The unchanging in a changing world
7
RATIONALITY AND FAITH
Some of the consequences of pitting faith against rationality in an unbiblical manner are as follows.
The first consequence of putting Christianity in an upper story concerns morality. The question arises as to how we can establish a relationship from an upstairs Christianity down into the area of morals in daily life. The simple answer is that you cannot. As we have seen, there are no categories upstairs, and so there is no way for the upstairs to provide categories! Consequently what really forms the “Christlike” act today is simply what the consensus of the church or the consensus of society makes up its mind is desirable at that particular moment. You cannot have real morals in the real world after you have made this separation. What you have is merely a relative set of morals.
The second consequence of this separation is that you have no adequate basis for law. The whole Reformation system of law was built on the fact that God had revealed something real down into the common things of life. There is a beautiful painting by Paul Robert in Switzerland’s old Supreme Court Building in Lausanne. It is called Justice Instructing the Judges. Down in the foreground of the large mural is shown much litigation—the wife against the husband, the architect against the builder, and so on. How are the judges going to judge between them? This is the way we judge in a Reformation country, says Paul Robert. He has portrayed justice pointing with her sword to a book upon which are the words “The Law of God.” For Reformation man there was a basis for law. Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.
Another consequence is that this throws away the answer to the problem of evil. Christianity’s answer rests in the historic, space-time, real and complete Fall. Aquinas’s error was an incomplete Fall. But the true Christian position is that, in space and time and history, there was an unprogramed man who made a choice and actually rebelled against God. Once you remove this you have to face Baudelaire’s profound statement, “If there is a God, He is the devil,” or Archibald MacLeish’s statement in his play J.B., “If he is God he cannot be good, if he is good he cannot be God.” Without Christianity’s answer that God made a significant man in a significant history with evil being the result of Satan’s and then man’s historic space-time revolt, there is no answer but to accept Baudelaire’s statement with tears. Once the historic Christian answer is put away, all we can do is to leap upstairs and say that against all reason God is good. Notice that if we accept a duality, thinking that we thus escape conflict with modern culture and the consensus of thinking, we are trapped in an illusion, for when we move on a few steps we will find that we come out at the same place where they are.
The fourth consequence of placing Christianity in the upper story is that we thus throw away our chance of evangelizing real twentieth-century people in the midst of their predicament. Modern man longs for a different answer than the answer of his damnation. He did not accept the Line of Despair and the dichotomy because he wanted to. He accepted it because, on the basis of the natural development of his rationalistic presuppositions, he had to. He may talk bravely at times, but in the end it is despair.
Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to speak clearly of the fact that its answer has the very thing that modern man has despaired of—the unity of thought. It provides a unified answer for the whole of life. It is true that man will have to renounce his rationalism, but then, on the basis of what can be discussed, he has the possibility of recovering his rationality. You may now see why I stressed so strongly, earlier, the difference between rationalism and rationality. Modern man has lost the latter. But he can have it again with a unified answer to life on the basis of what is open to verification and discussion.
Let Christians remember, then, that if we fall into the trap against which I have been warning, what we have done, amongst other things, is to put ourselves in the position where in reality we are only saying with evangelical words what the unbeliever is saying with his words. In order to confront modern man truly you must not have the dichotomy. You must have the Scriptures speaking true truth both about God himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the cosmos. This is what our forefathers in the Reformation grasped so well.
On the side of infinity, as we saw before, we are separated from God entirely, but on the side of personality we are made in the image of God. So God can speak and tell us about himself—not exhaustively, but truly. (We could not, after all, know anything exhaustively as finite creatures.) Then he has told us about things in the finite created realm, too. He has told us true things about the cosmos and history. Thus, we are not adrift.
But you cannot have this answer unless you hold to the Reformation view of the Scriptures. It is not a question of God revealing himself in Jesus Christ only, because there is not enough content in this if it is separated from the Scriptures. It then becomes only another contentless banner, for all we know of what that revelation of Christ was comes from the Scriptures. Jesus himself did not make a distinction between his authority and the authority of the written Scriptures. He acted upon the unity of his authority and the content of the Scriptures.
There is the personal element involved in all this. Christ is Lord of all—over every aspect of life. It is no use saying he is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the Lord of all things, if he is not the Lord of my whole unified intellectual life. I am false or confused if I sing about Christ’s lordship and contrive to retain areas of my own life that are autonomous. This is true if it is my sexual life that is autonomous, but it is at least equally true if it is my intellectual life that is autonomous—or even my intellectual life in a highly selective area. Any autonomy is wrong. Autonomous science or autonomous art is wrong, if by autonomous science or art we mean it is free from the content of what God has told us. This does not mean that we have a static science or art—just the opposite. It gives us the form inside which, being finite, freedom is possible. Science and art cannot be placed in the framework of an autonomous downstairs without coming to the same tragic end that has occurred throughout history. We have seen that in every case in which the downstairs was made autonomous, no matter what name it was given, it was not long before the downstairs ate up the upstairs. Not only God disappeared but freedom and man as well.
THE BIBLE CAN STAND ON ITS OWN
Often people say to me, “How is it that you seem to be able to communicate with these far-out people? You seem to be able to talk in such a way that they understand what you’re saying, even if they do not accept it.” There may be a number of reasons why this is so, but one is that I try to get them to consider the biblical system and its truth without an appeal to blind authority—that is, as though believing meant believing just because one’s family did or as though the intellect had no part in the matter.
This is the way I became a Christian. I had gone to a “liberal” church for many years. I decided that the only answer, on the basis of what I was hearing, was agnosticism or atheism. On the basis of liberal theology I do not think I have ever made a more logical decision in my life. I became an agnostic, and then I began to read the Bible for the first time—in order to place it against some Greek philosophy I was reading. I did this as an act of honesty in so far as I had given up what I thought was Christianity but had never read the Bible through. Over a period of about six months I became a Christian because I was convinced that the full answer which the Bible presented was alone sufficient to the problems I then knew, and sufficient in a very exciting way.
I have always tended to think visually, so I thought of my problems as balloons floating in the sky. I did not know then as many of the basic problems of men’s thought as I know now. But what was exciting to me (and is exciting) was that, when I came to the Bible, I found it did not shoot down the problems, as an antiaircraft gun would, knocking down the individual balloons, but something far more exciting. It answered the problems in the sense that I, limited though I was, could stand as though having a cable in my hand with all the problems linked together as a system, in the framework of what the Bible says truth is. Over and over again I have found my personal experience repeated. It is possible to take the system the Bible teaches, put it down in the market place of the ideas of men and let it stand there and speak for itself.
Let us notice that the system of the Bible is excitingly different from any other because it is the only system in religion or philosophy that tells us why a person may do what every man must do, that is, begin with himself. There is, in fact, no other way to begin apart from ourselves—each man sees through his own eyes—and yet this involves a real problem. What right have I to begin here? No other system explains my right to do so. But the Bible gives me an answer as to why I can do what I must do, that is to begin with myself.
The Bible says, first of all, that in the beginning all things were created by a personal-infinite God, who had always existed. So what is, therefore, is intrinsically personal rather than impersonal. Then the Bible says that he created all things outside of himself. The term “outside of himself” is, I think, the best way to express creation to twentieth-century people. We do not mean to use the phrase in a spatial sense but to deny that creation is any kind of pantheistic extension of God’s essence. God exists—a personal God who has always existed—and he has created all other things outside of himself. Thus, because the universe begins with a truly personal beginning, love and communication (which are a burden of twentieth-century men’s hearts) are not contrary to that which intrinsically is. The universe began in a personal (as against an impersonal) beginning, and, as such, those longings of love and communication which man has are not contrary to that which intrinsically is. And the world is a real world because God has created it truly outside of himself. What he has created is objectively real, thus there is true historic cause and effect. There is a true history and there is a true me.
In this setting of a significant history, the Bible says that God made man in a special way, in his own image. If I do not understand that man’s basic relationship is upward, I must try to find it downward. In relating it downward, a person is very old-fashioned today if he finally relates himself to the animals. Today, modern man seeks to relate himself to the machine.
But the Bible says that my line of reference need not lead downward. It is upward because I have been made in God’s image. Man is not a machine.
If the intrinsically personal origin of the universe is rejected, what alternative outlook can anyone have? It must be said emphatically that there is no final answer except that man is a product of the impersonal, plus time, plus chance. No one has ever succeeded in finding personality on this basis, though many, like the late Teilhard de Chardin, have tried. It cannot be done. The conclusion that we are the natural products of the impersonal, plus time and chance, is the only one, unless we begin with personality. And no one has shown how time plus chance can produce a qualitative change from impersonal to personal.
If this were true, we would be hopelessly caught. But, when the Bible says that man is created in the image of a personal God, it gives us a starting point. No humanistic system has provided a justification for man to begin with himself. The Bible’s answer is totally unique. At one and the same time it provides the reason why a man may do what he must do, start with himself; and it tells him the adequate reference point, the infinitepersonal God. This is in complete contrast to other systems in which man begins with himself, neither knowing why he has a right to begin from himself, nor in what direction to begin inching along.
BEGINNING FROM MYSELF AND YET . . .
When we talk about the possibility of men beginning from themselves to understand the meaning of life and the universe, we must be careful to define clearly what we mean. There are two concepts or ideas of knowing which must be kept separate. The first is the rationalistic or humanistic concept, namely that man, beginning totally independent and autonomous of all else, can build a bridge toward ultimate truth—as if attempting to build a cantilever bridge out from himself across an infinite gorge. This is not possible because man is finite and, as such, he has nothing toward which he can point with certainty. He has no way, beginning from himself, to set up sufficient universals. Sartre has seen this very clearly when, as a result of finding no infinite reference point, he comes to the conclusion that everything must be absurd.
The second concept is the Christian one. That is, as man has been created in God’s image, he can begin with himself—not as infinite but as personal; plus the important fact (as we shall see below) that God has given to fallen man content-full knowledge which he desperately needs.
The fact that man has fallen does not mean that he has ceased to bear God’s image. He has not ceased to be man because he is fallen. He can love, though he is fallen. It would be a mistake to say that only a Christian can love. Moreover, a non-Christian painter can still paint beauty. And it is because they can still do these things that they manifest that they are God’s imagebearers or, to put it another way, they assert their unique “mannishness” as men.
So it is a truly wonderful thing that, although man is twisted and corrupted and lost as a result of the Fall, yet he is still man. He has become neither a machine nor an animal nor a plant. The marks of mannishness are still upon him—love, rationality, longing for significance, fear of non-being and so on. This is the case even when his non-Christian system leads him to say these things do not exist. It is these things which distinguish him from the animal and plant world and from the machine. On the other hand, beginning only from himself autonomously, it is quite obvious that, being finite, he can never reach any absolute answer.
This would be true if only on the basis of the fact that he is finite; but to this must be added, since the Fall, the fact of his rebellion. He rebels against, and perverts, the testimony of what exists—the external universe and its form and the mannishness of man.
THE SOURCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE WE NEED
In this setting the Bible sets forth its own statement of what the Bible itself is. It presents itself as God’s communication of propositional truth, written in verbalized form, to those who are made in God’s image. Functioning on the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, both the secular and the unbiblical theological thinking of today would say that this is impossible. But that is precisely what the Bible says it sets forth. We may take, for example, what occurred at Sinai.1 Moses says to the people, “You saw; you heard.” What they heard (along with other things) was a verbalized propositional communication from God to man, in a definite, historic space-time situation. It was not some kind of contentless, existential experience, nor an anti-intellectual leap. We find exactly the same kind of communication occurring in the New Testament, as for example when Christ spoke to Paul in Hebrew on the Damascus road. Therefore, on one hand we have the kind of propositional communication God gives in the Scriptures. On the other hand we see to whom this propositional communication is directed.
The Bible teaches that, though man is hopelessly lost, he is not nothing. Man is lost because he is separated from God, his true reference point, by true moral guilt. But he never will be nothing. Therein lies the horror of his lostness. For man to be lost, in all his uniqueness and wonder, is tragic.
We must not belittle man’s achievements—in science, for instance, man’s achievements demonstrate that he is not junk, though the ends to which he often puts them show how lost he is. Our forefathers, though they believed man was lost, had no problem concerning man’s significance. Man can influence history, including his own eternity and that of others. This view sees man, as man, as something wonderful.
In contrast to this there is the rationalist who has determinedly put himself at the center of the universe and insists on beginning autonomously with only the knowledge he can gather, and has ended up finding himself quite meaningless. It comes to the same thing as Zen Buddhism, which expresses so accurately the view of modern man: “Man enters the water and causes no ripple.” The Bible says he causes ripples that never end. As a sinner, man cannot be selective in his significance, so he leaves behind bad as well as good marks in history, but certainly he is not a zero.
Christianity is a system which is composed of a set of ideas which can be discussed. By “system” we do not mean a scholastic abstraction, nevertheless we do not shrink from using this word. The Bible does not set out unrelated thoughts. The system it sets forth has a beginning and moves from that beginning in a noncontradictory way. The beginning is the existence of the infinite-personal God as Creator of all else. Christianity is not just a vague set of incommunicable experiences, based on a totally unverifiable “leap in the dark.” Neither conversion (the beginning of the Christian life) nor spirituality (the growth) should be such a leap. Both are firmly related to the God who is there and the knowledge he has given us—and both involve the whole man.
THE “LEAP IN THE DARK” MENTALITY
Modern man has come to his position because he has accepted a new attitude in regard to truth. Nowhere is this more clearly and yet tragically seen than in modern theology.
In order to see this new attitude to truth in perspective, let us consider two other concepts of truth: first that of the Greeks and then that of the Jews. Often the Greek concept of truth was a nicely balanced metaphysical system brought into harmony with itself at all points. The Jewish and biblical concept of truth is different. It is not that the rational concept which the Greeks held to was unimportant to the Jews, for both the Old and the New Testaments function on the basis of that which can be reasonably discussed; but, to the Jewish mind, something firmer was needed. And the firmer base was an appeal to real history—history in space and in time which could be written down and discussed as history.
The modern view of truth drives a wedge between the Greek and Jewish views, but it does so at the wrong point. Those who hold the modern view would picture the Greeks as holding to rational truth and the Jews as being existentialists. In this way they would seek to claim the Bible for themselves. This is ingenious but a complete mistake. The Jewish concept is separated from the Greek in that the Jewish was rooted in space-time history and not just a balanced system. But the Jewish and biblical concept of truth is much closer to the Greek than to the modern, in the sense that it does not deny that which is a part of the mannishness of man—the longing for rationality, that which can be reasonably thought about and discussed in terms of antithesis.
THE UNCHANGING IN A CHANGING WORLD
There are two things we need to grasp firmly as we seek to communicate the gospel today, whether we are speaking to ourselves, to other Christians or to those totally outside.
The first is that there are certain unchangeable facts which are true. These have no relationship to the shifting tides. They make the Christian system what it is, and if they are altered, Christianity becomes something else. This must be emphasized because there are evangelical Christians today who, in all sincerity, are concerned with their lack of communication, but in order to bridge the gap they are tending to change what must remain unchangeable. If we do this we are no longer communicating Christianity, and what we have left is no different from the surrounding consensus.
But we cannot present a balanced picture if we stop here. We must realize that we are facing a rapidly changing historical situation, and if we are going to talk to people about the gospel we need to know what is the present ebb and flow of thought-forms. Unless we do this the unchangeable principles of Christianity will fall on deaf ears. And if we are going to reach the intellectuals and the workers, both groups right outside our middle-class churches, then we shall need to do a great deal of heart-searching as to how we may speak what is eternal into a changing historical situation.
It is much more comfortable, of course, to go on speaking the gospel only in familiar phrases to the middle classes. But that would be as wrong as if, for example, Hudson Taylor had sent missionaries to China and then told them to learn only one of three separate dialects that the people spoke. In such a case, only one group out of three could hear the gospel. We cannot imagine Hudson Taylor being so hard-hearted. Of course he knew that men do not believe without a work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, and his life was a life of prayer for this to happen, but he also knew that men cannot believe without hearing the gospel. Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.
In a parallel way we are being as overwhelmingly unfair, even selfish, toward our own generation, as if the missionaries had deliberately spoken in only one dialect. The reason we often cannot speak to our children, let alone other people’s, is because we have never taken time to understand how different their thoughtforms are from ours. Through reading and education and the whole modern cultural bombardment of mass media, even today’s middle-class children are becoming thoroughly twentieth-century in outlook. In crucial areas many Christian parents, ministers and teachers are as out of touch with many of the children of the church, and the majority of those outside, as though they were speaking a foreign language.
So what is said in this book is not merely a matter of intellectual debate. It is not of interest only to academics. It is utterly crucial for those of us who are serious about communicating the Christian gospel in the twentieth century.