Truth Considered and Applied: Examining Postmodernism, History, and Christian Faith

By Stewart E. Kelly

For philosophy and theology students, Truth Considered and Applied examines the leading theories of truth in relation to postmodernism, history, and the Christian faith. Author Stewart E. Kelly defends Christianity in the face of postmodernist challenges that would label such religious faith as merely one version of truth among many in a pluralistic world. Likewise, in looking at Christianity as a historical faith, Kelly supports the need for Christians to develop a hermeneutic that does justice to the biblical texts and our informed understanding of the past in general; because if a genuine past cannot be recovered in some meaningful sense, the claims of Jesus being incarnate and risen from the dead are seriously jeopardized.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BH Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781433673634

Stewart E. Kelly

Stewart E. Kelly (PhD, Notre Dame) is professor of philosophy at Minot State University. He is the author of Truth Considered and Applied and Thinking Well: An Introduction to Critical Thinking.

Book preview

Katie

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Introduction

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One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true, but because it is good.¹

—C. S. Lewis

Is it possible to maintain an academically respectable scholarship and a conservative theological position of the orthodox evangelical type?²

—Gerald Bray

Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?³

—Chico Marx

In years past Protestant Evangelical Christianity has been a significant force in American life and culture. As M. Noll writes, During the decades from the post-Revolutionary revivals at least through the Civil War, the country’s ethos was predominantly evangelical. In a number of particulars, this was indeed the era of ‘Christian America’ as evangelical Protestants would use the term. ⁴ Evangelical Christianity was a vibrant option in both popular and academic circles. In the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the catastrophe called World War I (1914–1918), Evangelical Christianity came under attack on a number of fronts. Five of the leading thinkers/writers of the later half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth were adamant and eloquent foes of traditional Christianity. Each played a role in the diminution of the Christian worldview as the/a dominant worldview of the times. ⁵ The five thinkers are Karl Marx (1818–1883), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Stephen Crane (1871–1900).

Marx had serious doubts about the moral viability of a free market economy, as well as misgivings concerning belief in God.⁶ Darwin’s Origin of the Species, first published in 1859, led many to question the traditional (Genesis) account of creation and whether the whole idea of God was superfluous. Though many Evangelicals saw Darwin as being compatible with the historic Christian faith,⁷ the overall effect was to undermine the traditional Evangelical understanding of Scripture. Darwin, the rise of higher criticism, and other factors conspired to move Evangelical Christianity out of the esteemed position it once so firmly held. To many it was no longer clear that Christianity was the truth.

To say that Nietzsche was a fierce critic of Christianity is a considerable understatement. Nietzsche called for a new worldview that sloughed off the dead skin of Christianity and replaced it with the will to power, truth as a mobile army of metaphors, and a world where God is no longer even relevant.⁸ Freud is no less sanguine about the demise of traditional Christianity. Belief in God is, for the most part, for the psychologically weak and dependent, and in The Future of an Illusion Freud hopes for a day where our only view of Christianity (and religion in general) is in our rearview mirror.⁹ Belief in God arises from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race.¹⁰ Belief in God is seen here as the result of wish fulfillment and psychological dependence and not the byproduct of a rational mind coolly and calmly considering the evidence.¹¹ One could choose from a number of talented writers to fit with the other four thinkers chosen. Crane is particularly apt in that he lucidly and eloquently writes of the loss of the beneficent God who valiantly watched over nature. Such a God could scarcely survive under the onslaught of the fabulous four, and in Crane’s The Open Boat, there is no watchful or benevolent God to watch over the rowers as they seek in vain to make shoreline and to survive. They row and row and row, with the end result that the most courageous of them dies, while the remaining mortals all make it, illustrating the sublime indifference of the heavens to the fate of humanity.¹²

As the twentieth century unfolded, the two world wars made evident that the lion and the lamb were not going to lie down together any time soon, at least without one of them eating the other. Meanwhile, in philosophical circles logical positivism held sway from the heady days of the 1930s until the 1960s, when logical positivism¹³ retreated into the obscurity it so richly deserves.¹⁴ But then, with Yeats in mind,¹⁵ things came unglued. The last 45 years or so saw sustained assaults on concepts near and dear to the heart of the Western philosophical tradition.¹⁶ Truth, objectivity, rationality, and knowledge came to be viewed with considerable suspicion. Under the broad umbrella of what has been labeled postmodernism, truth was reduced to power relations and what our peers would let us get away with; objectivity gave way to subjectivity; rationality was seen as a remnant of Western imperialism; and epistemology became a veritistically challenged branch of philosophy.¹⁷

This book is, in large part, an attempt to argue that there is yet such a thing as truth, that objectivity, suitably modified, is still viable, that a modest rationality is defensible, and that knowledge should still be construed veritistically.¹⁸

Concerning Point of View

Rick is completely neutral about everything.¹⁹

Louis Renault

One of the givens of the past 50 years or so is that no one approaches any subject from an idealized or neutral point of view. I have biases, inclinations, points of view, and a perspective that is most definitely tied to my Sitz im Leben—my situation in life. I don’t pretend to be completely objective, whatever that might mean. I do, with fear and trepidation, offer what follows as a rational defense of the claims I advance. So what sorts of biases and tendencies lurk in my background? The short version would be as follows; I am:

1. White (Scot-Irish)

2. Grew up middle class

3. From the east coast (New Jersey, no less!)

4. Male

5. Protestant

6. Evangelical²⁰

7. Christian

8. Trained in the analytic tradition²¹ (as opposed to the continental tradition)²²

9. Politically centrist (all else being equal)

10. I believe all of the above are relevant but are only part of the story. To think that what I write is somehow reducible to the above is a crude and indefensible reductionism, which I emphatically reject. Such reductionistic efforts are also, for good measure, usually self-refuting.

11. One can tell a lot about someone by whom they read (whom they cite, etc.). A few of the better known names who have influenced my thinking on these matters include (but are not limited to) the following:

A. Philosophers—A. Plantinga, W. Alston, A. Goldman, J. Searle, P. Boghossian, and R. Kirkham.²³ Many others have been consulted, but these are the ones most used.

B. Theologians—D. A. Carson, K. Vanhoozer, N. T. Wright, and A. McGrath.

C. Historians—M. Noll, C. B. McCullagh, R. Evans, G. Iggers, P. Novick, E. Breisach, T. Haskell, and J. Appleby/L. Hunt/M. Jacob.

D. Others—P. Rosenau, E. Gellner, and S. Best/D. Kellner.

My general approach is in some fundamental ways Anselmian. I have faith and I am seeking understanding. As Anselm put it,"Fides quaeren intellectum."²⁴ Unlike some of the leading thinkers of modernity (e.g., Kant), I see no a priori conflict between faith and reason. Whether such a compatibility is demonstrable is part of what this book is about, though it also seeks to do more than that. Furthermore, if my general arguments fail to convince or persuade,²⁵ it will indicate that my efforts may have fallen short and not that faith and reason as such are somehow at odds. If, on the other hand, my arguments (more or less) succeed, then I believe that God is honored and that my approach is consistent with (or faithful to) the truth of Scripture.

I should also note that, in many cases, I do not think proofs or deductively valid arguments are forthcoming. It does not follow that I endorse or espouse some form of relativism. I humbly believe that modest and rational arguments often make excellent bedfellows, and I generally eschew what M. Murray has rightly called sledgehammer apologetics.²⁶ Rationality encompasses a lot of territory between 100 percent deductive proof and the 50-50 flip of a coin.²⁷ Much of what I argue is intended to occupy some of that middle ground.

Focus of the Book

So what exactly am I trying to do in this book? In a nutshell I am seeking to address three interrelated issues/questions:

1. What is postmodernism, and what should we think about it? How should it affect our understanding of truth, objectivity, rationality, and knowledge? Does postmodernism, properly construed, leave much standing? There is much disagreement both as to the nature of postmodernism and to what we Evangelicals should think about it. I will paint a picture of postmodernism with broad strokes, seeking to sort out the worthwhile from the dubious and the dubious from the dastardly. Much of postmodern thought can be viewed as skeptical of the epistemological confidence found in the thought of R. Descartes (1596–1650) and the European Enlightenment (roughly 1660 until 1789).

2. Given the challenge presented by postmodernism, is genuine historical knowledge still possible? Or does postmodernism undermine the tenability of claims to have genuine knowledge about particular events in the past (such as Christian claims that Jesus rose bodily from the dead)? Many historians believe that the traditional approach to history (exemplified by L. von Ranke and the first professional American historians) is no longer viable. If this is so, are we justified in thinking that genuine historical knowledge, however modest, is still possible? Or is it better to concede that a thoroughgoing historicism²⁸ is the best way to go? If we focus on particular historical events such as the Holocaust, are we in a position to claim that, for example, the Holocaust happened and is inherently tragic? Or, as some have argued, can it somehow be understood not to be intrinsically tragic?

3. Given the above, how should we think about truth? Is truth best understood in some epistemic sense? Which of the varied understandings of truth (coherence, correspondence, pragmatic, and various deflationary views) is most defensible and consistent with the biblical conception of truth? It will be heavy going at times here, as the idea of truth is, to put it mildly, both involved and complicated.

It will soon also become obvious that I will have little to say about many important issues. For example, I will say little about the biblical conception of truth, though it is clearly relevant for what I am addressing. Such issues I will leave to the theologians. Philosophically, I will not have much to say about so-called semantic conceptions of truth, though (again) such issues are related to what I am addressing. And though I will discuss various theories of truth (six by my count), I will not go into much detail concerning both truth bearers (what is thought of as true and false) and truth makers (e.g., facts, states of affairs, and the like). That will still leave many meaty issues for me to tackle, and the pages that follow are my attempt to find my way through the thicket of issues surrounding the concept of truth.

Pilate and the Question of Truth

In John 18:38 Pilate asks Jesus, perhaps rhetorically, What is truth? It is doubtful that he is really interested in knowing, for example, whether truth is some sort of relation that holds between truth bearers (e.g., propositions) on the one hand and truth makers (e.g., facts) on the other. His interests are far more mundane; they are essentially political in nature. Given that he saw Jesus as politically nonthreatening, he seeks to put the matter back in the hands of Jesus’ accusers.²⁹ The irony here is that Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom (vv. 36–37) "is virtually indistinguishable from his testifying to the truth. . . . . Similarly, only those who are rightly related to God, to the truth itself, can grasp Jesus’ witness to the truth (cf. 3:16–21). Everyone who is on the side of truth (lit ‘who is of the truth’) listens to Jesus (cf. 10:3,16,27)."³⁰

It goes without saying that the nature and existence of truth have great significance for the modern Christian, as it did for our Christian ancestors two thousand years ago. A few quotes should aid in illustrating my point. Blomberg writes that

such ridicule and attack cannot alter the fact that the Christian church for nearly two thousand years has overwhelmingly affirmed the trustworthiness of the Gospel testimony to the uniqueness of Jesus that disallows the sentimental notion that one can choose to reject him in favor of other religious masters or principles and still find God or eternal life.³¹

Wright asks the question, Supposing Jesus was raised from the dead, what would it mean? He continues:

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.³²

Paul himself makes abundantly clear that if Jesus has not been (truly) raised, then our faith is worthless and we are to be most pitied.³³

For Evangelicals it is of the utmost importance that certain beliefs are true: (1) that the Scriptures are trustworthy; (2) that Jesus bodily rose from the dead; and (3) that our faith is not based on mere wish fulfillment or on anything other than the one true God, who has revealed Himself authoritatively in Scripture and in the person and work of Jesus Christ. If some postmodernists³⁴ are right that truth is but a chimera or nothing more than what our peers will let us get away with,³⁵ if there is somehow no truth at all, then the traditional Christian faith crumbles to the ground and we with it, we would, indeed, be the ones to be most pitied.³⁶ So it would be nice, all else being equal, if certain things really were true. And it goes without saying that nothing can be true unless there is such a thing as truth.³⁷ Now it’s time to see if there are good reasons for thinking that there is.

1 C. S. Lewis, Christian Apologetics, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. W. Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 101; original emphasis.

2 G. Bray, Biblical Interpretation: Past & Present (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), 553.

3 C. Marx, Duck Soup (1934). At the time Chico is impersonating Groucho.

4 M. A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 222.

5 I am focusing on the Western/European world here.

6 For a critical overview of Marx’s thought, see J. Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

7 One prominent example is the Princeton theologian, B. B. Warfield (1851–1921), who may properly be labeled a conservative evolutionist. See B. B. Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, ed. M. A. Noll and D. N. Livingston (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000).

8 One of the best introductions to Nietzsche is W. A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For a different take on Nietzsche, see S. N. Williams, The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); and D. Blazer, Freud vs. God: How Psychiatry Lost Its Soul & Christianity Lost Its Mind (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1998).

9 See S. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).

10 Ibid., 18.

11 For more on Freud, Christianity, and wish fulfillment, see P. C. Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 2009).

12 S. Crane, The Open Boat (Gloucester, UK: Dodo Press, 2008). For an introduction to Crane, see J. Berryman, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001); and K. Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

13 The seminal work of Logical Positivsm is A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Books, 1952).

14 A. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.

15 See W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1921).

16 The details of that assault comprise much of what follows.

17 This is a highly compressed summary. The reader is encouraged to read further for the fuller version!

18 From the Latin veritas (truth).

19 Louis Renault (played by Claude Rains) about Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca (1942).

20 For those interested in such matters, I take Evangelical to include the idea of belief in the inerrancy of Scriptures. See C. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008). Also, G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008). My understanding of Evangelicalism would position it somewhere between the various excesses of Fundamentalist Protestantism on the one hand and a more progressive Evangelicalism on the other. There remains a good deal of territory between these two points on the theological spectrum.

21 For an excellent and detailed overview of the analytic tradition, see S. Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, two volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

22 For an overview of the continental tradition, see R. C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

23 See the bibliography for a full list of the works used. I have also interacted with a number of thinkers with whom I have significant (or modest) disagreements.

24 Literally, faith seeking understanding.

25 And this is something I have modest control over at best. True conversion is always a work of the Holy Spirit, though God graciously chooses to work through us on various and sundry occasions.

26 See M. J. Murray, Reason for Hope (in the Postmodern World), in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. M. J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 14f. I am a bit more optimistic about the deliverances of reason than Professor Murray, though I am in substantial agreement with the general tenor of his comments.

27 For a classic overview of all of this, see R. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989).

28 Historicism is the idea that all historical judgments are environmentally conditioned, that is, a product (or by-product) of the total environment in which we live and think. Historicists believe that any degree of objectivity is no longer possible in making historical judgments.

29 See C. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 2:1114.

30 D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John: An Introduction and Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 595; original emphasis.

31 C. L. Blomberg, Matthew (Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 47; emphasis added.

32 N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 718.

33 See 1 Cor 15:17–19.

34 Many postmodernists hold on to some notion of objective truth. See part 1 of the book for more along these lines. To paint all postmoderns as metaphysical relativists (relativists with respect to substantial notions of truth) does not do justice to many thinkers properly characterized as postmodern. The work of Carson, Vanhoozer, Rosenau, Evans, and many others recognizes this fact.

35 A view advanced by R. Rorty. See R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 175–76.

36 See Paul’s comment in 1 Cor 15:19.

37 As true statements (or propositions) presuppose a concept (or property) of truth.

Part 1

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Friend or Foe?

The Challenge of Postmodernism

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I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.¹

—Justice Potter Stewart

It is not altogether clear what the devil it [postmodernism] is.²

—Ernest Gellner

All we have access to are shifting, incommensurable conceptual schemes, with no way to determine which, if any, is correct.³

—Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley

Introduction

This is a rather depressing beginning. I am proposing to write a fairly long section on a topic on which there is little agreement, let alone unanimity, as to what it is. The quotes mentioned above are a sign of the rough and rocky terrain ahead, and we are in need of both a map and a compass, though neither is immediately forthcoming. Still, I am hopeful that paths can be mapped, and though a plurality of paths seem a distinct possibility, I believe that light can be shed on both postmodernism and the modernist backdrop against which it arose.

In what follows I will seek to avoid tendentious definitions and characterizations and to present a broad and multifaceted understanding of both modernism and postmodernism. Given the breadth of the topic and the depth of the relevant literature, I will necessarily be painting with broad strokes, though the resulting portrait should bear some resemblance to its intended objects. Many Evangelical Christians have written about postmodernism and postmodernity, and it is fair to say that many of our disagreements stem from misunderstandings. We come from different countries, intellectually speaking, and speak different languages.⁴ Such recognition calls for intellectual humility, caution, and for speaking the truth in love.⁵ But in order to understand postmodernism properly, we must first understand the context in which it arose,⁶ commonly referred to as modernism.⁷ So I begin with a sketch of modernism, followed by a critique of its main claims. Then we will be in a position to proceed to the issues which frame the coalition of beliefs and attitudes conveniently labeled as postmodernism.

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A. Modernism

The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their reason.⁸

—Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Cariat Condorcet

Enlightenment minds ceased to equate religion with a body of commandments, graven in stone, dispensed through Scripture, accepted on faith and policed by the Church.⁹

—Roy Porter

Modernism can be initially defined as the ideology originating with and promoted by the Enlightenment. Peter Gay argues that there was only one Enlightenment, which embarked on a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom—above all, freedom in its many forms.¹⁰ Whether there was merely one Enlightenment or a plurality of them depends, in part, on semantic issues. England, France, Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands had their own Enlightenment, with the British and Dutch having some claim to predating the other three.¹¹ Both England and the Netherlands harbor key Enlightenment figures by the late 1600s, England in the persons of Locke and Newton (among others), and the Netherlands with the influence of Cartesianism and the radical views of Spinoza. Deism, later fashionable in eighteenth-century Germany, was alive and well before that in England in the writings of Lord Herbert, J. Locke, and J. Toland. Locke was probably not a Deist, but his reliance on human reason and his rumored Socinianism certainly did nothing to quash the burgeoning movement.

Besides subdividing the Enlightenment along national lines, one can also profitably view the Enlightenment as including a number of submovements not always compatible with one another. For example, as Israel argues, there is both a radical Enlightenment and a moderate mainstream Enlightenment.¹² For many in the moderate branch (e.g., Locke, Hume, LeClerc, and Voltaire), faith and reason could be seen as coexisting, though often in an uneasy tension. For the radicals no such compromise was possible. Influenced by the thought of Hobbes, some of the early Philosophes (e.g., Bayle, Fontenelle, d’Alembert) and (especially) Spinoza, the ideas of the radicals threatened the bastions of authority, tradition, the divine right of kings, and the Church itself.¹³ Also, as D. McMahon has recently argued, there was a considerable movement labeled as the counter-Enlightenment, which valiantly sought to defend the time-honored institutions under assault.¹⁴ Even using the traditional words Age of Reason is not without its problems, as Bayle and others were fideists of sorts, and T. Aquinas, D. Scotus, and other leading medieval thinkers were hardly antireason in their writings.¹⁵

For my purposes I shall use the term Enlightenment to designate the period in Europe from 1660 (and the rise of Cartesianism and the work of Spinoza) until the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. Modernism, with this understanding in mind, can profitably be viewed as the dominant ideology of the Enlightenment and beyond, enduring throughout the nineteenth century and until 1914 and the advent of World War I. Some see modernity as extending all the way to 1989 and the collapse of eastern European Communism,¹⁶ but for reasons to be developed later, 1914 is a more appropriate cutoff date.

As the seventeenth century dawned, Europeans were faced with new and radical challenges to many of the beliefs that had sustained them for hundreds of years. It is now time to see exactly what these challenges were. The following overview of modernism seeks to capture many of the central ideas of the movement and undoubtedly will neglect some of the more peripheral ideas and movements, as well as being subject to the various limitations faced in proposing broad historical generalizations of any sort.

Descartes and the Premodern

One of the main influences in the break with the premodern outlook is the thought of R. Descartes. While the premodern outlook had been broadly theocentric and centered on the authority of the king and the church,¹⁷ the modern moved in a more anthropocentric and subjective direction, taking what is frequently referred to as the epistemological turn. No longer was there a preoccupation with the supernatural¹⁸ but rather a shift away from being steeped in tradition, theological doctrine, and the mystique of kingship.¹⁹ The moderns, led by the work of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and numerous lesser lights, moved the locus of authority to an autonomous human reason²⁰ where belief in God was yet a possibility, though the door was now open for Deists, agnostics, Socinians, and even atheists to walk through. Descartes gave each person the freedom to write differently, to set out with the thinker and end up in a different place. The rewriting of Descartes’ story in that way has constituted a good deal of modern philosophy.²¹

Descartes is aware of the threat posed by various kinds of skepticism, including Pyrrhonists, Sextus Empiricus, and the work of M. de Montaigne.²² So although Descartes doubts almost everything in an attempt to find a foundational rock for his system of knowledge, he fails to doubt one thing: a substantial and enduring self which underlies and makes possible the whole method of doubt and the resulting search for certainty. It can reasonably be claimed that the certainty of Descartes’ existence as a thinking thing is given from the start. . . . Whatever the referent of the term ‘I’ is, the existence of that referent is never doubted during the so-called systematic doubt, although its existence has never been explicitly affirmed.²³ Descartes was educated in an atmosphere permeated by the use of Pyrrhonian (skeptical) arguments in the intellectual war between Catholics and Protestants.²⁴ As Popkin notes, in 1994 Pope John Paul II claimed that Descartes (perhaps unintentionally) set the stage for the destruction of the medieval Christian worldview and replaced it with a framework that facilitated the rise of rationalism, the corruption generated by modernity, and the ‘death of God.’²⁵ Though Descartes himself was a theist, his appeal to autonomous human reason later raised questions concerning the necessity of divine revelation.²⁶ Descartes and the many who followed him created the so-called Enlightenment project, . . . an attempt to bring critical rationality and scientific method to bear not only on the natural but on the social world in order to ‘master’ reality.²⁷ All of this worked together to result in the deification of reason and its identification with Nature [including natural human reason]. . . . [Consequently] the religious tradition was vigorously criticized from the standpoint of human standards of right and reasonableness.²⁸ The following pages seek to flesh out the various elements of modernism as it developed over the years of the Enlightenment and after.

1. The Omnicompetence of Human Reason

Tillotson thus fused Pelagianism and benevolence in a creed which, he trusted, all Englishment would feel able to endorse.²⁹

—Roy Porter

Toland demanded . . . that each particular of Scripture must be judged according to its conformity to common Notions: nothing that was above reason passed muster. His requirement that religion be mystery-free thus threatened the status of the Bible as revealed truth.³⁰

—Roy Porter

Most people, in this island, have divested themselves of all superstitious reverence to names and authority. The clergy have much lost their credit: their pretensions and doctrines have been ridiculed; and even religion can scarcely support itself in the world. The mere name of king commands little respect; and to talk of a king as God’s vice-regent on earth, or to give him any of those magnificent titles, which formerly dazzled mankind, would be to excite laughter in every one.³¹

—David Hume

The basic presupposition of Enlightenment rationalism is that human reason is perfectly capable of telling us everything we need to know about the world, ourselves, and God (if there is one).³² Though Pascal and others sought to use reason within the confines provided by biblical revelation,³³ the more radical elements of the early Enlightenment broadly denied all miracles and revelations,³⁴ and many of the Philosophes thought of themselves as modern, secular, philosophers,³⁵ who often had little use for traditional faith in God and the divinity of Jesus. Descartes and later moderns sought to set aside all externalities or contingent limitations on the pursuit of truth.³⁶ Such an approach would help in procuring objectivity in knowledge, both in level of certainty and in being free from external constraints.³⁷ Although both Descartes and Locke

thought of themselves as Christians, neither felt able to appeal to revelation or to the longstanding teaching of the universal church for solace on basic questions of life. Both thinkers resorted to the unaided powers of the natural human mind. And as it happens, both men were confident in those powers: the reasoning power of a human being, they believed, is competent to answer the deepest questions.³⁸

Condorcet, one of the leading French Philosophes, concurred in claiming that reason acted as the critic and destroyer of the old and the builder of the new order in all areas of life.³⁹ The result of the work of Reason would be a progressive and superstition-free society where human knowledge and control of life would reach at least near perfection.⁴⁰ Some 250 years after Descartes, the focus on an omnicompetent reason is still evident, as the following quote from A. B. Hart (in his AHA presidential address) makes clear: What we need is a genuinely scientific school of history which shall remorselessly examine the sources and separate the wheat from the chaff; which shall critically balance evidence; which shall dispassionately and moderately set forth results.⁴¹ The goal was to let loose a confident and unencumbered reason, avoid external constraints or biases, and let the facts speak for themselves.⁴² Descartes’ knowing subject became central to the Enlightenment agenda, . . . [and] prompted an exaltation of the human mind’s capacity to mirror nature.⁴³ All this is to suggest that though reason does have capabilities, Enlightenment modernism (and later modernists) overemphasized reason at the expense of faith, tending to place more confidence in the progress of the human race by means of rational methodologies and technologies than faith in the saving work of God in history.⁴⁴

2. The Rejection of Original Sin

Prizing freedom, Chubb dismissed original sin, predestination and special providence as equally pernicious, since all taught a cruel fatality in which men’s actions are not . . . their own choice.⁴⁵

—Roy Porter

I will never believe that my heart is thus bad.⁴⁶

—Ignorance in John Bunyan’s

Pilgrim’s Progress

That I commit this or that sin is not my problem; what afflicts me, rather, is this inborn, as it were natural, perverseness of the heart that sets my own will at enmity with the will of God.⁴⁷

—Alan Jacobs

The concept of original sin is the common opponent against which all the different trends of the philosophy of the Enlightenment join forces.⁴⁸

—Ernst Cassirer

Prior to the Enlightenment and the rise of modernism, the belief in original sin was a central belief in both Protestant and Catholic circles. The idea that all humans fell in Adam and that we inherited a common, sinful nature was widely believed. For Augustine and later medieval thinkers, humanity is universally affected by sin as a consequence of the Fall. The human mind has become darkened and weakened by sin and is unable to recognize God or to discern His glory.⁴⁹ Locke, one of the key figures of the moderate Enlightenment, judges the doctrine of original sin in the light of a confident human reason, and original sin is found wanting. Hoffecker writes, "An example of Locke’s rationalist revision of Christianity is his acquiescence to Socinianism’s rejection of original sin. Not only is the human mind a tabula rasa, but people are born with a moral nature untrammeled by sin.⁵⁰ The new spirit of Reason was captured by the Socinians in the sixteenth century. They laid the supreme emphasis upon the power and ability of human nature to lead a moral life without supernatural aid—the typical view of the humanists. . . . They denied the doctrine of original sin: man is not a fallen creature.⁵¹ A few years later the Deists waged a vigorous attack on all that distinguished Christianity from natural religion,⁵² and original sin was one of the main casualties. One of the central goals of the Enlightenment was to liberate humanity from the shackles of superstition, ignorance, and myth, and to jettison any item of doctrine that stood in the way of this inexorable progress. Rather than agreeing with J. A. Comenius’ (1592–1670) claim that philosophy is lame without Divine Revelation,⁵³ the modernists turned this on its head, proclaiming that Divine Revelation is lame without [the approval of] Reason." Thus the idea of original sin was oppressive and an impediment to the projected liberation of humanity, and not an essential feature of the religion of reason and nature central to the various Enlightenments.⁵⁴

3. The Affirmation of Meliorism

Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.⁵⁵

—Chet Powers

All we are saying is give peace a chance.⁵⁶

—John Lennon

Given the grand and glorious hopes of the Enlightenment thinkers, a new and improved view of human nature was in order. Not only was original sin objectionable, but a far more optimistic take on the human heart and human capabilities was now required. Enlightenment thought can be seen as above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains.⁵⁷ Both Voltaire and Rousseau "criticized the doctrine [of original sin] as encouraging pessimism in regard to human abilities, thus impeding social and political development and encouraging laissez-faire attitudes."⁵⁸ Locke, who professed to take historic Christianity seriously, saw humans as

morally neutral. . . . Whether people are good or evil depends on their education, which consists of habit formation: Of all the men we meet with nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind. Original sin in its Augustinian form, therefore, is a fiction. Continued belief in inherited corruption from our first parents undermines morality.⁵⁹

During the 1700s many Protestant churches and their clergy quietly retired concepts such as mortal sin, purgatory, hell, and angels. . . . Belief in original sin and predestination came to be seen as paralyzing. A new breed of clergymen depicted human beings as capable of self-reform and inherently good.⁶⁰ Following the lead of the early Rousseau and others, the chief sources of bad character and poor choices was now to be found more in the environment than in the heart of humanity. Jefferson, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire all viewed human beings as basically rational and good. That is what gives them the ability to govern themselves. Human beings don’t need political caretakers—lords or kings—they are competent to organize their own affairs.⁶¹ This Enlightenment confidence in humanity, though suffering a few setbacks from the French Revolution and the pen of Edmund Burke, dominated European thought through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As Breisach writes, Modernity, both in theory and praxis of life, radiated an unprecedented confidence that stifled doubts about progress.⁶²

Though Voltaire’s Candide is sometimes viewed as a pessimistic work in its assault on this best of all possible worlds, it is better understood, as with the Enlightenment, as above all a meliorist project, where Voltaire singles out many of the things which conspire to make the world a bad place.⁶³ A book that was genuinely pessimistic, A. C. Grayling argues, could not

have El Dorado in it. Voltaire’s version of Utopia—a place without religious strife and without greed, a place of amity between people because there is no cause for them to betray, cheat, fight and murder each other—is a place in fact of quietism. Candide manages to recreate, imperfectly of course, a miniature El Dorado at the end of the saga, showing where Voltaire’s best hopes lay.⁶⁴

Thinkers such as Condorcet, Habermas argues, had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings.⁶⁵ With original sin out of the picture and a newfound hope in humanity, a fervent hope in progress would be just around the corner.

4. Belief in Progress and the Emancipation of Humanity

Whatever else modernism was, it was a belief in the liberation of humanity from the shackles of traditional authority and a commitment to faith in the future and inevitable progress of humanity. Modernity can profitably be seen as embodying the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, individual autonomy, and progress.⁶⁶ With the rise of science, the ascendancy of autonomous reason, and the hope for reform came expectations of progress. With reform, the power of reason could become the source of emancipation from ignorance, superstition, disease, and oppression. They even imagined a new type of community built around an affinity for philosophic inquiry, unmarred by racial and religious prejudices which stirred the passions of their countrymen.⁶⁷ Led by the work of E. Gibbon and others, the human past⁶⁸ was quickly resequenced. First, there was the classical Era, then a lapse into the Dark Ages,⁶⁹—an eighteenth-century term referring to the period stretching from the fifth century fall of Rome to the Renaissance—after which the Enlightenment brought forth the Modern Era.⁷⁰ Viewing the residues of the past as important obstacles to the realization of the rational end stage, the end of history would see the triumph of the ‘empire of virtue’ over the ‘empire of fate.’⁷¹ Understanding philosophy and reason in an almost missionary sense, Kant and others believed the philosopher’s freedom is the precondition for universal freedom.⁷² As Gay writes, Man’s search for autonomy is impeded by laziness, cowardice, all the accumulated weight of tradition, and it is the philosopher alone, reasoning without alien constraints and criticizing without fear, who initiates and leads the great struggle for liberation.⁷³ At the heart of this theory of progress "lay their [the Philosophes] rejection of the dogma of original sin.⁷⁴ The Enlightenment modernists believed that their age was the most morally advanced epoch of human history⁷⁵ and that God’s authority over the fate of humanity was yielded to mankind.⁷⁶ The result of all this was that human knowledge and control of life would reach at least near perfection. The prospect of such a triumphal ending transformed this ‘progressive’ view from just another interpretation of history into a message of immense appeal and persuasive power."⁷⁷

5. Sharp History-Fiction Distinction (and the Assumption of Objectivity)

The study of both nature and history were seen as possible and profitable enterprises. A crucial factor was that the Cartesian knower was an ahistorical and unsituated observer. Such an observer could transcend his culture and, given proper training and focus, study a particular subject matter with complete objectivity and detachment. The observer must become like Newton was imagined to have been: a giant of reason who peers at nature with eyes that are value-free, neutral, and objective. . . . The clear scientific eye became transparent as it faced nature, made so by the method and rigor only experiment and mathematics could impart to its gaze.⁷⁸ Following the lead of Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and others, many moderns saw human reason as both autonomous and able to transcend [their] place in history, class, and culture.⁷⁹ Reason thus resided in the realm of objectivity and neutrality while faith languished in the murky abyss of subjectivity. The deck was clearly stacked against traditional Christianity and the life of faith.

Following the lead of the early Enlightenment thinkers, human nature and reason were both understood in totalizing, universal terms. In other words, human nature and rationality remained the same, independent of its specific historical, social, cultural or chronological location.⁸⁰ Indeed, just as God could be objective in His consideration of reality, so humans could rely on reason, as reason is the voice of God in man.⁸¹ Even today a number of prominent historians and theologians see their craft as (for the most part) a scientific one. J. Meier,⁸² J. D. Crossan,⁸³ and E. P. Sanders⁸⁴ are three prominent examples of theologians who espouse the scientific status of their methodology.⁸⁵ And though many historians realize the comparison with science is far from apt, such comparisons are still frequently made. As G. Nash, a historian of some note, writes, Both historians and scientists rely on ‘pattern recognition’—‘perceptible relationships among important facts.’⁸⁶ This cool, calm, and socially unsituated objective knower/observer later comes under attack by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and many leading thinkers in the twentieth century.

Though most modern historians eschew the totalizing objectivity of many modernist thinkers, the distinction between truth and falsehood remains fundamental to the work of the historian. . . . Nevertheless, the concept of truth and with it the duty of the historian to avoid and uncover falsification has by no means been abandoned.⁸⁷

6. A Commitment to Historical Realism⁸⁸

The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation.⁸⁹

—G. R. Elton

Historical Realism is best seen as not a single idea, but rather a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies.⁹⁰ Such a view includes all of the following: a belief in the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history and fiction.⁹¹ Such a past is better understood as discovered than constructed/created, while nonrealists are inclined to think that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past.⁹² As Munslow notes, while nonrealists may grant that something indeed happened in the past, its significance (its meaning as we narrate it) is provided by the historian.⁹³ The Enlightenment ideal of the knowing subject perceiving the past as it was is just that: a dream.⁹⁴ Such a dreamer is once more the positivist, who looking at history, believes that it is possible to have instant and unadulterated access to ‘events.’⁹⁵ The central question of the practice of writing history is: Can we justifiably claim that (at least) some of our descriptions of the past are true in light of the relationship between the description and the past event(s)? Are patterns and linkages of fact in history⁹⁶ discovered, or are they merely constructed/invented?⁹⁷ The historical realist maintains some degree of optimism about recovering the past, ranging from the moderate realism of R. Evans, C. B. McCullagh, M. Noll, G. Iggers, and J. Appleby, L. Hunt, and M. Jacob, to the strong realism of G. R. Elton and A. Marwick.