The Essentials of Christian Thought

Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story

Roger E. Olson

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780310521563
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Or at least, such an outlook should unite Christians of all theological and church backgrounds. However, alternate visions of reality often infect and corrupt Christians’ thinking.

In The Essentials of Christian Thought, eminent theologian and church historian Roger Olson outlines the basic perspective on the world that all Christians, regardless of the place and time in which they are born, have historically held. This underlying metaphysic accords with all orthodox theologies, whether Calvinist or Arminian, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, but it separates Christianity from other religious and secular perspectives. It is, quite simply, the essential requirement of a Christian view of the world.

Bold and incisive, The Essentials of Christian Thought will prompt thoughtful readers and students to more consciously appropriate the core of their faith, guarding against ideas that subtly but necessarily invite compromise.

CHAPTER 1
Knowing Christianly: Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story

Many Christians consider philosophy and the Bible as contraries, antithetical to each other. Yet, literally, philosophy simply means “love of wisdom.” If there is wisdom in the Bible, and if we love that wisdom, then we are automatically philosophers in the literal sense of the word—especially if we seek to understand that wisdom using our God-given reasoning minds. Some will agree with that much but object to talk of metaphysics in the Bible and wish to disassociate the Bible and Christianity from metaphysics. Again, much depends on how metaphysics is understood. Literally it simply means “what goes before the physical.” It could be understood simply as love of that wisdom about ultimate reality revealed in the Bible. Surely the Bible does not presuppose that the physical is ultimate reality; something came before and underlies the physical, the natural. As soon as one talks about anything “supernatural” one is in the realm of metaphysics. Supernatural is another problematic word that will be used in this book, but it will be carefully defined later to clear up misconceptions that cause much confusion about it.

Epistemology: Thinking about Knowing

One branch of philosophy is epistemology, thinking about knowing: What can we know and how can we know it? All kinds of questions arise in epistemology such as: Can we have absolute certainty about anything? There is no room here for a complete discussion of epistemology; that would consume many volumes. Modern philosophy especially has been obsessed with questions and concerns about knowledge. Traditionally epistemology comes before metaphysics in handbooks of philosophy, and that sequence will be followed here somewhat reluctantly. “Reluctantly” because it is our conviction that every epistemology assumes some account of reality and thus metaphysics. Put otherwise, the hows and whys and whats of knowing depend on some understanding of reality itself—on a worldview. Epistemology always assumes some framework of reality itself. There is an inescapable circularity in philosophy between epistemology and metaphysics.

Here, however, before delving very deeply into essential Christian thought (basic, foundational, biblical-Christian metaphysics), a bare-bones kind of account of Christian knowing will be offered. A certain perspective on knowing about ultimate reality, metaphysics, will be presupposed throughout the rest of the book, and therefore the reader is owed an account of it up front. The underlying question here is: How are Christians justified in believing the Bible to be a true account of reality?

Our account of knowing, our Christian-based epistemology, will diverge considerably from the main modern one which is commonly called foundationalism. Until the dawn of the modern age with the Enlightenment (approximately 1650), most philosophers, like ordinary people, believed that knowing truth depended on a combination of faith, tradition, and reason. Reason was commonly understood as common sense observation and logic. When it came to metaphysics, truth about ultimate realities, certain traditional philosophies and theologies held sway for most people. Authority was heavily invested in, for example, a combination of Greek philosophy and traditional church teaching about the Bible’s meaning. Knowledge and belief were not separated.

Then came the Protestant Reformation, which shook the foundations of Christian civilization, including philosophy and theology, and triggered the devastating Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants. One philosopher was especially disillusioned by the Wars of Religion and determined to find a new way of establishing knowledge even in religion. René Descartes (1596–1640) is usually considered the father of modern philosophy because of his revolutionary ideas about knowledge. He is famous for advocating doubt rather than faith as the beginning point for knowing. The one thing he could not doubt was his own existence: “I think; therefore I am.” He deduced an entire system of knowledge, including metaphysics and the existence of God, from his own existence.

Foundationalism is the epistemology begun by Descartes and carried forward by later Enlightenment thinkers. Basically, foundationalism depicts knowledge as a pyramid with indubitable truths of evidence and/or reason at the bottom and everything else flowing upward from them by induction or deduction (observation and/or logic).¹ Many modern philosophers adopted some form of foundationalism because it seemed to offer an objective, universal, rational path to knowledge that eliminated faith, revelation, and reliance on authority. At its most extreme, foundationalism claims that knowledge is a term reserved for what can be proven rationally; all else is “belief,” “opinion,” or “superstition.” Of course, one result has been that those three categories tend to collapse together into one for foundationalists: “subjectivism.” Only the foundational method, rationalism, is thought to yield objective knowledge. The result, of course, was a crisis for religion. Many religious philosophers and theologians scrambled to adapt religion to foundationalism using natural theology—knowledge about God and religious matters based on reason alone. But many affirmed foundationalism for the physical and human sciences while taking religion into the realm of subjective belief divorced from reason and knowledge (fideism).

Enlightenment foundationalism created a crisis for religion; religious responses were wildly diverse. None seemed to satisfy the rationalists, who disagreed among themselves about many things, such as whether it was possible to have knowledge about metaphysics. Kant argued that metaphysics was off limits to reason because pure reason could know nothing except appearances and the categories the mind uses to organize the data of the five senses. The upshot of it all was extreme skepticism about metaphysics and religion—unless they were relegated to the realms of subjectivity or authority, in which cases their truth claims should not be labeled “knowledge.”

The ultimate reach of Enlightenment-based skepticism toward metaphysics and religion relegated them totally to the realm of subjectivity and mere opinion (at best) and came in the early twentieth century with a type of rationalism called positivism. Positivism, led by philosophers A. J. Ayer (1910–89) and Antony Flew (1923–2010), dictated that all statements of fact were meaningless unless they could be empirically (using the five senses) verified (Ayer) or falsified (Flew). This meant that religious truth claims not only did not constitute knowledge but were meaningless—unless they could be verified or falsified. Ayer, Flew, and other positivists claimed they could not be verified or falsified objectively and empirically. This was true for all metaphysics as well. Metaphysics, which had long been held to be a necessary part of theology, was declared dead. At best, even its supporters admitted, it had become the “sick man of philosophy”—virtually ignored, considered a relic of a distant, premodern past.²

The Decline of Modern Rationalism

The irony is that not long after ascending to the pinnacle of modern philosophy, positivism itself became sick. It was attacked from all sides for many reasons. One main reason was that its own principle was itself unverifiable and unfalsifiable!³ In other words, critics pointed out, if positivism is true it is meaningless—an example of what is called in philosophy a “self-referentially absurd claim.” Of course, positivists came back with defending arguments and critics provided many alternative accounts of how truth claims can be meaningful even if not provable or falsifiable. The 1950s was either the high point or the low point, depending on one’s perspective, of modern philosophical analysis of metaphysical and religious language.

During this drawn-out debate over language and meaning, one philosopher gradually became the leading voice against positivism, but he was much more than that. Austrian-born Cambridge University philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) proposed that language, including truth claims, was being misunderstood and misrepresented by the positivists (even though he had once associated himself with them). According to Wittgenstein and his followers, there is no one “language game” that is normative and that has the authority to determine the meaning and validity of all others. For him, there are multiple language games with different grammars and rules. What is meaningful in one is not meaningful in another. Each has its own rules for meaningfulness. Most shocking, to positivists and other foundationalists, was Wittgenstein’s claim that religion is its own language game not to be judged by other language games such as the empirical sciences. In other words, Wittgenstein was denying a universal rationality that covers and judges all thought and speech. Whether he intended to or not he extended a philosophical olive branch, as it were, to metaphysics and religion, both of which had been under incredible attack in philosophy since the dawn of the Enlightenment but especially by positivists who seemed to rule especially British and American philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. If Wittgenstein was right, so it seemed, metaphysics and religion had new leases on life.

Several of the authors of essays in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955) offered what could be considered postmodern approaches to epistemology. Certainly they were postfoundationalist. One of the book’s editors was Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) who began then and went on to advocate an approach to knowledge that borrowed heavily from Wittgenstein but added in the dimensions of story, community, and tradition. MacIntyre has argued persuasively in his many volumes of philosophy that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is shaped by a tradition-community and its governing story. By story he does not mean “fiction” but narrative account of reality. His argument gained great support when philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that even the “hard” experimental sciences do not operate solely by evidence and reason but are driven or held back by paradigms—another word for what MacIntyre meant by story. (Kuhn’s groundbreaking work in the philosophy of science drove a nail in the coffin of modern foundationalism and opened the door further to postfoundationalist epistemology.)

Another author of an essay in New Essays was R. M. Hare (1919–2002), an Oxford University professor of philosophy who coined the term blik for world perspective—a way of “seeing the world as” something—existing independently of verification or falsification. In other words, according to Hare, everyone tends to “see” reality “as” something or other, and such basic visions of ultimate reality are never amenable to mere evidential or logical verification or falsification. In fact, as many of Hare’s followers pointed out, positivism itself depends on and articulates a blik!

The Rise of Perspectives in Thinking about Knowing

This word and concept blik merits further attention here. While not all postfoundationalist philosophers like the word, it seems to cover a lot of potential territory in postfoundationalist epistemology. A simple illustration is often used to explain it. Imagine, for example, a drawing of an animal that might be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. (There is a famous illustration of such found in Wittgenstein’s 1953 book Theological Investigations.) The mind tends to see it either as one or the other, although it could be either. A blik is when one sees it as a duck, not a rabbit, or vice versa. Of course, this is a simple illustration of something much more complicated. According to Hare and other Wittgensteinian philosophers, all knowing is blik-dependent. That is not to say, they would all caution, that it is impossible to break out of one’s blik and see reality “as” something else. Only extreme Wittgensteinians think bliks, language games, are private and incorrigible—that is, imprisoning such that one cannot look at reality differently. The point is only that all knowing tends to be influenced by perspectives. This can be called “postfoundationalist perspectivalism.” The relevant point for religion is that it introduces something akin to faith in all knowing. If it is true, then knowing is always shaped by “seeing as,” by unprovable and unfalsifiable perspective.

This postmodern, postfoundationalist, perspectivalist approach to epistemology, however, might not be of any help to either metaphysics or theology because both, by definition, seek to discover and state what is true about reality for everyone, always, and everywhere. In other words, metaphysics, especially, can never be private or personal in the sense of merely relative or true only for one person or group. By definition metaphysics attempts to explain ultimate reality—what is really real and not just for one person or a group of people. So while Wittgensteinian postfoundationalism might crack open the door to religious discourse once again being meaningful and might take away foundationalism’s claim to own the category knowledge, how does it help metaphysics?

Uniting Perspectivalism with Metaphysics

A too-little noticed but very insightful answer was published by philosopher James Richmond in 1971: Theology and Metaphysics. Richmond brought together perspectivalism and metaphysics by redefining both. In other words he softened perspectivalism to avoid sheer subjectivism and relativism in truth and knowledge and softened metaphysics to allow for an element of subjectivity.

Richmond went against the stream of post-Kantian antimetaphysical theology so prominent in modern Protestant theology, which has tended to reduce Christianity to ethics or spiritual feelings. He boldly stated his thesis that Christian theology and ethics cannot dispense with some metaphysical vision that draws together into a rational whole human experience of and knowledge about reality.⁴

Richmond defined metaphysics as “existential map...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Why This Book
• 1. Knowing Christianly: Seeing Reality Through the Biblical Story
• 2. Ultimate Reality Is Supernatural and Personal (But Not Human)
• 3. The Biblical Vision of Ultimate Reality Retrieved
• 4. Non-Biblical, Non-Christian Views of Reality
• 5. The Biblical-Christian View of Ultimate Reality: God
• 6. The Biblical-Christian Perspective On the World
• 7. Biblical-Christian Humanism
• Appendix: A Model for the Integration of Faith and Learning