christ through the Church can spill over to non-Catholics and non-professing-Christians. On the Protestant side, there is Barth, who was a universalist of sorts, and more “evangelical” voices such as Billy Graham, John Stott, Dallas Willard, and others who are by no means universalists, but who strongly suggest that the mystery of God’s salvation cannot be circumscribed by what is visible to us in the human context.
The Holocaust Test forces us to tread in some difficult waters. I don’t think the Biblical witness, or the Tradition, or reason or experience, support true universalism. It seems abhorrent to me to suggest that Anne Frank and Hitler share precisely the same fate, whether in Hell or in Heaven. Freedom means that we have freedom to reject God, and many do reject God, which is the definition of being “lost,” now and in the eschaton. But, at the same time, the crabbed little “four spiritual laws” view of individual eschatology can’t possibly be the whole story if there is such a thing as divine universal Justice.
What do you think?
This is Part II of my review of Faith Thinking by Trevor Hart. This text was assigned in my Missional Theology I class at BTS.
Hart’s critical realist approach is immediately evident in Chapters 2 and 3, “Faith and the Search for Certainty” and “Admiring the View from Nowhere.” In Chapter 2, Hart sketches the familiar story of how the search for certainty reached its apex during the Enlightenment with Rene Descartes. The Cartesian project sought to establish knowledge on indubitable rational foundations, and therefore separated “faith” from “reason” as ways of knowing. Echoing St. Augustine, Descartes reasoned that in virtue of being able to think he must at least have indubitable knowledge of his own existence (“cogito ergo sum”). It soon became clear, however, even to Descartes, that essentially nothing can be deduced with certainty from the fact of one’s own existence, because the senses can and often do deceive.
Hart notes that other Enlightenment figures, particularly John Locke and David Hume, recognized the weaknesses of Descartes’ “internalist” notion of rationality, and instead sought a sure foundation for truth claims in external empirical observation and verification. This move further ghettoized “faith” and paradoxically undermined the possibility of certainty. There were now “no universal and eternal truths of reason to fall back upon,” and the senses are not indubitably reliable, so the best a person can do is explain how things appear to himself.
Into this void stepped Immanuel Kant. As Hart notes, Kant sought to fuse Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies by suggesting that the human mind is preconfigured to shape the raw data of perception into a form accessible to “reason.” Human beings, therefore, can agree on public truth based on empirical observation and testing in conformity with the noetic limitations of the human mind as it encounters sense experiences. What human beings cannot do, however, is count as “truth” any concepts that are not immediately accessible to sense perception and reason. In particular, “religious” claims, which by definition transcend the material world, cannot constitute public truth.
Hart concludes Chapter 2 with a brief summary of the aftermath of the failure of the Enlightenment effort to achieve certainty. He alludes to the opposite poles of positivism, which demands “factual or logical evidence” before a belief can be deemed reasonable, and relativism, in which “there is no truth except that which each community (or in extreme cases each person) cretes for itself.”
In Chapter 3, Hart turns to contemporary efforts to recover the possibility of public truth without succumbing to the absolutist stance of positivism. These are represented, for Hart, by Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre.
Polanyi sought to understand knowledge in more holistic terms than the positivists to which he often was responding. For Polanyi, knowledge is embodied and personal. Even in the rarified world of the natural sciences, most of what a researcher believes must be accepted on authority or learned through tactile experience; there is simply too much information for any person to verify. Human knowledge, therefore, is always involves some risky personal commitment.
MacIntyre emphasized the communitarian aspects of knowing. Knowledge, for MacIntyre, is located in “traditions,” meaning ways of thinking, being and living in the world that support human flourishing, incorporate particular virtues and practices, and extend through time. For both Polanyi and MacIntyre, there is no entirely “objective” stance by which competing knowledge claims can be neutrally and fully adjudicated. We must give up the quest for disembodied certainty and instead determine how to examine claims about reality from within the precommitted perspective of one sort of faith or another.
A group headed by Francis Collins announces today the launch of the BioLogos Foundation, an effort to improve dialogue between Christian faith and the natural sciences. Collins provides some additional background on a new blog, “Science and the Sacred,” associated with the project. This is exciting. I hope and pray that it represents a new, constructive phase in the maturation of evangelical perspectives on the natural sciences.
This is Part I of my review of Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology by Trevor Hart. This was the first book assigned in my Missional Theology I course at BTS.
Trevor Hart’s Faith Thinking is a prolegomena to Christian theology in the tradition of “faith seeking understanding.” In essence, Hart seeks to envision Christian theology as the extension of a MacIntyreian tradition, utilizing the epistemological resources of “critical realism.”
In his introduction, Hart outlines his project and discusses the contours of “faith” and “theology.” “Faith,” he notes, “will always seek to enter into a fuller and deeper knowledge and understanding of that which matters most to it.” This means that, although faith is situated within a tradition, it is not merely a rote repetition of that tradition. Faith is concerned both with the “internal coherence” of contemporary expressions of the tradition and the “external reference” of those expressions to other sources and facets of knowledge. Faith is integrative. It must “seek . . . to come to terms with the problems and the possibilities of integrating our faith in its various aspects into a wider picture of things entertained by society; thereby inhabiting a more or less integrated world, a universe rather than a multiverse.”
“Theology” is an attempt to understand the object and place of faith. Theology, then, is an effort to understand reality – the universe – from a stance of faith. Christian theology, in particular, tries to “sketch an intellectual contour of reality as it appears from within the stance of a living and active faith in Christ . . . .” If all Christians are called to seek after God’s purposes, then all Christians to some degree or another are engaged in the theological task.
Although Hart does not say so directly, his project clearly is an effort to view Christian theology from the perspective of critical realism. “Critical realism” is an epistemological position that is both realist and critical. It is “realist” in that, as with Enlightenment empiricists and rationalists, it affirms that human beings are capable of true knowledge of a real world that is not merely constructed. It is “critical” in that, as with contemporary postmodernists, it recognizes that all human knowledge is constrained, situated, incomplete, and provisional. In contemporary theology, critical realism is represented in the thinking of Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, Leslie Newbiggin, N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and others, many of them referred to by Hart throughout the book.
In my Missional Theology class at BTS, we’ve been discussing the nature and task of “theology.” One aspect of the discussion is the role of scripture in theology. Some folks think of theology as a house, with scripture as its foundation. This is an interesting analogy, particularly when we consider the creativity of the architect and the need to remodel the house at times when the landscape or neighborhood changes.
But, I wonder if the “foundationalist” metaphor for scripture is a good one. If scripture always has to be received and interpreted, and if we require the Holy Spirit to “illuminate” scripture for scripture to function as God intends in the Church, does the analogy of scripture to the unchanging foundation of a house stretch things too far? I wonder if the Apostle Paul’s frequent use of the analogy of a “body” in relation to the Church provides some different resources for thinking about the relationship of scripture to theology?
I wonder if scripture is more like the physical structures of the brain. Those structures regulate how we are capable of perceiving and thinking about the world. They are adapted to give us useful data — though not perfectly complete God’s-eye data — of the world we live in so that we can function effectively as human beings. Perhaps scripture is more like this than like the foundation of a building. Scripture regulates how an organism, the body of Christ, perceives and thinks about God and about how to live in the world God created.