The problem of the relation of science to religion is still the greatest stumbling block for those who are earnestly seeking to believe that Christianity is true. Thus the story of my spiritual journey from liberalism to orthodoxy, which CHRISTIANITY TODAY has asked me to write, is the story of clearing the ground of the obstructions offered by science, so that I could with intellectual honesty believe the biblical religion I had loved from childhood.
My parents were earnest Christians and independent students of the Bible. My first childhood orthodox (i.e., supernatural) theology was pieced together bit by bit from routine Sunday school, and the hymns, Bible reading, and scattered remarks in sermons, in our plushy, liberal Congregational church. At seventeen I had read the Bible through of my own volition.
The real initiation into the currents of scientific humanism came in my undergraduate years at Smith College, 1922–1926. It did not worry me in the least to be told that no educated person believed either that God was an old man with a long white beard, or that there was a platform in the sky on which he lived. My picture of God, drawn from my Bible reading, was a picture of his character, and I was already conscious enough of the way my mind worked to recognize the shadowy outline of human form that sometimes accompanied my thought of God as part of the mind’s technique for thinking. And by the time I was sixteen I was already conscious “that the great distances are those we carry around within us.”
The awareness of genuine (i.e., non-metaphorical), non-spatial distance is nothing new in religion (Isa. 57:15; 2 Cor. 12:2–4). I find myself puzzled by the Bishop of Woolwich’s distress as to whether God can be thought of as “up there,” or “out there,” or neither. The idea of another form of existence all about us, other than our space-time universe, has never seemed to present insuperable difficulties. And as a specialist in higher mathematics once said, “The fact that mathematicians can do valid calculations with dimensions beyond the four of our space-time universe is not the slightest proof that the Christian heaven exists. It is, however, proof that scientists and philosophers cannot say dogmatically that the Christian heaven does not exist.”
The really grim problem for faith came with an understanding of chemistry’s claim that all matter comprises a closed system moving on undeviating schedule, in which a measured amount of any chemical action could be depended upon to bring about an exactly predictable amount of chemical reaction. Since this was true of all physical action, including brain action, all thought, according to the behavioristic psychology of the day, was only a conscious registering of the brain action of the moment, which brain action was completely determined, because it was exactly corresponding reaction to previous chemical action. This claim, if true, would eliminate Christianity by disproving its claim that a supernatural, righteous, Creator-God has interacted with the world on man’s behalf by inspiring the prophets, and by the Incarnation and bodily Resurrection of his Son, and by the subsequent strengthening and guiding power of the Holy Spirit. For if a supernatural God’s direct activity initiated these events, then these events would not have been initiated by previous chemical action. This point is the essential problem. If one tries to bypass the problem by describing God as everywhere present as part of the universe, then, since the universe contains evil, God cannot be described as perfectly righteous. If God is perfectly righteous, he has to be supernatural to the creation.
Before one now talks glibly about behavioristic psychology being superseded and about scientific thought becoming less mechanistic, it is well to remember that science, if it is staying within its own sphere of studying objectively measurable reality, is still forced to describe all action in relation to other physical action within the cosmos. The opposition of present-day physicists and chemists to accepting the Duke University experiments as valid proofs of telepathy, is an indication that the idea of non-physical mind influencing physical matter is still contrary to the scientific way of looking at the mind-matter relation.
A Limit To The Sphere Of Science
I rightly began looking, not for scientific proofs of Christianity, but for a means of limiting science’s sphere of intellectual authority, in favor of that of the Bible.
The first permanent conclusion that I reached was that, as far as its being a total philosophy of existence is concerned, the mechanistic-behavioristic view could be eliminated on scientific presuppositions themselves. For science proceeds on the assumption that, of all hypotheses, that one should be assumed to be correct that stands up under testing and accounts for all the relevant data most simply. Mechanistic behaviorism had a neat water-tight explanation that made the mistake of omitting the relevant datum of consciousness itself. Its theory explains completely how the Encyclopaedia Britannica could have been written, published, and read with only the nervous system and its reactivity being involved. No human consciousness need ever have existed!
The all-important realm of consciousness is outside of the scientific domain, because the subjective consciousness, which objectively exists, cannot be objectively known, even by introspection. The nearest we can come by introspection to an objective knowledge of ourselves-thinking, is the content of our consciousness in the split-second past. So between the subjective consciousness and the realm open to scientific investigation there is a gap permanently unbridgeable to our understanding.
Since much of the activity of our bodies is unconscious metabolic chemical action, as unconscious as both the chemical reactions of inanimate matter and the activity of the lowest organisms, the point at which Christian apologetics should take its stand is at that aspect of man which is made in the image of God, man’s conscious intelligent-spiritual nature. That there is a God, or Supernatural-Creative-Mind, seemed intellectually reasonable to suppose. The FBI would be unable to decode a message from a can of alphabet soup, because the letters in it had been assembled not by mind but by chance. But since the intelligent minds of chemists can at least partially decode the mathematically precise constituents of primeval matter, the indications are that intelligent mind arranged matter in the first place. Furthermore, the fact that values are existences occurring in conscious minds, and not in and for objective matter as such, places all values, such as righteousness, outside the realm of science. It is not scientifically proper even to say that man is a higher type of life than the giant squid. All that can be scientifically said is that both the physical organism and the reaction pattern are more complicated in man than in the giant squid. The relation of consciousness and values to matter is, frankly, a mystery.
Intelligence and values exist in subjective conscious minds. The idea of a Great Intelligence arranging the order of the universe seems a necessary presupposition if our human intelligence can make headway in “decoding” nature. If the consciousness we have of values, especially righteousness, can be thought of as likewise derived from a characteristic of the Great Intelligence, then we have the theoretical groundwork on which the Christian picture of God can be built. And it is valid so to build it, even though we do not see fully how this description of God and his actions relates to the scientific picture. For the problem of the relation of this righteous God to the world is an extension of the problem of the relation of the subjective consciousness and values in man to the objectively measurable world which science investigates. As we have already seen, there is a gap, which science cannot bridge or explain, between the subjective consciousness and the world that can be objectively measured.
The initial consciousness that Ultimate Reality is righteous comes partly from the pressure of our inner awareness of duty—that we ought to try to do what is right, partly from reasoned arguments, partly from the “spiritual hunch” that comes to us when we read the Bible, especially the Gospels, and partly from the leap of faith. Life constantly presents us with moral choices; we are forced to choose, and thus to gamble our brief earthly careers on the belief that Ultimate Reality is intrinsically righteous, or on the denial of this. The refusal to commit oneself to one of these alternatives becomes eventually a denial by default that Ultimate Reality is righteous.
In order to be righteous, Ultimate Reality would also have to be conscious, intelligent, and purposeful—in short, a personal God. He could not be part of the world, since the world contains evil. So he would have to be the Creator of the universe, or nature, and therefore supernatural to nature. This much we can deduce philosophically, granted the initial belief that Ultimate Reality is righteous. But these things that we can deduce are in line with the biblical description of God as the supernatural, righteous, powerful Creator. Also, since righteousness is an active social virtue, the Christian claim that God is eternally a Community (the Trinity), who has from before the creation practiced righteousness among himself, would seem to be at least possible.
Acceptance Of The Bible’S Authority
I believed that Ultimate Reality is righteous. Also, by my human intellect I could recognize the Bible as the greatest existing book on the subject of righteousness, and so as the greatest authority on that important aspect of man’s relation to God. Since the Bible stood the intellectual test in that area, I could accept it as authoritative in the vital non-repeatable area that is not subject to philosophical proof, namely, the account of man’s redemption through God’s revelation to Israel, culminating in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of his only begotten Son.
The intellectual obstructions offered by science had now been adequately dealt with, so that I could with intellectual honesty accept the Bible as authoritative. The next fall, 1926, found me at the University of Chicago Divinity School, studying for a master’s degree in New Testament, preparatory to becoming a Bible teacher.
I have never in my life hated anything with the permanent, creative passion with which I hated my Chicago experience. The New Testament was taught with so much emphasis on the Greek and Hebrew cultural backgrounds, and from such an “objective” point of view, that I was much longer in understanding the school’s over-all pattern of liberalism—with its denial that God is supernatural—than I would have been had I been specializing in theology. I came bitterly to resent the fact that in my naïveté I had assumed that all teachers in Christian divinity schools are Christian, and that by means of that trust they had led me blindfold.
In long retrospect there were positive gains in my work in Chicago, besides the training in historical backgrounds and exact scholarship, and the one course in Old Testament under Professor J. M. Powis Smith that was sheer joy. Behind all the anthropological detail that cluttered his lectures, the novice could sense that he had personally known and loved the God of Israel. The full greatness of Professor Edgar J. Goodspeed I never realized until, when he was nearly ninety years old, he wrote Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, thereby retracting, in his devotion to the search for truth, many of the scholarly assumptions with which his fame was associated.
Besides, the virulence of the liberal poison was its own antidote. The turning point came not long before I took my degree at Chicago. In my perplexity I finally insisted in a seminar that the teacher tell me whether he personally believed in God. He answered, after a moment’s hesitation, that he was “operating [his] religion on a non-theistic basis.” I was inexpressibly shocked. Avowed humanists I had known and respected at Smith College. But that a humanist would pretend, by teaching in a Christian divinity school, to be propagating Christianity, was spiritual indecency beyond any I had ever imagined. The feeling that that divinity school had any moral or spiritual authority, or that it had any rightful claim upon my love or loyalty, vanished at that moment.
My perennial objection to liberal leaders and their neoorthodox variants is that they too largely confine their intellectual honesty to the circle of their professional peers. How many of them stand up before their assembled students, congregations, and Sunday schools, and put baldly, into words of one syllable, precisely what practical assistance they really believe Jesus Christ was able to offer the first Christian martyr, when the dying Stephen cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”; or even state, without mental reservation, whether they believe that at that moment the individual, Jesus Christ, heard Stephen’s prayer at all, or was conscious of the predicament he was in? The present student generation’s almost total unconcern with the issue of truth, which troubles all thoughtful teachers, including Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen in his current book, The Vindication of Liberal Theology (pp. 72, 73), can, I believe, be traced more directly to the evasions and equivocations of the pulpit in the last half century than liberals would like to admit.
Faith Undermined From Within
When in the spring I received the offer of a position teaching Bible at the Northfield School, I was not sure whether I could honestly accept it. The University of Chicago Divinity School had successfully undermined my faith from within, as science had not been able to do it from without. The influence of the accumulation of the school’s teaching was to make the New Testament seem merely the outgrowth of its first-century milieu, to focus attention away from some of the main lines of thought of the New Testament, and to imply that Jesus did not himself claim to be the Son of God or to teach many of the sayings which the Gospels attribute to him. If I could not intellectually accept “our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” which includes by corollary the belief in intelligently conscious, supernatural Deity domiciling himself at a particular time within created nature, then to pretend that I was teaching Christianity would be a lie.
I decided that, since I did not fully disbelieve in Christ’s divinity, it would be proper to try teaching for three years on the basis of my undergraduate insights, to see whether, with more maturity and further thought, I finally came to accept or reject the Chicago position. At the same time I decided to begin immediately a program of four summers’ study for a master’s degree in English literature, so that if after the three years’ experiment in Bible teaching I found that I had permanently accepted the Chicago position, I would be equipped to change my professional field, and would not be economically tempted to spiritual dishonesty. There was one comforting thought: the University of Chicago Divinity School’s portrait of Jesus had depicted him as not only not divine, but also as not even interestingly human. Since I was confident that greatness must exist in human experience before it can be embodied in literary form, I was sure that the school’s portrait of Jesus’ humanity, because it was uninteresting, was at fault. And if they were mistaken in their picture of his humanity, they might be mistaken on the subject of his divinity.
By the end of the summer of 1931 I had finished my three years’ experiment in Bible teaching and had completed my master’s degree in English literature at the University of Colorado, where, after the Chicago deep freeze, I had gradually thawed out spiritually under the deeply human scholarship of the well-known Shakespearean authority, Professor George Reynolds. By then I knew that I believed God to be supernatural, and therefore the Chicago New Testament interpretation to be off-center; so that I was now in a position to believe the basic teachings of orthodox Christianity to be true. The struggle was now entering its steady long-term phase of understanding the Christian teaching more fully, and intellectually struggling at particular points with liberalism to substantiate the orthodox supernatural Christian faith I believed. There was no longer any doubt about my wanting to make religious teaching a life work. So I returned to graduate study, and entered Yale Divinity School to take my Ph.D. in church history and doctrine.
If I say nothing about the galaxy of great professors under whom I studied there, it is because the major battle had already been fought. The pain of the feeling of theological isolation was becoming an old story, and so less acute. Yale was in some ways the haven after the storm. These new teachers were of course also liberals, but liberals by whom whatever lack of confidence they experienced in basic Christian belief was felt as a misfortune against which they were consciously working. My debt is incalculable to these men who furnished my mind, who gave lavishly of their time and energy to help me, and who kept their thinking a constant intellectual pressure upon me, without allowing that pressure to degenerate into the professional pressure of academic power, to the hindrance of the independence of my own thought. Of all the educational institutions in which I have studied, it is Yale that I think of as home.
I took my degree in 1937, and the following year saw me teaching in Kobe College, Japan, during the strain and uncertainty of the first year of the Sino-Japanese War. During this year there emerged into consciousness a practical difficulty, the question of whether as a general tendency I was putting the service of God or my own ambition first in my life. As soon as I fully identified the problem, I gave in immediately, because I made some nice calculations and decided that if I fought against God I could hold out only two or three years, after which he would force a nervous breakdown without any sentimental hesitation. “God’s ‘no’ was an ultimate refusal, and there was no use in trying to argue the point. This may sound like an unhappy experience. As a matter of fact, it was a very peaceful one. For in the midst of the strangeness of a foreign country, and all the instabilities of my own nature and the warring world around me, it was reassuring to know that there was one thing that could be depended upon not to change—that God has the will and the power to hold out for his own terms, forever. The hand of God may be heavy, but it feels safe. For the measure of his power is the measure of our security. ‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me’ ” (quoted from my book, God’s Boycott of Sin, 1947, p. 122). The evening of the decision was marked by a life-directing experience of the presence of God.
Fishing For A Hearing
Too many preachers and teachers behave like female anglers. You know how it is with the average woman. The thought of picking up a live, wiggly worm and jabbing a hook through it sends shivers down her spine. And the thought of sticking lively, red-blooded words into … sentences chills many Christian communicators.
Indeed, the whole business of providing a lure for their would-be public repels them. To be assertive, imaginative, different, or humorous in order to attract listeners or readers seems unnecessary. “The fish are there and waiting,” they maintain. “Just let down the line, wait a bit, and then reel away.”
Ah, the fish may be there, but they are not myopic; they know a naked hook when they see it. And they aren’t going to impale their interest on our drabness while hundreds of fancier prospects swim by.
Or, “The fish are weary of frills,” the non-communicator declares. “Give them a simple message from the heart and they will respond.” (Which sounds admirable.) But usually such messages, when they come out, sound more like they originated instead in the area of the soft palate. Or at least from somewhere between the mind and the heart.…
If by a message from the heart we mean something like Psalm 130—fine! (“Out of the depths I cry to thee, O LORD! Lord, hear my voice!”) But if we mean a tepid concoction of generalities, a string of sentences that look like they came from a drowsing committee—then fie!—Sue Nichols, Words on Target (John Knox Press, 1963). Used by permission.
Rachel H. King is chairman of the Department of Bible at the Northfield School, East Northfield, Massachusetts. She has the A.B. degree from Smith College, the M.A. degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the Ph.D. degree from Yale Divinity School.
