Revisiting Christianity

Theological Reflections

Marius C. Felderhof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317063544
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This book presents a view of Christianity and Christian thinking that draws on some key thinkers from Plato to Wittgenstein and represents a thoughtful 'common sense' theology offered as an alternative to the anti-intellectualism of many contemporary Christians and to the distortions of Christianity provided by some of the most vocal critics. Seeking to make accessible some traditional Christian thinking and practices that are rooted in the desire to make the most of life, Felderhof highlights the additional Platonic corollary that unless we have learned to live well, we shall not properly understand, thus presuming the mutual interdependence of theory and practice. Felderhof portrays how Christian theology is to do with making sense of what Christians do and how generally we are best advised to live. This is an invaluable introduction to key themes for students and a wide range of readers.

PART I
Clarifying What Christians Do

Chapter 1
Eternal Life

What is the role and significance of the idea of eternal life?1

Many people plan their lives according to a carefully ordered timetable of sequential steps recorded in CVs, that is to say, most people live in a fundamentally temporal way with a past, present and future. With this familiar pattern in mind, people are led into the preconception that eternity means ‘time without end’, an ongoing time, a movement of time without limit and that, consequently, eternal life is taken to mean a life that never ceases but goes on forever and ever. This conclusion may be natural but it should not be presumed. To take for granted the assumption that eternal life is like this life, only indefinitely more of it, i.e. that it is quantitatively more, actually discounts any potentially ‘spiritual’ meaning it may have. The term ‘spiritual’ here signals a qualitative rather than quantitative difference in life, one which truly distinguishes the spiritual from the materialistic. Similarly, we should explore the notion that the Eternal differs from the temporal qualitatively, just as the infinite is qualitatively different from the finite.

If a materialistic (some would say ‘naturalistic’) rather than a spiritual understanding of the world is taken for granted and one assumes this is the only way to think, asking what it means to live with eternity in view will inevitably seem rather strange and esoteric. Normally, our life cannot plausibly be described as going on forever without end; physically we die; our brains die; our mental processes cease. So how and where does the idea of an eternal life arise and have its application?

To open up other possibilities we should note that to confine ourselves to the material world could blind us to questions, for example, about its significance and value. If we are essentially located in time and space, we might take a ‘position’ beyond the boundaries of those considerations by asking what is the meaning of this existence?2 What is the point of life in its totality when it is so obvious that our life begins and ends in nothingness? As human beings with a pressing awareness of our mortality,3 we are often struck and overcome by feelings of pointlessness, especially when confronted by the death of the young and the innocent. A kind of nihilism takes hold of us and we reason that if life ends in nothingness, it is essentially meaningless and consequently we may lose the will to live.

Yet from the same imaginative vantage point of overviewing the totality of life, we are encouraged when we suspect that regardless of passing time and death, there are occasional intimations of enduring worth. These we are equally quick to observe and eager to acknowledge in everyday life, for example, at a Remembrance Day service where we recall all those who do not grow old. It is these intimations of enduring worth which are seized upon by faith, for above all faith is a kind of confidence that there is, or that there must be, a sense to life that is untouched by the passing of time, untouched by death. The challenge is not only to identify where the source and ground for this confidence lies but also how to talk about it and how to cultivate it in life. What we do not want is self-deception and false consolation.4

How can the confidence of faith, which sets aside the limits of time, be justified?

Firstly, faith generally resists the satisfaction of explanations offered by accounts that are wholly confined to location and movement in space and time, to connected causal relations, for example, the world as described in a materialistic philosophy. By ‘materialistic’ I do not mean having an overriding interest in money, but the view that everything ultimately boils down to a matter of physics or chemistry.5 Materialism is basically a rather mechanistic view of the world, which is at its most reductive when it holds that everything can ultimately, in principle at least, be accounted for through the investigations of the causal connections offered by these two disciplines alone. Naturally, this reductionism eliminates the Eternal from any serious consideration for the obvious reason that the physical universe is clearly temporal in character. In fact, many cosmologists claim that the physical universe had a beginning some 15 billion years or so ago. There is no reason to doubt or quarrel with their claim on theological grounds. Theologians as theologians are not in a position to contradict the evidence of the natural sciences in this regard. What they do dispute is the sense of reductionism6 and the assumption that the pursuit of the unity of knowledge requires it.

Especially at issue is the claim that there can be no other meaning or any other forms of understanding than the materialistic one with its interest in causal connections. For the theologian, reductionism is seen to be a kind of imperialistic embargo as if the only thing we care about is restricted to the limits defined by space and temporality. But why should we accept such imperialistic moves? Most disciplines add their own unique insights into the multi-dimensional reality that is our world, highlighting features which cannot be explained by physics and chemistry. By resisting reductionism, we open up our perceived world to different possibilities which are in part generated by what we care about, i.e. by our differing interests. Basically we cannot come to know what does not interest us.

Do our interests need to be justified and how do they relate to each other?

Although the concern for eternal life may appear to characterise the religious life above all,7 it is in fact an interest that most or, at least, many people share in one form or another. As a line of thought it is not solely confined to the ostensibly religious. It may first make its appearance as a general anxiety about the limits of life. Crudely children may ask what happens to people when they die. The question posed like this can only lead to agnosticism. Or, better, we might say nothing happens to them for they have ceased to be. If anything can be said to happen, it is that a person’s identity is fixed and the possibility of change is removed; on the point of death we quite simply and unchangeably become what we once were. This may be a terrifying thought to some. The absence of a future, the inability to change or to be free from the past is deeply worrying. The midlife crisis some people experience may be an echo of feelings of being circumscribed, a point at which we are unable to live for something better or to become something better. We would like to begin life over again, to start afresh. With an increasing awareness of the limits of our life we are beset by the fear that we may be missing out on something we know not what. The confidence of faith is the obverse of an anxiety experienced in life.

As hinted earlier, another way to begin to understand eternal life is to note that within this life people do have a positive interest in cultivating in their life various concerns that are not strictly time-bound; in other words, there are activities done for their own sake, such as sports and art. There are quite simply concerns that do not depend on how things go; one does not do them for the sake of something else. They are pursued for the ‘now’ and not for some future good. They are in a manner of speaking timeless. It is with the timeless concerns of life, I propose, that we begin to discern the meaning of eternal life.

The most obvious things to note here is that we are dealing with a very basic human interest that is not readily (if at all)8 transposed into something else. And purely as an interest, the Eternal is just one of a number of very basic interests9 that human beings happen to have. Temporal interests include economic ones, making money (in gospel language, ‘building ever bigger barns’) or the interest in satisfying bodily needs such as hunger, thirst or sex. As mentioned earlier, people have an interest in causal relations;10 this manifests itself when they ask what caused the accident or what caused the explosion. Basically, interests are what people have when they begin to develop some serious pursuits. From a cognitive point of view (i.e. in what we can come to know and understand), the particular interests that we happen to have can certainly affect the character and the limits of the understanding we have of the world and of ourselves. If we have no interest in beauty, the understanding that we develop of the world is unlikely to have an aesthetic dimension.

In somewhat the same way that a scientist’s interest in causal relationships is what drives the investigations of the natural sciences, it is my claim that the interest in ‘eternal life’ is the characteristic and constitutive passion of religious life.11 We must not forget that human beings do have a range of other interests apart from the ‘causal’ and the ‘eternal’ just mentioned. For example, human beings, almost universally, have an interest in: 1) what is right and good (Murdoch, 1970) – it is the interest which is constitutive of moral life – and also in 2) the beautiful – it is the interest which is constitutive of the aesthetic life. There are two important points to observe at this juncture. The first is that these interests cannot be easily transposed. They are simply different. Secondly, one does not normally need to have reasons for such interests – people simply have them!

Do connections exist between the different interests that human beings have? Is this connectedness a reflection of the world we know?

Insofar as we may rightly long for an integrated view of our life, we may assume that the various interests that human beings have do actually relate, or are linked, to each other in some way. But not everyone thinks this is so! Such people live more compartmentalised lives. There are artists who glory in being reprobates. Art is done for art’s sake, not because it has any moral value; creativity may be treated as counter-cultural, rejecting anything that the culture has previously believed to be true, good and beautiful. There do seem to be some select individuals who write great music or poetry and at the same time manifest all the qualities of being thoroughly dissolute.12 In short, there are people who have separated the aesthetic from the moral. There cannot therefore be an absolutely necessary link between the beautiful and the good so that one cannot have one without the other.

On the other hand, there are those who justify the maintenance of museums and art galleries on public funds on the grounds that art is somehow edifying and humanising; similar arguments are used for the maintenance of orchestras, ballet companies, troupes of actors and theatres. They are all thought to be worthy of support from the taxpayer for the common good. In other words, they appear to presume a fundamental connection between aesthetic and moral life. As a consequence, the people who employ such arguments implicitly believe that our society would be shallower and more impoverished – less good –without these aesthetic forms of life.

Historically, Plato thought of the Good and the Beautiful as being Eternal and that together they are ultimately one. In other words, he made connections between the fundamental interests that human beings have.13 There is – he supposed – an underlying unity in all reality. If this is true, it could explain the deep relationship that has been presumed to exist in Western cultural history prior to the Enlightenment: 1) between religion (with its interest in eternity) and morals, and 2) between religion and art.

The relationship that may exist between the interests in beauty, goodness and the Eternal on the one hand and the causal interest that scientists have on the other hand is much more complex. Indications that a relationship does exist may be gathered from scientists who speak of a particular theory being ‘elegant’ and ‘beautiful’, as if these aesthetic considerations are important criteria for preferring a particular scientific theory to potential rivals. We can only conclude that aesthetic judgments matter in science, even if we are not sure why.

The relationship between science and the moral is even more problematic. It has certainly been asserted by more than one scientist that science is strictly speaking amoral. Science, it is said, is concerned with whether something is true, not whether it is good. But the claim that science is strictly amoral has been profoundly worrying to many, since it rather supposes that activities, such as the rightness or wrongness of dropping the atomic bomb, the adoption of programmes in eugenics and the experimentation on sentient animals, are outside the scope of the scientist qua scientist. It appears to suggest that scientists can engage in research, in searching for truth, ignoring all moral considerations and consequences. But where science is taken to be amoral, it appears all too often to pave the way for, and to be a precursor of, im morality.

However, even if science in itself is amoral, the scientists who pursue their science are human beings. As human beings they can be held accountable for the intentions and consequences of their scientific work. The same is true for any society that expends its energy and resources on whatever will destroy,14 whilst neglecting the scientific research that will clearly promote and enhance the flourishing of human beings and their world. When people confidently say that an individual scientist and the society will be subject to moral judgment and will be held accountable (using the future tense), what in fact is meant is that sub specie aeternitatis people are inescapably subject to moral judgment. They may not in this place or in this point in time invoke moral considerations, but from a religious point of view they cannot, as human beings, ultimately escape moral judgment. Hence, religiously, there is such a thing as a last judgment made in eternity.

If there are relationships between different interests that people have, what is the precise relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘science’?

The relationship between the interests in the ‘eternal’ and the ‘causal’ is much more problematic than that generated by the relationship between morality and aesthetics or between science and morality. This could explain some of the difficulties encountered between religion and science that have dominated the modern world.

Part of the difficulty reside...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On Revisiting Christian Faith
• PART I: CLARIFYING WHAT CHRISTIANS DO
• PART II: CLARIFYING TO WHAT CHRISTIANS ARE COMMITTED
• Appendix: Christological Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index