Rational Christianity

Part of the weakness of the Christian movement in our generation has been the relative lack of emphasis upon belief. There are three areas that must be cultivated if any faith is to be a living faith: the inner life of devotion, the intellectual life of rational thought, and the outer life of human service. There is no doubt as to which of these has been most neglected in our time; it is the emphasis upon rational belief. Christian books dealing with prayer and worship have been plentiful; books urging men and women to tasks of mercy have been abundant; but good books helping people to arrive at sound convictions have been scarce. Even some which would appear to be concerned with belief only succeed in repeating the questions by which people are already disturbed, rather than in providing any clear answers. Popular preachers stay very close to social issues and avoid involvement in the problems of ultimate faith. Yet it is a revealing fact that when men such as John Stott, rector of All Souls’ Church in London, have the courage and wisdom to engage in an affirmative approach to Basic Christianity they receive a tremendous hearing, particularly from the young.

However good and important human service is, it loses its motive power when the sustaining beliefs are allowed to wither. That mere humanistic idealism has a natural tendency to end in bitterness is not really surprising. People do disappoint us, and if we have nothing more fundamental upon which to depend than the natural goodness of man we are bound to end in a mood of futility. The social witness of the modern Church, especially in regard to racial justice, is very important, but we need to remember that the social gospel depends ultimately upon convictions. Unless it is true that each person, regardless of race or sex, is one who is made in the image of the Living God, much of the impetus of work for social justice is removed. Such work may go on for a generation, by social momentum, but it will not continue much longer. The “slip carriage” detached from its engine finally comes to a full stop. Social momentum is not permanent.

The rejection of creeds in the modern Christian Church is easily understandable. It is a fact that the words of both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed seem to many in our generation merely antique, having lost their power by constant repetition. But confusion arises when people move from an antipathy for particular creeds to rejection of all creedal expression, for then the woeful result is that they have nothing upon which to build their lives.

There is really no hope for the Christian faith apart from tough-mindedness in matters of belief. If God is not, then the sooner we find it out the better. If belief in God is not true, it is an evil and should be eliminated from our entire universe of discourse. False belief is evil because it diverts energy from practical tasks that require attention. If prayer is not an objective encounter with the Living God, we shall do well to make this discovery and give up the nonsense as soon as possible.

We hear, repeatedly, the cliche that deeds are everything while beliefs are unimportant; but this is manifest nonsense. The truth is that belief leads to action, and acting often depends upon believing. We are wise to remind ourselves of what Dr. Johnson said to Boswell on July 14, 1763, apropos of a man who denied the existence of a moral order: “If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our house, let us count our spoons” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson [John B. Alden, 1887], I, 346). If men believe that slaves are not fully human they will treat them as they treat animals. A man who is convinced that something is impossible will not, if he is intelligent, try to produce it.

Unfortunately, the intellectual effort that modern man so desperately needs, especially in his faith, is not being generally encouraged. Instead, there is a real diseouragement produced by the preaching of anti-intellectualism. What we hear and read, over and over, is that the existence of God cannot be proved. The consequence is that many draw the erroneous conclusion that all items of faith are devoid of intellectual support. Since men certainly will not seek what they are convinced they cannot have, the effort to develop a reasoned faith is naturally not even attempted. Examples of abdication in the face of rational difficulty are easy to find, not only among average churchmen, but also among religious leaders. Joseph Fletcher subscribes with charming simplicity to the anti-intellectualist creed, and with no qualification, when he concludes that “Philosophy is utterly useless as a way to bridge the gap between doubt and faith” (Situation Ethics [Westminster, 1966], p. 41). A similar position is expressed by the pastor of Judson Church in New York when he describes the new mood in the congregation which he guides. “The Judson people,” he says proudly, “are learning to live in a world of the withering away of apologetics” (Howard Moody in Who’s Killing the Church? [Church Missionary Society, 1960], p. 87).

What we need desperately, at this particular juncture in the enduring human crisis, is the emergence of Christian intellectuals. If Basic Christianity is to survive, it must be served by a highly dedicated and highly trained group of persons who are unabashed and unapologetic in the face of opposition and ridicule. They must be able to outthink as well as outlive all attacks on the central faith which we so sorely need as an alternative to confusion. Because this has been possible in many other generations of need, there is good reason to believe that it is possible again. Professor Pelikan has pointed out what is sometimes forgotten: that the leaders of the Reformation were themselves keen intellectuals. He refers to men of the stature of Calvin as “a cadre of intellectuals” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Intellectual [Harper & Row, 1965], p. 17). Being himself an example as well as an exponent of Christian intellectualism, Professor Pelikan deserves to be heard.

It is not hard to see how popular anti-intellectualism has arisen. It is a revolt against the kind of rationalism represented by St. Thomas Aquinas, which some say may convince the mind but not the heart. Furthermore, many are vaguely aware of the criticisms of the tradtional arguments for the existence of God in the work of Immanuel Kant and his successors. But as so often occurs in the history of human thought, the tendency is to fall into an extreme even worse than the one that is being rejected. This has, in fact, occurred in our time. However bad some arid intellectualism has been, anti-intellectualism is worse, since it provides no antidote to either superstition or wish-thinking. If the tough-minded concern for evidence and for consistency is given up, there is no way to detect error, or even to distinguish between degrees of probability. Archbishop Temple touched exactly the right note when he pointed out that “the most important of mental disciplines for almost all purposes is not that which distinguishes between certainty and probability, but that which leads to discrimination between degrees of probability” (William Temple, Nature, Man and God [London: Macmillan, 1934], p. 84).

The familiar statement that God cannot be proved is fundamentally ambiguous. On one hand it may mean that the existence of the One whom Christ called Father cannot be proved beyond a shadow of doubt, but on the other hand it may mean, and often does mean, that there is no valid evidence for the being of God. One does not need to be a professional philosopher to see that these two meaning differ radically. Part of the trouble lies in the fact that, while the writer may mean the first, the reader may interpret him as meaning the second, with the result that faith is further eroded.

The time has now come to point out that the sentence, “God cannot be proved,” while true, is profoundly misleading. Furthermore, it is often used in a way which is manifestly dishonest, because care is not taken to add that absolute proof is not possible anywhere else. Without the addition of this important observation, the reader is not to be blamed if he concludes, erroneously, that items of Christian faith are without support while items in other fields, such as science, have the value of certainty.

It is now widely recognized that absolute proof is something which the human being does not and cannot have. This follows necessarily from the twin fact that deductive reasoning cannot have certainty about its premises and that inductive reasoning cannot have certainty about its conclusions. The notion that, in natural science, we have both certainty and absolute proof is simply one of the superstitions of our age. We have, of course, high probability, but that is a different matter. Even in the first great burst of scientific reasoning, in what Alfred North Whitehead called “the century of genius,” it was already recognized that absolute proof is not given to finite minds. Thus Blaise Pascal asked his fellow scientists, “Who has demonstrated that there will be a tomorrow, and that we shall die?” He knew that all science depends upon assumptions which are incapable of proof.

Once we face honestly the fact that complete demonstration is not within our scope, we are in a far better situation to do what we can do. Whether we are considering the existence of God or the existence of atoms, we need not, because we lack certainty, give up the effort to believe honestly, for though nothing is supported perfectly, some items of faith are far better supported than others. The horoscope predictions which still appear in our newspapers are not based upon any evidence which will bear full examination, whereas the conclusions of modern astronomy are supported by abundant and cumulative evidence. The way of wisdom is not to give up the effort to believe when we recognize that absolute certainty is denied us, but rather to recognize degrees of evidential value. The practical danger of all perfectionism is that it leads so easily to abandonment of the comparative good which is possible. Though we may never know, in this life, the absolute truth about anything, we have sufficient evidence on which to proceed, and we can at least rid our minds of frauds.

The greatest danger that comes from frequent repetition of the phrase, “God cannot be proved,” is that it lodges in the public mind the idea that reason has nothing to do with the matter at all. This leads millions to the impotence of mere “fideism.” The word means acceptance of “faith alone,” with no concern for intellectual content. The crucial difficulty of this position, however popular it may be at times, is that it provides no means of choosing between radically different faiths. It gives no basis for rejecting the Nazi faith or even the faith of voodooism. Once the life of reason is rejected, there is no reason why any one faith is better or worse than any other. The pathetic fact is that the people who say they do not need to give reasons for the objective validity of the faith they espouse do not seem to realize how sad the consequences of their position are.

The current rejection of apologetics is both misguided and futile, for it abandons the citadel to the enemy. Even the harshest critic of Basic Christianity has no objection to the affirmation of a faith which cannot defend itself before thoughtful minds, since he can afford to be tolerant of anything so weak, because he is fundamentally contemptuous. Accordingly, one of the most urgent tasks of contemporary Christians is to express a faith which can be made credible for modern man. Enthusiasm is not enough! It will do something for a while, but it will soon evaporate unless the faith which is espoused can be so stated that those who do not share the enthusiasm can be convinced in their minds. (A vivid illustration of this process is provided by the history of Quakerism in the seventeenth century. The movement of George Fox and his contemporaries was saved from the dismal fate of similar movements by the brilliant work of Robert Barclay. Even Voltaire was impressed!) No faith can survive unless it meets the double test of intellectual validity and social relevance.

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