Through Faith Alone
7
Through Faith Alone
writing this book as a missionary who is concerned to
commend the truth of the gospel in a culture that has sought
for absolute certainty as the ideal of true knowledge but now
despairs of the possibility of knowing truth at all, a culture that
therefore responds to the Christian story by asking, "But how
can we know that it is true?" There is a long tradition of Christian
theology that goes under the name "apologetics" and that seeks
to respond to this question and to demonstrate the "reasonableness of Christianity" The assumption often underlying titles of
this kind is that the gospel can be made acceptable by showing
that it does not contravene the requirements of reason as we
understand them within the contemporary plausibility structure.
The heart of my argument is that this is a mistaken policy. The
story the church is commissioned to tell, if it is true, is bound
to call into question any plausibility structure which is founded
on other assumptions. The affirmation that the One by whom
and through whom and for whom all creation exists is to be
identified with a man who was crucified and rose bodily from
the dead cannot possibly be accommodated within any plausibility structure except one of which it is the cornerstone. In any
other place in the structure it can only be a stone of stumbling.
The reasonableness of Christianity will be demonstrated (insofar
as it can be) not by adjusting its claims to the requirements of a preexisting structure of thought but by showing how it can
provide an alternative foundation for a different structure. The
title of one of the most famous writings of the Enlightenment
was Religion within the Limits of Reason. The American philosopher Wolterstorff has reversed the title with his book Reason
within the Limits of Religion. The reversal of words is justified if
one remembers that all human reasoning is embodied in a
specific culture and that, through most of human history, religion
has been the most powerful factor in the shaping of culture. To
look outside of the gospel for a starting point for the demonstration of the reasonableness of the gospel is itself a contradiction of the gospel, for it implies that we look for the logos
elsewhere than in Jesus.
The obvious implication of this argument, therefore, is that the proper form of apologetics is the preaching of the gospel itself and the demonstration - which is not merely or primarily a matter of words - that it does provide the best foundation for a way of grasping and dealing with the mystery of our existence in this universe. Needless to say, this demonstration can never be more than partial and tentative. It is, according to the gospel, only on the day of judgment that the demonstration will be complete and decisive. Until then, my commitment to the truth of the gospel is a commitment of faith. If I am further pressed to justify this commitment (as I have often been), my only response has to be a personal confession. The story is not my construction. In ways that I cannot fully understand but always through the witness of those who went before me in the company of those called to be witnesses, I have been laid hold of and charged with the responsibility of telling this story. I am only a witness, not the judge who alone can give the final verdict. But as a witness I am under obligation - the obligation of a debtor to the grace of God inJesus Christ - to give my witness. I cannot pretend to anticipate the final judgment by offering any proof other than the fact that my life is committed to the truth of this witness.
In my own experience, I find that this position is questioned from three sides: from the Catholic tradition of natural theology, from Protestant fundamentalism, and from liberal theology of all kinds. At the risk of going over ground already partially covered, it may be helpful to look at these three criticisms in order:
The first critical standpoint comes from the long tradition of natural theology. From this standpoint, the stance I have suggested is attacked as being an abandonment of the responsible use of reason. It is a blind leap in the dark. It requires more rational justification. How, it is asked, am I to believe that Jesus is the Word of God if I do not have rational grounds for believing that the word "God" stands for any actual reality?
In reply to this, four points are in order:
1. We are not speaking of a blind leap into darkness but of a personal response to a personal calling. When Jesus called the first disciples with the words: "Follow me," he was certainly calling for an act of faith. He did not offer any demonstrable certainties. And so it is with everyone who has been so called through the faithfulness of the first apostles and their successors. To regard this as cognitively inferior to the rational demonstration of supposedly certain truths is to assume that the ultimate reality with which we have to deal is not personal but impersonal. In the investigation of impersonal realities we may ask for the kind of indubitable certainties that the Age of Reason demanded, even though subsequent history has shown that they are not attainable. But if the ultimate reality with which, or rather with whom, we have to deal is the being of the triune God, then the response of personal faith to a personal calling is the only way of knowing that reality. To rule this out as unreasonable is to make an a priori decision against the possibility that ultimate reality is personal.
2. The objection from natural theology also seems to rest on the assumption that there is available a kind of knowledge which does not rest on any faith commitment. It denies the truth of Augustine's slogan, "I believe in order to know." I have already argued that this setting of reason against faith is absurd. Reason is not an independent means for finding out what is the case. It is not a substitute for information. In order to be informed, we have to make acts of trust in the traditions we have inherited and in the evidence of our senses. Moreover, as has already been said, all systematic reasoning has to begin by taking for granted certain things that are accepted without argument. There must be data without argument or, at least, without prior demonstration. I have already referred to the argument of Roy Clouser in his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality. There exists no neutral reason that can decide impartially on the truth or falsehood of the Christian gospel. On the contrary, if it is true that Jesus is the Word made flesh, then to know Jesus must be the basis for all true knowledge. We therefore have to recognize that the ancient words "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" has a wider range of reference than is often supposed.
3. Having said this, it is now important to add that it follows from the above argument that there is a proper kind of theology that deals with the area natural theology addresses. If one may put it so, it covers the same field but starts from the other end. It does not start from somewhere outside the gospel in order to demonstrate the truth of the gospel but starts from the gospel itself, seeking to show how this starting point illuminates all our other experience. This is a true and necessary form of apologetics. In preaching the gospel, it is our business to show, insofar as our knowledge and experience equip us to do so, how the Christian story enables us to understand and deal with the whole range of human experience in both public and private life. Once again we follow the path suggested in Augustine's slogan: we believe in order to understand. We do not argue from experience to the gospel. On the contrary, it is the gospel accepted in faith which enables us to experience all reality in a new way and to find that all reality does indeed reflect the glory of God.
4. The points made in the three preceding paragraphs refer to the role of natural theology in Christian apologetics. There is, of course, a long pre-Christian tradition of natural theology. If, as for most of the great thinkers of classical antiquity, alleged divine revelation is not a reliable source of certain truth or if we disallow the Christian claims regarding God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, then natural theology is surely a perfectly legitimate enterprise. But for those who have become believers in the gospel of the Word made flesh, there is something improper, as I have argued, in supposing that this faith can be validated by the arguments of natural theology. This has special poignancy if we remember, as we must always remember, that when we speak of God's self-revelation in Christ, we are speaking of an immeasurably costly act of self-giving for our redemption and reconciliation. When we know that God has done this infinitely gracious thing, is it not inappropriate for us to respond, to put it crudely, "Thank you, but I have other collateral sources of information"? The truth surely is not that we come to know God by reasoning from our unredeemed experience but that what God has done for us in Christ gives us the eyes through which we can begin to truly understand our experience in the world.
In addition to the attack from natural theology, there is a second attack. It comes from what I have called Protestant fundamentalism. I hesitate to use the word "fundamentalism," since it has become common to label anyone who firmly believes in the truth of his or her religion a fundamentalist. In this sense, I am myself happy to be called a fundamentalist. But I am referring to something more specific. I have argued (in agreement with the postmodernists) that all truth claims are culturally and historically embodied. The Christian gospel arises out of the culture of one people among all the peoples of the world, the people of Israel. The claim, of course, is that within this particular culture there was present, in the man Jesus, the eternal Word through whom and for whom all things exist. But those who make this claim do not occupy a position above other particular cultures or histories. I have found myself attacked at this point on the ground that this is a surrender to subjectivity. The safety of the church and of the Christian confession requires, it is said, that we affirm the "objective" truth of what the gospel affirms. If the word "objective" here means "really true," then I am happy. But the claim is made that we must affirm the factual truth of every statement in the Bible as a matter of indubitable certainty and that, if this position is surrendered, we are in a world of subjectivity and relativism along with the rest of contemporary society. I have been told that there are context-independent criteria of truth on the basis of which one can undertake to demonstrate the truth of the gospel.
One can understand this anxiety that the gospel should not be allowed to sink into the swamp of relativism where there are no firm footholds, and what is true for you may not be true for me. But this way of defending the truth of the gospel will not work. Two things can be said in reply to the fundamentalist stance:
1. In seeking a kind of supracultural and indubitable certainty, these Christians have fallen into the trap set by Descartes. They are seeking a kind of certainty that does not acknowledge the certainty of faith as the only kind of certainty available. The only one who has a context-independent standpoint is God. The fundamental error of Descartes, surely, was the supposition that we ourselves can have such a standpoint. Christian faith is not a matter of logically demonstrable certainties but of the total commitment of fallible human beings putting their trust in the faithful God who has called them. I believe and trust that the Bible is the true rendering of the story of God's acts in creation and redemption and therefore the true rendering of the character of God. At the core of the biblical story, there is a record of events in history. The biblical accounts of the beginning and the end of the world are, however, obviously not of the kind of accounts which rest upon indubitable Cartesian certainty, since no human evidence is available. The stories of the beginning are reshapings of the contemporary, available cosmologies to reflect that knowledge of God's ways and purposes that had been given to the prophets of Israel by God. Likewise, the vision of the end of the world in the last book of the Bible uses the images that Israel and the church had learned to use through their experience of God's dealing with them, his people. It is a confusion of categories to use the constantly changing modern views of cosmology to call into question the unchanging truth about God and his relation to the world and human life, a truth embodied in the protology and eschatology of the Bible.
The heart of the Christian faith from the first apostles onward has been that the story told in the Bible is the true story of God's dealings with the people he had chosen to be the bearers of his purpose for the world, and that those through whom the story has come down to us were enabled by his Holy Spirit - the same Spirit by whom Jesus was anointed and empowered - to interpret truly his dealings with his people. But the Bible is also the work of sinful and fallible human beings whose sins had to be constantly rebuked and whose misunderstandings had to be corrected. The very heart of the Bible is in this long, patient wrestling of God with a sinful and fallible people. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews summarizes the whole story as the story of a faith that grasps what cannot yet be seen, and he calls upon his readers to exercise the same faith. To convert the Bible into a compendium of indubitably certain facts is to impose upon it a character alien to itself, a character that is the typical product of minds shaped by the Enlightenment.
2. This way of understanding the Bible can and does often lead to a kind of hard rationalism that is remote from grace. Christian discipleship is a kind of life lived by faith in the grace of God. The arrogance of supposedly indubitable certainties is uncongenial to it. Indubitable certainties call for the submission of the intellect even if the heart is unpersuaded. (And indubitable certainties, as we have been reminded, make no contact with reality) But the gospel is not a matter of indubitable certainties; it is the offer of a grace that can only be accepted in faith, a faith in which both heart and intellect join.
In addition to being criticized by natural theology and Protestant fundamentalism, the position I am seeking to establish comes under attack from a third tradition: theological liberalism. The assertion that the biblical story, with its crucial turning point being the events concerning Jesus, must be accepted in faith as the starting point for all our thinking - such an assertion is unacceptable dogmatism in the eyes of many in the liberal tradition. And it is fundamental to the liberal tradition that all such dogma must be open to critical evaluation. Clearly, anyone who claims the name "Christian" has to take the Bible, or at least the New Testament, very seriously. But in the liberal tradition, the Bible cannot have the kind of ultimate authority I have suggested. It is, after all, the product of human experience; and, like all records of human experience, it must be tested in the light of the wider experience of the human race. It must take its place along with other records of human religious experience and be subject to the same kind of critical questioning as are the others. Liberals will, therefore, gladly acknowledge that God may speak to the human mind and conscience through the Bible, but they are uncomfortable with any identification of the Bible as the word of God.
The great value of the liberal tradition is its readiness to listen to new truth and to be open to questioning. There are many times when one has to be thankful for this, in contrast to the kind of dogmatism incapable of hearing anything that calls present beliefs into question. Precisely because it concerns our whole being and destiny, religious belief can be so tightly held that the mind is closed to anything new. Against this, the liberal tradition is a refreshing protest. But theological liberalism can itself become a dogmatic position that is closed to the witness of the gospel. The principle that every dogma must be open to question is itself a dogma open to question. I suggest four lines along which questions should be raised against the central dogma of theological liberalism:
1. Liberalism has accepted the critical principle of Descartes and his successors as an integral part of its method. In the preceding pages, I have tried to show how this inevitably leads to nihilism. All grasping of the truth concerning the world beyond our consciousness is the work of minds shaped by a tradition that uses a language and a set of concepts and models developed over many generations. The historical-critical method upon which liberal theologians rely in their use of Scripture is one part of such a tradition. Those who are shaped by this tradition work with certain, quite specific presuppositions, which I have discussed in a previous chapter. These presuppositions are so much a part of the reigning plausibility structure of contemporary modern society that it is hard for those who accept them to recognize that these presuppositions are only a few among a whole possible set of presuppositions, and that there are no rational grounds on which it could be shown that they have a superior epistemological status to the presuppositions that a Christian (or Jewish) reader brings to the Scriptures. They form part of a particular cultural tradition that has had a relatively short life, showing many signs of disintegration.
In contrast to the liberal reader of the Bible, who stands within the tradition of the historical-critical principle, the confessional reader stands within the tradition of the Christian church. The presuppositions here are those of the gospel itself, namely, that in Jesus the Word of God was made flesh, lived a human life, died for the sin of the world, and rose again. These presuppositions govern Christians reading. They read as members of that same community whose story is told in the Bible. It is that community that has put the Bible into their hands and has taught them how to understand it. They read as believers. The difference between this way of reading the Bible and the historical-critical way is not that the latter is neutral or scientific whereas the former is confessional or sectarian; rather, it is the difference between two confessions, two traditions of interpretation developed in two different human communities. From the perspective of the much longer and wider experience of the Christian church, the historical-critical approach to the Bible is part of a cultural movement that has been fruitful in many respects but that is now in the process of disintegration. From a Christian point of view, there is something naive about the confidence of liberal theologians who suppose that the critical method provides a standpoint more secure than that offered by the historical faith of the universal church.
2. The principle that every dogma must be open to question runs into the difficulty that, in human affairs, action is required before all questions can be asked and answered. In his famous essay The Will to Believe, William James gives us a parable that illustrates the point I am making: A man climbing a cliff finds his hold slipping. Close by there is a tree growing out of a cleft in the rock. If he transfers himself to the tree, will it hold his weight? There is no way of deciding the matter in advance of action. There is no possibility of keeping an open mind. The climber has to make a decision on the evidence available, and that will be the final decision. The proposition that every dogma must be open to question is a typical product of that separation of thought from action, which we have traced to Descartes. We are continually required to act on beliefs that are not demonstrably certain and to commit our lives to propositions that can be doubted. The liberal who discounts the Christian interpretation of the biblical narrative on the ground that its truth cannot be demonstrated continues nevertheless to act on other beliefs whose truth cannot be demonstrated but are accepted anyway because they are part of the plausibility structure. Since the birth of the church, it has never been a secret that the acceptance of the full truth of the gospel announcement - that in the events concerning Jesus, God was himself performing those acts that are determinative for the history of the world - meant a radical questioning of the presuppositions of the majority of humankind. To decline the evangelical invitation to do exactly that is not to have the security of objective truth as opposed to confessional prejudice. It is to have chosen another confession.
3. Liberal theologians speak much of experience and frequently describe the Bible as particular record of human religious experience. But experience can be of many kinds, and we have to make distinctions. The experience of having a stomachache does not provide us with any information about a world of realities beyond the sufferer - only perhaps something about the eating habits of the person concerned. But the experience of seeing a great work of art does tell us something about a world beyond ourselves. Of course the Bible describes human experiences, but it does not speak of them in those terms; it speaks of the mighty acts of God. Of course these acts are understood and made part of the reader's awareness through the experience of human beings who were witnesses of them. But their witness concerns what God has done and not just what they have felt. And if God did indeed do the things of which the gospel speaks, then these accounts of them cannot be filed away in a catalogue of the varieties of religious experience. The story must either be disbelieved or it must become the fundamental presupposition of all our thought and action.
4. But perhaps the fundamental flaw in the tradition of theological liberalism lies at the point of its most attractive feature. The liberal mind is at its best in challenging us to be open to new truth, to be fearless in exploring all reality, and to be humble in recognizing the vastness and mystery that we try to comprehend with our finite minds. But even the language about the greatness and the unfathomable depths of the mystery of God can be the cloak for a calamitous error. The error is the supposition that it is we who are the explorers, that the real questions are the ones we formulate and put to the universe, and that our minds have a sovereign freedom to explore a reality waiting to be discovered. Our peril is that, out of the vastness of the unplumbed mystery, we summon up images that are the creations of our own minds. The human heart, as Calvin said, is a factory of idols.
The gospel challenges liberals' thinking in the sharpest possible way, and perhaps this is the hardest thing for them to accept. It exposes as illusion the liberal picture - the picture of ourselves as sovereign explorers who formulate the real questions in a search for a yet-to-be-discovered reality. The gospel undermines our questions with a question that comes to us from the mystery we thought to explore. It is a question as piercing and shattering as the voice that spoke to job out of the whirlwind. It exposes our false pretensions. We are not honest and open-minded explorers of reality; we are alienated from reality because we have made ourselves the center of the universe. Before we continue with our questions, we have to answer a question put to us from the heart of the mystery. We have to answer that anguished question, "Adam, where are you?" We have to learn that we are lost and that we have to be rescued. We have to answer the call of the one who has come to rescue us and learn that it is only in him and through him that we shall be led into the truth in its fullness. There is still mystery, but it is not the mystery of an empty infinity of space and time. It is the mystery of the incarnation and the cross, of the holiness that can embrace the sinner, of a Lord who is servant, and of the deathless one who can die. There is still the vast ocean of what we do not know and do not understand. But we know the way, and the way is Jesus. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that stand at the head of this essay, "Jesus Christ alone is the certainty of faith." To look for certainty elsewhere is to head for the wasteland.
Both faith and doubt have their proper roles in the whole enterprise of knowing, but faith is primary and doubt is secondary because rational doubt depends upon beliefs that sustain our doubt. The ideal that modernity, following Descrates, has set before itself, namely, the ideal of a kind of certainty that admits no possibility of doubt, is leading us into skepticism and nihilism. The universe is not provided with a spectator's gallery in which we can survey the total scene without being personally involved. True knowledge of reality is available only to the one who is personally committed to the truth already grasped. Knowing cannot be severed from living and acting, for we cannot know the truth unless we seek it with love and unless our love commits us to action. Faith is the only certainty because faith involves personal commitment. The point has often been made that there is a distinction between the cognitive and the affective elements in belief, between "I believe that ..." and "I believe in...." But faith holds both together; to separate them is to deny oneself access to truth.
The confidence proper to a Christian is not the confidence of one who claims possession of demonstrable and indubitable knowledge. It is the confidence of one who had heard and answered the call that comes from the God through whom and for whom all things were made: "Follow me."