Faith and Reason and Studying the Bible

I have just read Ronald Hendel’s piece in Biblical Archaeology Review, "Biblical Views: Farewell to SBL: Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies" (July/August 2010). Hendel laments that the Society of Biblical Literature appears to be pandering or catering to "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" groups.As Hendel sees it, the SBL has dropped the word "critical" from its motto in order to attract more conservative biblical scholars. Traditionally, SBL’s motto included the language, "founded in 1860 to foster critical biblical scholarship."  Recently the language which appears is ". . . to foster biblical scholarship"—"critical" has dropped out. This displeases Hendel. The word "critical" should be reinstated—on Hendel’s view—for the SBL should be committed to "reason" not "faith."  I do not really have a dog in the hunt over whether to include the word "critical."  But Hendel's piece is interesting because it is as sterling an example of modernist and dogmatic enlightenment thought that one is likely to find.

There are many things that could be said about Hendel’s piece, but let us note his use of Blaise Pascal.  Hendel quotes Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”  Hendel comments: "Pascal's Pensées draws a wise distinction between religious faith and intellectual inquiry. The two have different motivations and pertain to different domains of experience. They are like oil and water, things that do not mix and should not be confused. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, and he did not allow his Catholic beliefs to interfere with his scholarly investigations." He continues: "...facts are facts, and faith has no business dealing in the world of facts. Faith resides in the heart and in one’s way of living in the world."

This is a wonderful example of the mindset of modernist and dogmatic enlightenment thinking.  It is, in short, dogmatism parading as free-thinking.  It is classic pietism, the type of pietism that sometimes follows a trajectory to an anti-intellectualism and sometimes follows a trajectory to old-school liberalism.  For Hendel, faith has to do with what goes on in the human heart while reason or intellectual inquiry has to do with what goes on in the human mind.  Classic pietism.

Pascal might be read in this way at points.  But a fuller reading of Pascal will likely point us in another direction.

For Pascal, our intellectual inquiry and deliberation is shaped all the way down by the state of our hearts.  That is, our intellectual abilities are always thoroughly shaped by our relationship to Jesus himself, and whether we are in submission to him.

Indeed, intellectual error is directly related to our moral character.  Pascal would write: “Those who do not love truth excuse themselves on the ground that it is disputed and that very many people deny it.  Thus their error is due to the fact that they love neither truth nor charity, so they have no excuse.”[1]  Indeed, writes Pascal: “The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from God, is invisible to carnal and intellectual people.  They are three orders differing in kind."[2]   What is needed, contended Pascal, is to see all things through Jesus Christ.  Apart from this, we would have no true knowledge. Hence, Pascal is a true Augustinian when he wrote:

"Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ.  Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.

Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself".[3]

Indeed, we know nothing truly if we do not know it in the light of Christ and Scripture.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood Pascal quite well when he summarized Pascal, even though Nietzsche disagreed with Pascal.  Nietzsche summarizes Pascal as follows: “Our inability to know the truth is the consequence of our corruption, our moral decay.”[4]

There is much more which could be said of Hendel’s piece.  But one thing should be said: Pascal and many like him did not drive a wedge between faith andreason.  On the contrary: our intellectual lives are inextricably linked to one’s relationship to Christ, and true knowledge requires that one bows to the risen Jesus.

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Published: 22 June 2010 22 June 2010

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David Jeffrey, the Bible and the University

In the eighth and last volume in the "Scripture and Hermeneutics Series," David Lyle Jeffrey and C. Stephan Evans served as editors for The Bible and the University (Zondervan, 2007).  I have read several of the essays, but to me the stand out is David Lyle Jeffrey's "Introduction" (which was also published in Touchstone magazine).  The entire volume wrestles with the place of the Bible in the university.  This question will strike some moderns (and particularly thoroughgoing secularists) as extremely odd, put historically the question was a fair one, and not a particularly shocking one (even if folks have historically disagreed on the role of the Bible in places of learning).

But Jeffrey's "Introduction" is simply excellent.  As Jeffrey has written here and elsewhere, in the Christian West knowledge was always seen in relation to other and related goals like wisdom and virtue, and in relation to God.  That is, Christians--at their best--have always seen the acquisition of knowledge against the backdrop of God, man, the world, and God's relationship to man and the rest of the created order.  Man is a creature, and true knowledge must always be seen in relationship to the God who has created and rules over all things.

To forget wisdom is ultimately to cripple the educational enterprise, and we have been living amidst the ruins of this crippled enterprise for some time.  Jeffrey's argument is  radical and penetrating.  He certainly is saying that we should seek to understand the relationship between knowledge and the lordship of Christ, and he certainly is saying that we should seek to grasp how to think Christianly about the acquisition of knowledge, and that such knowledge is always to be submitted to the universal lordship of Christ.  But Jeffrey is saying a tad more than that.  It is tempting in Christian colleges and universities to speak simply of a Christian "worldview" or of the "integration of faith and learning" (both fine realities, properly understood).  But Jeffrey is also arguing that in the Christian West, the Bible itself was a central component of liberal learning.  He writes (p. 7): "But here is the point too often missed: classical learning, indeed all types of learning in the monasteries and other communities of Christian education, was  organized around a studium whose central preoccupation was with the bible as a foundation for all learning."  Jeffrey goes on to summmarize Bonaventure (p. 8): "all knowledge is a light, or means of understanding, but the highest of all lights--superior to philosophical knowledge, to the knowledge arrived at by sense perception, and to the mastery of the mechanical arts--is the light of 'Sacred Scripture.'"

In Western culture, even more non and anti-Christian folks often engaged in their intellectual deliberations and inquiries against a backdrop shaped and prepared by Christian thinking.  Thus, Jeffrey can write concerning Goethe (p. 10): "all Goethe's ambitions may be summarized as a wish not merely to translate but actually to rewrite the Bible."

Referring to the 12th century French thinker Hugh of St. Victor, Jeffrey writes (p. 14): "we cannot long thrive without a centering of our efforts upon the getting of wisdom."  For Hugh, "the instrumentality of the humane disciplines to an intrinsic and higher good, namely wisdom in the learner of an abiding, life-changing and personally transcendent gravitas."

Everything I have read by Jeffrey has been wonderful.  If you have not read this essay, I highly recommend it.

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Published: 31 May 2010 31 May 2010

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Bill Kaufman and American Wars

For my entire adult life the American conservative movement has been in a "crisis."  That is at least what has come from the pens of various pundits for at least the last 25 years or so. This may or may not be true (I suspect it is), but if one wants to read an intriguing book by an intriguing man, it would be worth the time to pick up Bill Kauffman's book, Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (Metropolitan, 2008).  Kauffman stands in the noble tradition of those conservatives who have been skeptical of an interventionist foreign policy.  In the not-too-distant past it tended to be liberals of various sorts who would advocate for a large-scale interventionist foreign policy.  Indeed, as Richard Gamble argues in his The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI, 2003), it was the "progressive" Christians who saw the U.S. in messianic terms and who used messianic terminology to describe the role of the U.S. in the world (a viewpoint now generally found amongst "conservatives"--although "liberals" chime in along these lines fairly often as well).  Indeed, it is fascinating to realize that some of the strongest and most principled resistance to various twentieth-century wars has tended to come from various persons on the political right.  For interesting speeches and essays in this regard, one can turn to the work by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008).  But Kauffman is a provocative and engaging writer, and in a world full of double-speak and spin, it is helpful to have such a no-nonsense writer to turn to.

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Published: 21 May 2010 21 May 2010

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Some Wonderful Novels by Michael O'Brien

I have been reading Michael O'Brien's novels for a number of years.  I think I read the first one almost ten years ago.  I have just purchased Theophilos (Ignatius, 2010), as in the "Theophilos" from the opening verses of the Gospel of Luke.  His last novel was Island of the Sun (Ignatius, 2007), and is one of the best novels I have ever read.  It is set in the aftermath of certain atrocities in World War II in Croatia.  Some of his novels have an apocalyptic theme, and are very well done.  Particularly compelling (and haunting) was Eclipse of the Sun (Ignatius, 1998), which rings true for our own day, given the fragile nature of political liberty which exists in our (and I suppose every) age.  O'Brien is a traditional Catholic, and I have found that his novels are some of the most penetrating and profound I have read.  His picture of political tyranny in Eclipse of the Sun is unsettling and frightening.  His portrayal of determination, love, loss, and contentment in Island of the Sun was virtually second to no other novel I know of.  His novel, Plague Journal (Ignatius) also has an apocalyptic theme, and is utterly believable.  If you are looking for good reading for the summer, it would be hard to improve upon O'Brien.

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Published: 21 May 2010 21 May 2010

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Russell Kirk: Good Reading for Our Times

Russell Kirk is always good reading, particularly as we live in a day when many people including (inexplicably) Christians, hanker for the growth of the leviathan state.  Intercollegiate Studies Institute has published a judicious selection of Kirk's writings: The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, edited by George A. Panichas (ISI, 2007).  Kirk was one of the founders of twentieth-century American conservative thought, even though it might be hard to see the similarities between contemporary "conservatives" and Kirk himself.  Kirks is helpful reading for contemporary folks who intuitively know something is wrong with our contemporary cultural moment, but who may have a hard time putting their finger on the issue (or issues!).  If someone has not read Kirk, this is a good place to begin.

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Published: 18 May 2010 18 May 2010

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Stephen Williams on Revelation and Reconciliation

A year or two ago I worked carefully through Stephen N. Williams' book, Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge, 1995).  I found it particularly helpful because Williams was offering a certain interpretation of modernity which differed from the account I would normally read.  Williams, who teaches theology in Belfast (Northern Ireland), argues that modernity is not first and foremost simply an epistemological issue (that is part of the picture), but rather a moral issue, or an issue of the will.  That is, it is common for folks to  try and unpack or diagnose modernity as a question of how do we know, and particularly how do we know anything like a divine being or this divine being's will.  Williams suggests that the more fundamental issue in coming to terms with modernity is to see that modernity is fundamentally a moral issue.  Williams follows thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard in arguing that modern man tends not to believe in a divine being because modern man simply does not want to believe.  Williams can quote Karl Barth, who in speaking of Friedrich Nietzsche (a prototypical modern man) can speak of Nietzsche's "crusade against the cross" (what a wonderful phrase!).  Thus, for Williams modern man's problem is that he resists the fact that he is a creature in need of reconciliation (hence the title of the book).  We do see certain epistemological issues as central to modernity.  However, it is likely the case that the moral issue is prior, and leads to, or influences, the epistemological issues.  As Williams writes, "The theology of the Reformers themselves consistently reminds us that the biblical drama is about the tragedy of a world alienated and loved in spiritual rebellion, root of our cognitive dysfunction" (p. 173).  In short, as Christians think through the nature of the modern age, we must do so with a thoroughly biblical and theologically-rich understanding of what it means to be human (and now fallen), and that there is every reason to think that often apparently simply "intellectual" conundrums or difficulties often have a much deeper and difficult root.

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Published: 17 May 2010 17 May 2010

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