Where Hearty Thinking, Honesty & Humility Meet
The Truth is Out There (and it's one scrappy son-of-a-gun).
So the buildings that survive an earthquake are not the ones that are immovable, but the ones that flex on a firm foundation.
Glass is harder than rubber, but not stronger.
Christian belief seems to me to have become brittle—increasingly hard and unbending, but subject to cracking or even shattering when pressure is applied.
Recent centuries have delivered an unmistakeable pummeling to a Biblical and Christian worldview. I am an amateur historian, at best, but I don't believe that there has ever previously been a one-two punch to the jaw of the Faith quite like the left hook of Darwinian and the right uppercut of Freudian redefinitions of what it is to be human.
Naturalism declares that we are in a closed system that excludes the existence - or at least the engagement - of the supernatural. The Naturalistic thinking that both produced and proceeded from Darwinian theories on where we came from and Freudian theories on who (or what) we are spawned a broad and brazen frontal assault on Biblical authority, gospel propositions about sin and salvation, and any real experience of the eternal, the transcendent, the miraculous, or anything that did not fit in the quickly constricting and pronouncedly narrow-minded box of "enlightenment" rationalism.
Others could survey these historic, philosophical, and theological dynamics better than I am able; but I do have a thought about the inclination of Christian thought and theology that emerged from the spiritual blitzkrieg of those times.
In large part, through the assault, Christian dogmatism increased and Christian thought diminished. I do not doubt the heart passion and sincere piety of the believers who fought through that storm; but when the winds subsided and the downed trees were cleaned up the Faith appeared to be standing - but on a whole new playing field (to keep mixing metaphors).
Darwin and Freud remained identified enemies, but Kant and Hegel (a more subtle and insidious pair) had been unwittingly absorbed as friends and applied to redefine the categories of life and thought.
There was much honor and faithfulness among the fundamentalists of the early 20th century (a substantially different title, crowd, and mindset than "fundamentalists" of recent times) and there were remarkable exceptions to my overly-simplistic evaluation of them (men like J. Gresham Machen come to mind).
But what seems a fair and apparent observation is that Christian thought emerged from the Great Storm of naturalism, higher-criticism, and rationalism having accepted submission to a new set of rules.
The supernatural and the natural, the phenomenal and the noumenal, faith and reason - these all had been pried apart and relegated to separate spheres of life and reality. The tragic essence of much 20th century, conservative theology was, as a result, "Let the rationalists and the naturalists have reason - we are claiming faith." These two, God-crafted partners—faith and reason—were declared alien to one another, and a Babel-like redefinition of language made it nonsensical for them to try to be on speaking terms.
Faith and reason would be forced to part ways as perplexed strangers, and it would take quite some time to reintroduce them to one another.
Reacquainting these two is a project still in process. Progress has been made in recent decades. Thoughtful men and women of both belief and brain have arisen to offer theological faithfulness, careful thought, apologetic skill, and philosophical and even scientific counterpoint to "enlightenment" dogmatics - but there remain concerning remnants of concessions made in earlier days.
For example (rather randomly and quickly assembled):
1. We believe more things, more dogmatically, with less thought and less ability to explain or defend them.
2. Generation after generation we appear to be re-experiencing a mass exodus of "the next generation" from the community of faith, as most Christian-trained young people are left to perceive a need to choose between faith and reason/scholarship/science—left also to choose between legalism (rules without reasons) and apparent liberty (rationalism without rules). A great many churched young people, understandably, barely flinch before stepping over that threshold.
3. Our Christian witness has become more combative and less conversational. We assume that the Babel-like confusion of languages between faith and reason was irreversible and that we must run over the questions and concerns of a non-believer with emphatic, inflexible declarations on nearly every point of discussion. We assume that saying "I don't know" reveals weakness, so we always "know." We insist that it will all make sense if they would just believe it, rather than urging them to consider if previously unfamiliar beliefs might make considerably more sense than the ones they have been working with up until now.
4. Christian unity seems unattainable. When faith and reason got divorced, all beliefs became equal. Confining ourselves to the faith domain not only alienated us from reason, it erased reasonable distinctions in dogmatism. Believing in justification by faith, scriptural authority, a particular method of baptism, a certain structure for church life, a specific millennial theory, proper dress, music style, or biblical translation for a church service, etc. etc. - are all equals in the eyes of subjective, self-authenticated faith. They are all authorized by the same internal intuition and (too often) defended with the same unbending fervor. When faith and reason are fittingly wedded, we can grow toward a sense of proportion, without shame over honest questions, measured dogmatism, and a humble orthodoxy. This also adds to our credibility when we stand firm on the big stuff.
5. Christians have largely become, in the analogy of Dr. Michael Bauman, Fortress Theologians instead of Pilgrim Theologians. We often communicate and function as though we possess the Truth, rather than pursue it. And since we often have a latent distrust of reason - left over from when it was declared our enemy - we seem to believe that the Truth is vulnerable and needs our protection. We put the Truth in a locked vault somewhere deep inside a fortress that we have erected, in layers, around the Truth. We then (immovably and, therefore, immaturely)—stridently fight for a treasure that we have treated as though it is fragile.
We think the Truth vulnerable because we acquired it by weak and self-sufficient means. Let it out into the light of day! The truth is quite resilient. It smiles at the storms and arrows and bombings that come its way. It is trustworthy enough to talk about and test, and it is tough enough to take on the assaults of error, enemies, or even the sincere wrong-thinking of others or ourselves. Pilgrim theologians love the truth they have and eagerly journey toward the treasure of gaining more. It's a messier way of life than life in the fortress, but it allows our ideas to increasingly align with the Truth and our faith to effectively mean something.
By the way, Naturalism and modernism have taken their own bruises as well through the decades. Modernists discovered that they couldn't comfortably live without a soul - so they became what we have labeled (for a while at least) post-modernists. Having "rediscovered their spirits," most still linger in the schizophrenic existence of living in a tension of the spiritual and the sensible, that were never meant to be at odds in the first place.
Anyway - just some nagging, quickly-assembled, over-simplified thoughts as I remember that the buildings that don't fall down in earthquakes are built on a firm foundation and designed to flex.
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This is a bonus post, woven in with the “Twenty Easy Ways to Raise a Pharisee” series of blogposts that are being posted here in conjunction with Season 2 of the “No Mere Mortals” podcast (this link is to the Apple podcast app, but NMM is also available at Spotify and in other podcast apps).
We would invite you to jump over and listen in on the weekly podcast, but we would also suggest (related to this post) that you go back to Season 1 of the podcast and listen to Episode 11—”On Thinking.”
Track along with all that we are doing here at Enjoying Grace Story Co. at Don’s Instagram.