I found this article by Bishop Newbigin, which is the opening chapter to "Lausanne Occasional Paper 27" (1996) here. It gives an interesting overview or summary of the context of modernity (the age of reason) and post-modenity. It also touches on Christian and Islamic engagement with 'reason.'
Chapter 1
MODERNITY IN CONTEXT
by Lesslie Newbigin
In the following chapter, [On web-page] Bishop John Reid has drawn together some of the main insights of the conference on ‘Faith and Modernity’ convened by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation in Uppsala, Sweden in the Summer of 1994. The full report of the papers given at that meeting deserves wide circulation and study, and I hope that the present work will lead readers to study the full report. As one of the participants said, ‘Modernity is perhaps the most serious challenge which Christianity has so far faced in its two thousand year history and it is urgently necessary that we understand it and how to respond to it’.
Perhaps the best way to say what we mean by the word ‘modernity’ and to identify its characteristic features is to look at it from the point of view of those societies for whom ‘modernisation’ is the contemporary programme. All over Africa, Asia and the Islands of the Pacific there are societies seeking to achieve ‘modernisation’, which is the replacement of traditional ways of thinking and of organising economic and political life by the ways developed in Western Europe and North America during the past two or three centuries.
And it is also easy to see that Christian missionaries, by introducing western styles of education, medical care, agriculture and industry, have been among the main agents of world-wide modernisation. Modernity, in other words, is not an enemy that has attacked Christendom from without; it is a development within Christendom which we have exported to the rest of the world. If, as we must, we now recognise it as an enemy, we must search our own history to find out where we took a wrong turn. It also means that Christians of the western world have a special responsibility in this regard.
It is common among students of the history of ideas to date the rise of modernity from that century which called itself the ‘Age of Reason’. (1) Here ‘reason’ was invoked as a contrast to ‘tradition’ and ‘revelation’. To understand the power of this appeal to ‘reason’, one must remember two things. One is the memory of the religious wars of the 17th century. For most of that century Europe had been soaked in the blood of Christians fighting each other in the name of divine revelation understood through different traditions. There was a deep revulsion from the fanaticism and intolerance of those who claimed to be representing God. The other new fact was the birth and development of the new science and of what seemed to be a more reliable avenue to truth than those offered by the warring factions of Christianity.
But, of course, Christians had been making use of reason long before the ‘Age of Reason’ had dawned. Nothing could be more rigorously rational than the arguments of the Scholastic theologians of the late Middle Ages. Karl Barth (1886-1968 AD), the theologian of modern times who has most powerfully asserted the priority of divine revelation, was asked by a student: ‘What is your attitude to reason?’. He replied: ‘I use it’. Reason is not an independent source of information about what is the case; it is a faculty by which we seek to ‘make sense’ of all the information with which we are challenged through our sense and through what we learn from others. (2) The point at issue is not whether we use our reason but how we use it. Here two things have to be said in respect of the two things against which these first ‘moderns’ pitted the authority of reason - namely tradition and revelation.
1. There is no possibility of knowing anything without apprenticeship to a tradition. (3) This tradition in its primary form is embodied in the language we learn from our parents, family and neighbours. It is carried on through our schooling into the history and literature of our people. We learn to use and to internalise the concepts, metaphors, stories, which this language conveys to us. All our learning to know comes through apprenticeship to such a tradition. Above all, - science - the jewel in the crown of modernity - has developed through a continuing cherishing and developing of a tradition, carefully guarding it against ideas and innovations which do not qualify as ‘real science’. No one earns accreditation as a scientist without a very long and arduous apprenticeship to the tradition. Thus, as in every branch of human knowing, reason can function only within a tradition.
2. The second matter is the relation of reason to revelation. One way to approach this is as follows. We know in practice that reason operates on different logical levels. (4) At the level of mechanics reason will enable us to understand how a machine works, how its different parts bear on each other. Reason operating at this level will enable us to explain the breakdown of a machine. But it can never enable us to understand the purpose for which the machine has been designed. That question takes us to a different logical level. We shall either have to ask the designer, or to ask someone who, having been instructed by the designer, knows how to use the machine.
Reflection will show that the same differentiation of logical level applies - for example - at the boundaries between physics and chemistry, or between chemistry and biology. A neuro surgeon uses his reason in examining and analysing the way in which the brain works, but no refinements of this art would enable a surgeon by these methods to discover what the person is thinking. That involves moving to a different logical level. When the patient has been removed from the operating table, the surgeon will have to sit down with the patient and the latter will have to - as we say - open his mind and explain his thoughts. The surgeon - now a listener - is still using his reason but in a different way. To suppose that the former way is the only proper one would be absurd.
I pointed out earlier that modernity, which poses such a threat to Christianity, arose out of Christendom itself. In the light of what I have just said, however, it might be replied that modernity arose out of the failure of Christianity, out of the collapse of Christendom in the religious wars of the 17th century.
That is part of the truth, but it must also be said that modern science, which for the time seemed to offer an alternative to Christianity as an avenue to truth, was itself a distinctive product of Christianity. Historians of science have had to ask the question: why did modern science develop in western Christendom and not the cultures of ancient Greece, Egypt, India or Mesopotamia, in spite of the brilliant achievements of these latter civilisations in the fields of mathematics and astronomy?
In seeking to answer this question, attention has been drawn to the debates which took place in Alexandria in the 4th and 5th centuries between Christian theologians and the scientists of the time. In direct opposition to Aristotelian philosophy, the Christian thinkers took as their starting point the witness of Scripture, and on that basis laid down certain fundamental ideas. Among these ideas were:
(1) Because the cosmos is the creation of a rational God who also made human beings in his own image, it follows that the cosmos is comprehensible by rational human thought.
(2) Since the cosmos is a creation and not an emanation from God, it therefore has a relative autonomy and, so it follows, its nature must be discovered by inductive observation of empirical facts and not simply by deduction form ultimate, a prioriprinciples.
(3) Since both the earth and the heavenly bodies are creations of the one God, both earth and the heavenly bodies share the same nature. That is to say, the sun, moon and stars are not made of a substance different from the elements we know on earth, but are of the same kind. This, of course, was the issue on account of which Galileo was condemned by a Church magisterium which, meanwhile, had reverted to Aristotle (384-322 BC) as ‘the Philosopher’.
In the following centuries during which the Barbarians of western Europe were being slowly shaped into a new society governed by the biblical account of human nature and destiny, the science and mathematics of Greece and India were brilliantly developed in the Arab world ignited as it was by the message of ‘the Prophet’.
Nestorian Christians, who were the tutors of their Arab rulers, had translated the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy (367-285 BC), and Euclid (c.300 BC) into Arabic, as well as the works of Greek medical science, and these became an integral part of Islamic civilisation. Within a short space of time this brilliant civilisation had far outstripped the barbarian kingdoms of western Christendom in science, architecture, medicine and other forms of culture, as well as in military power. When the great Muslim commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and became widely known within western Europe, the conflict between the Aristotelian way of understanding knowledge and the biblical way was re-opened in a way which was to shape all the subsequent centuries of thought in western Christendom.
At the risk of shocking over-simplification, one can say that whereas in the debates of the 5th century Christian theologians had taken the view that all our knowing must be shaped by the biblical revelation, St Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274 AD) in his massive re-statement of Christian theology recognised two modes of knowing. There are, he said, things which reason can know without the aid of divine revelation, things which may be offered to faith for acceptance. There are other things which can only be known by divine revelation accepted in faith. But, as Michael Buckley has shown, the bringing of ‘the Philosopher’ to defend the Christian faith had serious consequences. (6) If we depend upon philosophy for our ultimate beliefs, the arguments of the philosophers must be invulnerable, and they are not.
There followed the growing scepticism which was eventually to lead to Descartes’ (1596-1650 AD) undertaking to develop a method of thought which would lead to absolute certitude. Crucial to his method were:
(a) the mind of the thinker as an indubitable starting point;
(b) mathematics as a way of thinking which embodies absolute clarity and certainty; and
(c) the ‘critical principle’ as the tool by which all claims to truth (and of course particularly truth claims in the name of divine revelation or tradition) were to be tested. This led in turn to the triumphant positivism of the 19th century with its central belief in ‘objective facts’ which exist in a sphere above mere human belief or opinion, ‘facts’ which exist in a realm disinfected by all human subjectivity. While, for example, truth claims in the area of religion will be introduced by some such phrase as ‘we believe’, truth claims in the areas of science have no such preface. They have no sign of personal responsibility affixed to them. They are simply ‘the facts’ - even though we know that in the text books published twenty years after, the ‘facts’ will be other.
And now this confidence has collapsed into what we are learning to call ‘post-modernity’. There are no ‘eternal truths’ of the kind celebrated in the ‘Age of Reason’. There are no ‘meta narratives’. There is no meaning in what we encounter, whether in a written text or in contemporary events. Meaning is what we choose to provide. The prophet of the collapse was Friederich Nietzsche (1884-1900 AD) who recognised that the critical principle must eventually turn on itself and destroy any basis for the critical act. In his own memorable phrase, ‘We have wiped out the horizons’. There is nothing which is simply ‘given’. Each of us is alone in a world without given landmarks. We are as completely ‘free’ and as completely futile as an astronaut floating weightless in space with nothing to connect him to a space-craft.
Before trying to say something about Christian witness in this situation, let me pause to consider again part of the story which I have summarised. Two great civilisations have sprung from a mingling of Greek rationalism and biblical faith - Islam and Christendom. (7) These two occupy a unique place in world history. None of the other world religions make claims which embrace the whole world. Islam is both a missionary religion and a political empire stretching from the Atlantic coasts of Africa to the Pacific coasts and islands of South-east Asia. Christianity is present, though not as a political power, in every nation of the world. Both confront, though in different ways, the claims and challenges of modernity. Their mutual interaction, with many changes in the balance of power between them, has been of crucial importance for both.
What is germane to our present discussion is the difference between the ways in which these two religions have dealt with the duality of their roots - classical and biblical. At the centre of Christianity is a revelation of God in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus (Heb 1.1-2). From the beginning the crucifixion of the Saviour has been seen as a contradiction of the wisdom of a world which depends for its wisdom on the ‘rational’ interpretation of empirical facts. The relation between the Greek and biblical elements in the Christian tradition has therefore always been problematic. There have been times when it seemed that it could only be expressed in terms of sheer opposition - ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ asked Tertullian (160?-230? AD). At other times it has seemed as if biblical faith was so domesticated within Greek rationalism that the scandal of the cross had been covered up.
Islam, by contrast, denies both the cross and resurrection. The Jesus of the Qur’an goes straight from the Virgin birth to the Ascension. Allah’s perfect will triumphs without such an unthinkable humiliation as the cross. There is no doctrine of original sin and therefore no doctrine of the atonement. God is sheer, transcendent power. Revelation is therefore a matter of communication and does not involve the agony of reconciliation. And this way of understanding revelation fits much more comfortably into the Aristotelian rationalism which Islam embraced than does the Christian understanding which makes salvation a matter of grace and faith, rather than (primarily) a matter of information and submission.
This difference between two ways of understanding divine revelation is at the heart of the difference between Islam and Christianity, and helps to explain the fact that Greek rationalism could be absorbed so completely into Islamic theology while for Christians it has created such tension and conflict.
The matter may be illuminated by returning to my earlier delineation of different logical levels. The neuro -surgeon does not depend on grace and faith for his confidence. He depends on the proved efficacy of his methods of analysis and observation which he is always seeking to improve. His confidence is in the adequacy of his cognitive methods. By contrast, the friend talking with his friend depends on the gracious willingness of the other to open her mind and reveal her thoughts. If he has at the back of his mind the thought that he needs to verify what he is being told by seeking independent ‘third party’ corroboration, the mutual understanding is not likely to develop. This kind of knowing works through grace and faith. It is only in this way that the true inter-personal knowledge and understanding comes about. As has often been noted, the positivism of 19th century modernism was a massive attempt at wholesale reductionism, an attempt to account for everything at the lowest possible logical level. The final result can only be absurdity.
From this point of view the mistake of Descartes becomes clear. It is not only that he pictured the human mind as though it were a disembodied eye looking at the cosmos from a god-like vantage point outside it (sub specie aeternitatis), but posing an ideal of ‘objectivity’ which is illusory. It is also that - from a Christian point of view - the proposal to offer a proof of the existence of God which by-passes God’s own self-revelation in Jesus Christ, seems to be incompatible with epistemological implications of our Christian understanding of our creaturely existence before God (sub specie temporis). (8) If practised in the context of human interpersonal relationships, it would terminate any incipient mutual understanding with immediate effect.
In spite of its erosion by the growing movement of ‘deconstruction’ among intellectuals in the ‘developed’ societies, Modernism is still the major challenge which the world faces, primarily because it is embodied in the global economic-financial-industrial system which is now more powerful than even the most powerful nation-states and which is rapidly engulfing traditional societies and their ‘autonomous economies’ into its mindless operations. Islam is making its own response to this at many levels - political, economic and intellectual. How are we as Christians to respond?
It is helpful, though perhaps too facile, to position oneself in the face of this question by looking at typical responses made so far by different groups of Christians. If I am doing this in such broad terms that those who represent these responses feel they are being caricatured, I can only ask pardon and plead the limitations of a brief essay.
The characteristic Liberal response has been to accept the main thrust of modernity and to seek to interpret the Gospel in such a way that it can be accepted by ‘modern’ people. One must not fail to acknowledge the genuinely evangelical motive in this concern. There has been a genuine and surely worthy desire that ‘modern’ people should come to know Jesus in their personal lives. But in this effort, essential questions of truth have been evaded. The truth- claims of modernity, its apparently obvious axioms and assumptions have been too widespread to be challenged. Liberals have tried to show how the Gospel can ‘make sense’ for modern people, when they should have rather tried to show that without the Gospel the world ultimately makes no sense at all.
To their credit, Liberals have been foremost in challenging the dehumanising consequences of modernity as embodied in the dominant global system of free-market capitalism and have produced works of great intellectual power to demonstrate the incompatibility of this system with biblical faith. (9)
A common response in Roman and some Anglo Catholic circles has been to re-state the Thomistic synthesis of Greek thought with biblical faith and to seek through a re-stated natural theology to demonstrate the reasonableness of the Christian faith. This has certainly not been without value in enabling many to embrace the Christian faith who might otherwise have been lost. Its weakness becomes clearly exposed when the ‘post- modernists’ reject the supposedly secure foundations on which ‘natural theology’ rested. And, as it seems to me, this tradition has never been able to face with sufficient seriousness the reality of sin and the necessity of the atonement. I am not suggesting that this was absent, but its full implications were not sufficiently acknowledged.
Among those who would identify themselves as ‘Conservative Evangelicals’ - sometimes including ‘Fundamentalists’ - the response to modernity has been an emphatic affirmation of the truth-claims of the Gospel. Conservatives have been ready, unlike most Liberals, to say bluntly that modernism is wrong at crucial points. There seems to me, however, to be a danger that the Conservative may be colluding with the Liberal in one point: both may be taking over a ‘modern’ way of understanding truth-claims.
The challenge for Conservatives is to think through the way they articulate the inspiration and authority of Scripture in such a manner that it follows the teaching and thought pattern of Scripture itself, and not the rationalism of someone like Descartes. The Bible is not written as a collection of incorrigible certainties, for it contains much internal self-correction. It is from the Bible itself that we must learn the way in which God speaks his word and this is in a way very different from - for example - the statements in a scientific text book.
Some Protestant theologians have developed a kind of natural theology which claims to provide conclusive logical proof for the affirmations which we make when we say the creed in church. It seems then as if our ultimate ground for confidence is not God’s living Word - Jesus Christ - but a series of philosophical statements whose reliability depends upon the capacity of our minds to reason correctly. It is also unfortunate that, in some of its most prominent expressions, such as the ‘religious right’ in the United States of America, ‘fundamentalism’ is linked to an unquestioning acceptance of the free market system with its global dominance, and of the individualism which it embodies.
How do we develop an adequate response to the challenge of modernity? I refer again to the Uppsala volume which anyone who is trying to answer this question should certainly read. And as Os Guinness has powerfully reminded us, we must learn to think, to put away any lingering idea of evangelical faith which does not also require disciplined thinking. (10) In what I have said in this essay about the primacy of grace and faith, I do not want to under-state the necessity of hard, critical thinking. As will already be clear, I do not think the future lies with the concept of ‘apologetics’ which supposes that we can validate the truth claims of the Gospel by relying on the findings of philosophy. That was, surely, the flaw in the work of Aquinas, as Buckley has so powerfully demonstrated.
There are, however, forms of apologetic which are always valuable. One is the critical analysis of the assumptions of modernity. There are assumptions which are so generally held by everyone we meet that it seems almost unthinkable to question them. But many of them can be shown to be quite irrational - such as the assumption that it is impossible to know the reality behind appearances, that all truth claims are ‘just what you think’, and that all the great religions are different paths to the same goal. This negative critique has an important place. There is also the positive task of showing by illustration how the Gospel illuminates the whole human situation, making better sense of that which, on any other view of the world, makes no sense. (11)
These and other forms of apologetic have a real value. But at the end of the day our task is to set forth the Lord Jesus Christ himself, clothed in his Gospel. The only response that matters in the end is the response of adoring and obedient faith to his gift and his calling. There is nothing higher, more universal or more reliable that we could dare to propose as ‘proof’ of his right to our love and obedience. As Bishop Reid says in this booklet, one of the dangerous features of modernity is the separation of truth claims from personal responsibility. We are responsible before God to believe and love the truth when it is offered to us. We cannot side-step that personal responsibility by appealing to the authority of some disinterested, ‘disengaged’ observer, who in the manner of Descartes, claims possession of ‘pure objectivity’. All human beings are called by God to seek the truth and to recognise and obey it. This call comes in the name of Jesus addressed to each of us personally: ‘Follow me’. At this point we are not allowed, like Peter, to look round and ask whether we have to go alone or whether we will be supported (John 21.18-23). The call requires a personal response.
That is the call we have to address to every human being. It must come as a call of grace and love, evoking the response of faith. And the call will be credible when it comes from the heart of a Christian congregation which is confident in the Gospel, believes it, celebrates it, lives it and carries it into the whole life of the community in which it is set.
REFERENCES TO CHAPTER 1
(1) For an excellent treatment of this period, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation - The rise of Modern Paganism New York & London: W W Norton & Co, 1966).
(2) This is not a new insight. The theologians of 17th century Protestant orthodoxy saw this clearly, though - as we will see - there was less clarity about the indispensability of a tradition as the cognitive environment in which critical reason actually functions. See, for example the catena of quotations in Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. from German and Latin by Charles Hay and Henry Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1899), pp 29-38.
(3) For my thoughts on this subject, I am indebted to Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958 & 1962).
(4) Again, for the idea of different logical levels, see Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
(5) On revelation as a personal self-disclosure, see Austin Farrer, "Revelation," in Basil Mitchell, ed. Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1957), pp 85; also William J Abraham, "Revelation" in Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall mc, 1985), pp 165-178.
(6) Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).
(7) Though it is certainly the case that Islam does not represent an adequate understanding of the biblical tradition. For this reason Islam was at first considered by Christians to be a Christian heresy. Moreover, source critical work being done on the Qur’an is proving to be very illuminating as regarding heretical Jewish and Christian sources incorporated in the Muslim holy book.
(8) The counsel of Ecclesiastes 5.2 seems apposite at this point: "God is in heaven, and you upon earth; therefore let your words be few".
(9) See, for example, William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin Books, 1942; and R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London: G Bell & Go, 1927);Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1926). Though by no means a theological Liberal, the more recent work of Jim Wallis continues to address these concerns from an avowedly Evangelical perspective.
(10) For a fine example of the result of such hard, critical thinking cast into a popular format, Os Guinness’ "Mission Modernity: Seven Checkpoints on Mission in the Modern World" in Sampson, Samuel and Sugden, eds., Faith and Modernity, (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1994), pp 322-352; and The Gravedigger File: Secret Papers on the Subversion of the Modern Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983).
(11) The kind of apologetics I have in mind might be represented by some of Reinhold Neibuhr’s work. While I might want to qualify some of his statements, the overall approach is right. His 1939 Gifford Lectures critiques the presuppositions of the thought of modernity from an avowedly (Augustinian-existentialist) Christian standpoint. See The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (London: Nisbet & Co, 1941), especially vol. 1.
