Faith, Reason, and Culture

An Essay in Fundamental Theology

George Karuvelil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030458140
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030458157
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this book, George Karuvelil seeks to establish the rationality of religion and theology in the contemporary world. Theology has always required some philosophical basis. Moreover, Christian theology has had a dynamic character that enabled it to adapt to more than one philosophy depending on the need of the time. For instance, it shifted in accordance with the change from Neo-Platonism to Aristotelianism in the thirteen century. However, this dynamism has been absent since the dawn of modernity, when reason became identified with modern science to disastrous results. While the advent of postmodernism has brought the limits of modernism to light, it has done nothing to establish the rationality of religion, other than to treat religion as a cultural phenomenon along with science. This book conceives fundamental theology as a discipline that seeks religious truth in the midst of diverse perspectives, ranging from militant atheism to violent religious fanaticism.

© The Author(s) 2020

G. KaruvelilFaith, Reason, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Reason: The Multi-Coloured Chameleon

George Karuvelil¹

(1)

Faculty of Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

George Karuvelil

Keywords

Faith and reasonThomas AquinasEpistemologyObjectivismScientism

End Abstract

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) officially opened up the possibility of thinking independently of Scholastic philosophy and theology. One unintended consequence of this opening up was a decline among Roman Catholics in the study of philosophy, ‘not just of Scholastic philosophy but of philosophy itself’.¹ This impacted its theology with ‘theologians … allow[ing] themselves to be swayed uncritically by assertions which have become part of current parlance and culture’ (55). This sense of being adrift was producing an equally problematic ‘fideism which fails to recognize the importance of …philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith’ (55). Under these circumstances, Pope John Paul II saw the need to reaffirm that ‘study of philosophy is fundamental and indispensable to the structure of theological studies’ (62). He did this with the encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), which had been in the making for some 12 years, after closely observing the state of philosophy and theology for more than three decades after Council.

The encylical’s insistence on the need for both the wings of faith and reason was followed up by the Congregation for Catholic Education in 2012 making a course on faith and reason as a requirement for obtaining a bachelor’s degree from its philosophy faculties.² Both these documents are emphatic about the need to hold faith and reason together. Neither breaks any new ground nor provides any blueprint for accomplishing this task. Small wonder, therefore, that seminaries tend to meet the demand for teaching faith and reason by teaching Fides et Ratio . Such shortcut solutions forget that the encyclical involves a large vision for the future. In this introductory chapter I will spell out this vision and argue that following this vision calls for greater attention to the cultural entanglement of reason than what is recognized in the encyclical.

1 The Vision and Mission of Fides et Ratio

To begin with, the encyclical does not see relating faith and reason as an internal affair of the Church. Rather, the faithful must rationally engage the larger culture outside the Church. This is seen in the recognition that philosophy is needed, ‘often the only ground’ (104) for ‘communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it’ (5). This is the missionary dimension of the vision. As a person who earnestly attempted to carry out this dimension of the vision, it will be instructive to look at Pope Benedict XVI’s efforts.

1.1 Pope Benedict XVI: Missionary of a Rationally Engaged Faith

The extensive writings and engagements of Joseph Ratzinger (both as Pope and before) are pervaded by an urgency to re-evangelize the Western world that had become unhinged from its Christian moorings. He was anguished that, at two crucial moments in post-war Europe, Christianity failed to provide an anchor for those who were in search of meaningful alternatives. The first was the youth rebellion of 1968 and the second was the 1989 ‘collapse of the socialist regimes in Europe, which left behind a sorry legacy of ruined land and ruined souls’.³ This anguish prompted his attempts to reach out and present Christianity as a rational option to his European contemporaries.

Three of his attempts to reach out to the outside world are well known: engaging with Jürgen Habermas, a leading public intellectual, in 2004; addressing the University of Regensburg in 2006; and addressing the German Parliament (Bundestag) in 2011. I shall consider only the last, which did not have the sort of violent aftermath his Regensburg address had,⁴ but still illustrates where his theological brilliance falls short in addressing the rationality of faith in the contemporary world.

In his address, the Pope dealt with the foundations of law and the responsibility of politicians to safeguard those foundations, irrespective of their political affiliations. He observed: ‘Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society’. By this he was making it clear that although he was the head of the Catholic Church, he was not a theocrat; the state has its own autonomy. Then he went on to add that the ‘true source of law’ is ‘nature and reason’.⁵ The erudite pope showed that this tradition goes back not only to pre-Christian times, especially to the Stoic philosophers and the teachers of Roman law, but also to juridical developments during the Enlightenment, climaxing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. He did not hesitate to draw out the implication: politicians must go beyond the concern to secure a majority and do what is right and just.

The speech was highly appreciated, with one newspaper (Frankfurter Rundschau) even saying that the ‘pope could have put all his critics to shame’.⁶ The autonomy of the laws of state from the laws of the Church or from similar laws like the Islamic Sharia is definitely good news—not only for countries that are multi-religious and multi-cultural, but also for countries with significant minority populations of the same religion as with Shias and Sunnis or with Protestants and Catholics. The pope was showing a way forward to the whole world.

But criticism followed the adulation. Some criticized the speech for what they saw as overriding the majority principle as the basis of democracy.⁷ I wonder if such critics would still maintain that view after witnessing how an unprincipled use of the majority principle can be turned into a majoritarianism that threatens the lives and livelihoods of minority populations of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural countries like India and the US. The more important criticism was that the Pope claimed ‘universal acceptance of a particular worldview by declaring a specific approach to be general’.⁸ As a firm believer in God, it was right for him to speak of ‘the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God’.⁹ But what about those who do not believe in God? After all, was that not the point of acknowledging the autonomy of the laws of state? Harmony of objective and subjective reason is deeply rooted in the history of Western philosophy and Christian theology. It is a tradition that owes a lot to Stoics and the metaphysical tradition of Christian Scholasticism. Unfortunately, it was these very same things that the modern world revolted against. The Pope’s outlook and his address were strong on history and tradition, but weak in showing the rationality of faith to the secularized Europe. If the Church is to reach out to the contemporary world, it needs to look beyond the readymade solutions of the past and engage in the ‘daunting’ philosophical task that Fides et Ratio has rightly described as ‘one of the tasks which Christian thought will have to take up through the next millennium of the Christian era’ (85).

1.2 A Vision for Future

That brings me to the second dimension of the vision: it is a task for the future. The encyclical calls on Christian philosophers to ‘develop a reflection which will be both comprehensible and appealing to those who do not yet grasp the full truth which divine Revelation declares’ (104). This task is daunting as it requires a ‘unified and organic vision of knowledge’ in the face of a ‘splintered approach to truth and the consequent fragmentation of meaning’ (85). Here we have a clear indication that at the heart of the crisis to which Fides et Ratio responds is a theory of knowledge or epistemology. Against ‘widespread symptoms of lack of confidence in truth’ (5) the encyclical confidently affirms that ‘Truth can never be confined to time and culture’ (95). In keeping with the insistence on the human capacity for knowing truth, the word ‘truth’ appears no less than 365 times in the document, besides another 70 occurrences of ‘true’ and Aquinas is praised as an ‘apostle ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Reason: The Multi-Coloured Chameleon
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Back Matter