Liberating Christianity

Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium

Sorenson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275552
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity is in crisis in our North American context, especially among the cultural elite and people with progressive views. The reasons for the faith's loss of credibility have to do, in large part, with the dominant philosophical materialism of our culture and with the understanding of the faith almost universally held by Americans both inside the churches and outside them. In this book, Thomas C. Sorenson calls this understanding "Biblicism," by which he means the belief that the Bible is to be understood only literally and that, in one way or another, its authority comes from its claimed origin with God. Many enlightened people also reject Christianity because the only Christianity they know is the judgmental, socially conservative faith that the most vocal and visible advocates of the faith among us so loudly espouse.This book offers a different understanding of the faith. It begins with a discussion of the universal human experience of the spiritual dimension of reality. It then discusses symbol and myth as the necessary language for communicating that experience. The book shows that all human experience is necessarily subjective and that religious truth is thus also necessarily subjective. Therefore, religious truth is relative, not universal and absolute. The work argues that the Bible is a human work expressing its authors' experience of the divine. The book then discusses other obstacles to faith and offers a different understanding of the issues they raise. The book replaces the classical theory of atonement with a theology of the cross, based mainly on the work of Douglas John Hall. It redefines salvation as having to do with this life, not with the afterlife. It closes with a section that replaces the dominant social conservatism of popular Christianity with Jesus's teachings of nonviolence, economic justice, and radical inclusivity.

Part One

Overcoming the Obstacle of Philosophical Materialism

One of the primary obstacles with which the Christian faith is faced in our context today is the prevalence of the materialist worldview. “Materialist” here does not have its popular meaning of desiring to acquire many material goods. It means something more fundamental than that. It means the belief that only the material, only the physical, is real. A great many people in our dominant North American context today reject Christianity, indeed they reject all faith traditions, because they cannot accept the reality of the spiritual. To these people the only reality is physical reality. If they can’t see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, or taste it, it isn’t real to them. Many of these philosophical materialists, for that is what they are, consider any belief in the reality of the spiritual to be naïve at best and insidious at worst. Yet philosophical materialism is a rather recent development in the history of human culture, in which it is decidedly a minority voice. In this Part One we will consider the materialist worldview and seek to demonstrate that belief in a spiritual dimension to reality, which is in fact the nearly universal experience of humanity, is both reasonable and intellectually defensible.

1

The Rise of the Materialist Worldview and Its Effect on Christianity

All of us in our dominant North American context today are children of the Enlightenment and of the Scientific Revolution that was such a big part of it. The Enlightenment was nothing less than a major revolution in human thinking. In European cultures before the Enlightenment, and indeed in human cultures universally, about which more will be said below, the reality of a spiritual dimension was simply assumed. In the European Enlightenment for the first time reason replaced faith as the primary source of human knowledge. Ultimately, the Enlightenment and its intellectual offspring came to deny the reality of the spiritual altogether. We need to take a very brief look at how this happened if we are to understand the task before us of reclaiming the reality of the spiritual.

The Enlightenment was in part an evolution of Christianity. Its secular humanist values are in essence Judeo-Christian values with the faith or religious element removed. The Enlightenment was, however, also a reaction against Christianity. Specifically, it was a reaction against the violence and destruction that the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries visited upon Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. By the time the Treaty of Westphalia ended the worst of those wars, known as The Thirty Years’ War, in 1648, much of Europe’s intellectual elite was thoroughly disillusioned with religion, in whose name countless people had been killed and many of Europe’s cities had been destroyed. The contradiction between what Christianity preached and how Christian powers (if by no means all individual Christian people) had acted led the European intelligentsia to look for another way.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment found that other way in human reason. They elevated human reason to the status of the arbiter of truth. The Cartesian revolution in philosophy introduced a dualism in which a sharp distinction was drawn between the thinking subject and an objective world about which the thinking subject thought.1 Isaac Newton (1643–1727) introduced to the world a mechanical universe in which objects moved not at the will of God but according to immutable physical and mathematical principles called the laws of nature. Reason became the standard by which all human activity was judged. Reason dominated the political philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) and the economic philosophy of Adam Smith (1723–1790). Reason was sweeping the field in virtually every area of human endeavor.

As reason and science became the dominant ways in which people understood truth, God was pushed more and more to the margins. As early as 1616, when the Catholic Church condemned the astronomy theories of Copernicus which denied that the earth was the center of the universe, science and religion came to be more and more at odds. The Catholic Church’s infamous condemnation of Galileo (1564–1642) for teaching a Copernican view of the universe that he had confirmed with his own astronomic observations simply made the growing gap between science and religion wider and more apparent.2 The church may have tried to stop the advance of scientific knowledge, but it was unable to do so. The Catholic Church’s opposition to the new science served only to make the church more and more irrelevant in the development of European culture.

It wasn’t long before Europe’s intellectuals, forced to choose between faith and science, began to abandon belief in God altogether. Isaac Newton may have considered himself still to be a Christian, but by the mid-eighteenth century the high intellectual culture of Europe had largely abandoned the faith and was moving toward a strictly materialist worldview. Deism was a sort of halfway house on that journey. A rationalistic product of the Enlightenment, Deism did not deny the existence of God altogether. Rather, it limited God’s role to that of Creator. Deism saw God as The Great Clockmaker. God created the universe, charged it with energy, then let it go to run on its own according to those natural laws that Newton and the other scientists of the Enlightenment were so busy discovering.3

A God as marginal as the God of Deism is unlikely to survive very long. Indeed, Deism did not much outlive the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century European intellectuals had largely abandoned belief in God altogether. There certainly were great Christian theologians in the nineteenth century. The name Søren Kierkegaard comes readily to mind in this regard. Yet the worldview that was coming more and more to dominate the cultural landscape was philosophical materialism, or at least a philosophy that left little or no room for God. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) undertook to create a philosophical system to explain all of human experience. One of his bywords was “the real is rational, and the rational real.” The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) developed the influential doctrine of Positivism, which denies the value of metaphysical speculation and holds that the objects of human perception are the only things we can know. There may still have been some room for God in Hegel’s system, but Karl Marx (1818–1883), in many ways a disciple of Hegel and of Comte, took the final philosophical step to materialism. With Comte he taught that only the material is real, but with Hegel he accepted the validity of metaphysical speculation. He developed an entire philosophy of economics, politics, society, history, and culture on the basis of what he called “dialectical materialism,” the belief, that truly is nothing more than metaphysical speculation, that matter, the only reality, has its own internal dynamic that produces the events of human history. In biology, Charles Darwin’s great work The Origin of Species (1859) that introduced the concepts of evolution through adaptive genetic changes and the survival of the fittest seemed to challenge humans’ supposedly privileged position in creation as the one creature made in God’s image. It even challenged God’s role as Creator, at least in the traditional Christian sense. Philosophical materialism, whether “dialectical” or not, became the dominant world view of the European and North American intelligentsia. God was denied, or at least displaced, in the dominant intellectual disciplines, including economics, sociology, and political science. The spiritual worldview became culturally marginalized, and, by the dawn of the twentieth century, religious belief was considered quaint and naïve in most Euro-American intellectual circles.

One form of philosophical materialism that is very widespread in our context today is what we can call scientism. Scientism starts with the scientific method, the method of observation of natural phenomena and the confirmation or rejection of hypotheses about those phenomena through experimentation. This method produces what are considered to be valid scientific truths. In scientism, all other ways of discerning truth are rejected. To put some fancy words on it, epistemology becomes ontology. A way of knowing certain truths (an epistemology) becomes the determiner of all reality (an ontology). Only that which can be established by the scientific method is accepted as real. Most people who believe in scientism probably don’t recognize it as a belief system. To them it is simply how things are. People who believe in scientism (some but by no means all of whom are scientists) are not open to the spiritual truths of Christianity or of any other faith. Christianity will have nothing to say to them until they can see that scientism is in fact a very narrow understanding of truth that rejects a nearly universal human experience of the reality of the spiritual.

Philosophical materialism is an obstacle to faith in at least two ways. First, in the philosophical materialist worldview, truth consists only of facts. Especially in scientism, as we have seen, only that is true which can be established as true through the scientific method. The scientific method works very well for establishing facts about the physical world. Modern science has produced an explosion of human knowledge about the physical world. This knowledge consists of facts (or things we assume to be facts, which for our purposes here amounts to the same thing). When our understanding of reality is reduced to that which can be established by science, our understanding of reality is reduced to facts. What we take to be true has to be factual because for us only facts are true.

We will have much more to say about Christian literalism in the course of this study. The point we must make here is that Christian Fundamentalism and other forms of Christian literalism have been profoundly influenced by and indeed reflect this modern, materialist reduction of truth to facts. One example will illustrate this point. Christian literalists in our context insist that the creation account of Genesis 1:1–2:3 is “true.” By this they mean that God’s act of creation occurred literally in the way it is presented in that ancient story. By “literally” they mean factually. This is a philosophically materialist view of truth. For the true literalist, the Genesis creation story is not true if it is not factually true. The true literalist says that if we had been there we would have observed things happening exactly as the first creation story in Genesis describes them. For the literalist, the truth of Genesis 1 must be the same order of truth as the truths of science because that is the only kind of truth they recognize. Christian literalism has thus been profoundly influenced by philosophical materialism. Because Christianity must be liberated from literalism, philosophical materialism is also something from which Christianity must be liberated.

Philosophical materialism is, however, an obstacle to Christianity in an even more profound way. Like any tradition that can truly be called religious, Christianity is a spiritual worldview. It understands that reality consists of more than the material, more than the physical. Neither Christianity nor any other faith tradition will be an option for countless people in our context so long as they cling to the materialist view of reality. Overcoming the obstacles to faith in our context requires nothing short of a major paradigm shift in the way the most educated and sophisticated elements of our culture view reality. As Christian apologists4 we must make the spiritual worldview reasonable to those of our contemporaries who today consider it to be an irrational superstition. It is to that task that we now turn as we consider the scope and nature of the human experience of the spiritual.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What is real for you?

Is the physical world that you perceive with your senses real?

How do you know?

Is there any reality beyond the physical world that you perceive with your senses?

How do you know?

2. What does our culture consider to be real?

Is there any dimension of reality that our culture denies?

3. Recall anything you may have learned in school about the European Enlightenment and the role it assigned to reason in human life.

What is reason?

What is the proper role of reason in human thinking?

Are there types of knowledge that transcend or at least are different from reason? What are they?

1. The term Cartesian refers to René Descartes, 1596–1650, the French philosopher famous for the saying “I think, therefore I am,” often rendered in its Latin form...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Overcoming the Obstacle of Philosophical Materialism
• Part Two: Overcoming the Obstacle of Biblicism
• Part Three: Overcoming the Obstacle of the Denial of Grace
• Epilogue
• A Philosophical Appendix
• Glossary