Where the Action Is

The gradual retirement of God from the arenas of nature and history, and his consequent exile to man’s inner life, has been a distinguishing feature of modern thought. Once God is internalized, and shorn of all significance for the outer world, the step is very short indeed to a correlation of the God-idea merely with subjective decision and personal preference. Further down that road lies the notion that the Living God is dead.

For almost a century, much of continental European theology has expounded the reality of God on the tenuous premises that history and the cosmos can be explained without any reference to divine activity, and that the case for theism rests wholly on extra-historical and extra-cosmic considerations. In this speculative context arose the appeal of Ritschl to religious value-judgments (in distinction from scientific-theoretical judgments), Barth’s emphasis on personal revelation encounter and super-history, Bultmann’s suspension of God’s reality solely on inner existential response, and even Cullmann’s salvation events, which as a sphere of divine disclosure are to be contrasted with all other history. Moltmann’s downgrading of the biblical past in his vigorous appeal to the future may dimly mirror these same controlling prejudices, despite his commendable insistence on the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ and his call for an end to the baneful influence of Kantian criticism on contemporary theology.

It is to Kant indeed, and behind him to Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, that we may trace shaping influences that have obscured the Living God of the Bible—the God who acts personally and purposively in creating and preserving the cosmos, and in the affairs of men and nations, and who has revealed himself redemptively in the history of the Hebrews and in the promise and provision of messianic redemption in Jesus of Nazareth.

In his 1953–54 Gifford Lectures, The Form of the Personal, the Edinburgh personalist John Macmurray stressed that Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” subdivided reality artificially into the objective world known in mathematical formulas and the subjective thinking self. In identifying the observable outer world in terms of mathematically connectable events, this contrast of subjective/objective realms in principle—by concentrating solely on the sequence of observable events—deletes from the objective world any role for personal decision, activity, and purpose.

The exclusion from our knowledge of nature and history of all personal intelligence and agency—whether human or divine—is extended by Kant’s theory of knowledge. For although it stressed the universal validity of human knowledge, Kantian criticism denied its objectivity; according to Kant, the observable outer world is known to us solely in terms of causally connected events (causality being a mental category), and the categories and content of man’s knowledge are not to be considered constitutive of the objectively real world. Contemporary empirical science, while aware that its perpetually revisable readings do not inform us how reality is objectively constituted, has shied away from description of the observable world in terms of causally connected events to report instead predictable sequences.

In a noteworthy book titled “Secular Christianity” and God Who Acts (Eerdmans, 1970), a New Zealand scholar, Robert J. Blaikie, points out the costly erosive consequences of empirical secularism, which exploits this state of affairs. Conferring on scientific observational methods the sole right to delineate the observable objective world, it presumes to describe external reality adequately and comprehensively without any reference whatever to personal decision, activity, purpose, intelligence, reality. The absurdities to which this approach leads are increasingly acknowledged by incisive contemporary critics. M. Polanyi, for example, in a massive work on scientific method, Personal Knowledge, emphasizes that the restriction of knowledge to predictable observable magnitudes—which now dominates much of twentieth-century thought—threatens to stultify science itself through internal inconsistencies and ludicrous consequences. Not only does the secular empirical approach leave no room in the objective world for personal selves and acts, but it exiles the scientist himself as a free agent from the supposedly real world.

Blaikie is at his best when he critiques the Cartesian-Kantian subject/object split to show that it speculatively and inexcusably bans personal activity and decision—God’s or man’s—from the objective world, and warns Christians that any accommodation of God only in the dimensions of subjectivity leads to the evaporation of the God of biblical faith. He rightly calls for an alternative that reflects the God who acts in nature and history no less than in the inner life of man.

Building on Macmurray’s observations that “the long argument which Descartes initiated has moved decisively in the direction of atheism” and that “the emergent problem of contemporary philosophy”—i.e., a necessary revision of its subject/object presuppositions—“will instead tip the argument toward theism,” Blaikie espouses the Edinburgh philosopher’s view that action is the primary reality in the objective world. The self is to be regarded as Agent rather than as Subject (Descartes’s “I think” is replaced by “I act, therefore I am”); the world is denominated Other rather than Object. A personalistic philosophy of action is here welcomed as nourishing and confirming (beyond Macmurray’s hesitancies) the biblical view of the Creator-Redeemer God active in the cosmos and history.

Blaikie’s emphasis may be welcomed not simply for its intention of getting God back where the action is but for its recognition that the decisive action occurs where God is personally involved.

But Blaikie’s exposition nonetheless has serious weaknesses as an evangelical alternative to the secular option he effectively criticizes. While as a Presbyterian minister Blaikie emphasizes the priority of God’s self-revelation and the authority of the Bible for Christian faith, this criterion is broken and compromised in several ways. For one thing, he thinks it necessary to attract the world to faith through a personalistic philosophical prolegomenon, rather than solely in view of God’s Word and Act. For another, he approves biblical doctrines by a selective test; divine foreknowledge of human acts is repudiated as logically necessary to the rational acceptability of what is identified as the main biblical thesis, the essential freedom of personal relationships. Additionally, he champions a dialectical form of logic appropriate to the dynamic freedom of persons, and in this speculative context disowns conceptual propositional divine disclosure and the propositional errorlessness of the Bible.

A God who is active in nature and history, but whose articulate Word is so much muffled, unfortunately lacks the precision of prophetic and apostolic disclosure.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.