Reason
Reason
The third major theological resource to be considered is human reason. Although the importance of reason for Christian theology has always been recognized, it assumed an especial importance at the time of the Enlightenment (see pp. 58–61). We open our discussion by considering the changing emphasis which has come to be placed upon reason within the Christian tradition.
Reason and Revelation: Three Models
As human beings are rational creatures, it is to be expected that reason should have a major role to play in theology. There has, however, been considerable debate within Christian theology concerning what that role might be. In our discussion of the development of patristic attitudes to secular culture, including philosophy (see pp. 99–102), we noted a variety of attitudes that developed at the time, including a rather uncritical acceptance of Platonism (e.g., Justin Martyr, c.100–c.165), a vigorous rejection of any role for philosophy in theology (e.g., Tertullian), and a willingness to appropriate at least some ideas from secular philosophy (e.g., Augustine). It will be helpful to survey attitudes since the patristic period, during which three broad categories of positions can be discerned.
Theology is a Rational Discipline
This position, associated with writers such as Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74), works on the assumption that the Christian faith is fundamentally rational and can thus be both supported and explored by reason. Aquinas's “Five Ways,” considered in a later chapter (p. 158), illustrate his belief that reason is capable of lending support to the ideas of faith.
But Aquinas, and the Christian tradition which he represented, did not believe that Christianity was limited to what could be determined by reason. Faith goes beyond reason, having access to truths and insights of revelation which reason cannot hope to fathom or discover unaided. Reason has the role of building upon what is known by revelation, exploring what its implications might be. In this sense, theology is a scientia – a rational discipline, using rational methods to extend what is known by revelation. Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) likened Christianity to a cathedral which rests upon the bedrock of human reason but whose superstructure rises beyond the realms accessible to pure reason. It rests upon rational foundations, but the building erected on that foundation goes far beyond what reason can uncover. Philosophy is thus the ancilla theologiae, “the handmaid of theology” (see the more extended discussion at pp. 153–5).
Theology is the Republication of the Insights of Reason
By the middle of the seventeenth century, especially in England and Germany, a new attitude had begun to develop. Christianity, it was argued, was reasonable. Where Thomas Aquinas understood this to mean that faith rested on rational foundations, the new school of thought held that every aspect of faith, every item of Christian belief, must be shown to derive from human reason. If faith is rational, it was argued, it must be capable of being deduced in its entirety by reason.
An excellent example of this approach is to be found in the writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), especially On the Truth of Religion (1624), which argued for a rational Christianity based upon the innate sense of God and human moral obligation. This had two major consequences. First, Christianity was in effect reduced to those ideas that could be proved by reason. If Christianity was rational, any parts of its system which could not be proved by reason could not be counted as “rational.” They would have to be discarded. And, second, reason was understood to take priority over revelation. Reason comes first, revelation comes second.
Reason thus came to be regarded as being capable of establishing what is right without needing any assistance from revelation. Christianity has to follow reason, being accepted where it endorses what reason has to say and being disregarded where it goes its own way. So why bother with the idea of revelation, when reason could tell us all we could possibly wish to know about God, the world, and ourselves? This absolutely settled conviction in the total competence of human reason underlies the rationalist depreciation of the Christian doctrine of revelation in Jesus Christ and through Scripture.
Theology is Redundant; Reason Reigns Supreme
Finally, this potentially rationalist position was pushed to its logical outcome. As a matter of fact, it was argued, Christianity does include a series of major beliefs which are inconsistent with reason. Reason has the right to judge religion because it stands above it. This approach is associated with Deism, an English movement which laid the foundations of this form of rationalism in religion. The term “Deism” (from the Latin deus, “god”) is often used in a general sense to refer to the view of God that maintains God's creatorship, but denies a continuing divine involvement with, or special presence within, that creation. It is often contrasted with “theism” (from the Greek theos, “god”), which allows for continuing divine involvement within the world.
A good example of Deism is Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), by Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), which famously declared that Christianity was nothing other than the “republication of the religion of nature.” God is understood as the extension of accepted human ideas of justice, rationality, and wisdom. This universal religion is available at all times and in every place, whereas traditional Christianity rested upon the idea of a divine revelation which was not accessible to those who lived before Christ. Tindal's views were propagated before the modern discipline of the sociology of knowledge created skepticism regarding the idea of “universal reason,” and are an excellent model of the rationalism characteristic of the movement, which later became influential within the Enlightenment.
The ideas of English Deism percolated throughout the continent of Europe (especially to Germany) through translations and through the writings of individuals familiar with and sympathetic to them, such as Voltaire's (1694–1778) Philosophical Letters (1733). Enlightenment rationalism, to which we now turn to consider in greater detail, is often considered to be the final flowering of the bud of English Deism.
Enlightenment Rationalism
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). One of the most graphic portrayals of this enormous confidence in reason is the frontispiece to the eighteenth-century rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff's (1679–1754) ambitiously titled book Reasonable Thoughts about God, the World, the Human Soul, and just about Everything Else (1720). The engraving in question portrays a world enveloped in shadows and gloom, representing the old ideas of superstition, tradition, and faith. But, on part of the engraving, the sun has broken through, lighting up hills and valleys and bringing smiles to the faces of what we must assume to have been a hitherto rather gloomy group of peasants. The message is clear: reason enlightens, dispelling the fog and darkness of Christian faith and ushering in the glorious light of human rationality. Divine revelation is an irrelevance, if it exists at all. The consequences of this approach were noted in more detail earlier, when we surveyed the general impact of the Enlightenment upon Christian theology (p. 59).
At this point, we need to stress the difference between “reason” and “rationalism,” which may appear identical to some readers. Reason is the basic human faculty of thinking, based on argument and evidence. It is theologically neutral and poses no threat to faith – unless it is regarded as the only source of knowledge about God. It then becomes rationalism, which is an exclusive reliance upon human reason alone and a refusal to allow any weight to be given to divine revelation.
Enlightenment rationalism may be said to rest upon the belief that unaided human reason can deliver everything that humanity needs to know. There is no need to listen to other voices, having first consulted reason. By definition, the Christian cannot have anything to say that is at one and the same time distinctive and right. If it is distinctive, it departs from the path of reason – and thus must be untrue. To be different is, quite simply, to be wrong.
An excellent example of this rationalist critique of Christianity can be seen in relation to the doctrine of Christ (how could Jesus be both God and man at one and the same time?) and the doctrine of the Trinity (how can one God be three persons simultaneously, without lapsing into crude logical contradiction?). One of the early American presidents, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who was deeply influenced by eighteenth-century French rationalism, poured reasoned scorn upon such doctrines. Jesus, he argued, was really a very simple rational teacher, who taught a very simple and reasonable gospel about a very simple and rational idea of God. And at every point, Christianity chose to make things more complicated than they need be.
A direct consequence of this was the movement in New Testament studies known as the “quest for the historical Jesus” (see pp. 236–41). This quest, which dates from the late eighteenth century, was based upon the belief that the New Testament got Jesus entirely wrong. The real Jesus – the “Jesus of history” – was a simple Galilean teacher, who taught entirely sensible ideas based upon reason. The New Testament quite erroneously presented him as the risen savior of sinful humanity.
Reason was thus held to be able to judge Christ. In his celebrated work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued powerfully for the priority of reason and conscience over the authority of Jesus Christ. Where Christ endorses what reason has to say, he is to be respected; where he goes against or goes beyond reason, he is to be rejected.
Enlightenment rationalism asserted the sovereignty of unaided human reason, arguing that human reason was capable of establishing all that it was necessary to know about religion without recourse to the idea of “revelation.” Furthermore, reason possessed an ability to judge the truths of religions, such as Christianity, and eliminate vast tracts of their ideas as “irrational.” Influential though such ideas were in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they are now regarded with suspicion. The following section explores why.
Criticisms of Enlightenment Rationalism
A series of developments, of which we may here note a few, have severely eroded the credibility of the Enlightenment approach. Most writers sympathetic to the ideas of the Enlightenment made an appeal to Euclid's five principles of geometry. On the basis of his five principles, Euclid was able to construct an entire geometrical system, which seemed to be an example of a universal and necessarily true system based upon reason alone. Philosophers, such as Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), argued that the same method could be applied in philosophy. A secure edifice of philosophy and ethics could be erected on the basis of a secure and universal rational foundation, as in Euclid's geometry.
Yet the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry during the nineteenth century destroyed the appeal of this analogy. It turned out that there were other ways of doing geometry, each just as internally consistent as Euclid's. But which is right? The question cannot be answered. They are all different, each with its own special merits and problems.
Much the same observation is now made concerning rationalism itself. Whereas once it was argued that there was one single rational principle, it is increasingly conceded that there are – and always have been – many different “rationalities.” As explorers returned to Europe from voyages to Africa, Asia, and Australasia in the eighteenth century, they brought with them knowledge of cultures that adopted rationalities and cultural norms that bore little relation to those of western Europe. Did this not suggest that human reason was not as universal as the Enlightenment assumed? That there were local variations in patterns of rationality?
In his penetrating historical analysis of rationalist approaches to truth and meaning in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929) drew the conclusion that the Enlightenment seemed to demand criteria of justification that simply could not be met in practice:
Both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to precisely what those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons. One kind of answer was given by the authors of the Encyclopédie, a second by Rousseau, a third by Bentham, a fourth by Kant, a fifth by the Scottish philosophers of common sense and their French and American disciples. Nor has subsequent history diminished the extent of such disagreement. Consequently, the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.
It is for such reasons that the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) wrote scathingly of the “Robinson Crusoe dream of the historical Enlightenment, as artificial as Crusoe himself.” Gadamer himself was deeply concerned about the question of whether it was possible to transcend history and culture, in order to find a truly objective position from which to critique society and its ideas. The Enlightenment, in his view, failed to deliver on its promises. The notion of a “universal rationality” is today viewed by many as little more than a fiction. Postmodernism has argued that there exist a variety of “rationalities,” each of which has to be respected in its own right; there is no privileged vantage point, no universal concept of “reason,” which can pass judgment upon them.
Having considered some aspects of reason as a theological resource, we may now turn to consider the place of religious experience in theology.