Introduction

The Cultural Context of Modern Theology

Modern theology is thinking about God in the context of modernity—the cultural ethos stemming from the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the intellectual revolution, affecting all European and later North American societies, that began with the rise of a new rationalism in philosophy and science in the seventeenth century. Enlightenment thinkers “thought they had possession of a new knowledge and a new way of knowing which gave them a privileged position to judge the errors of the past and fashion the achievements of the future.”1 The Enlightenment, and its offspring modernity, will be the subject of some of the initial chapters of this book, so here only the briefest preview must suffice.

Modernity Is Born in a Cultural Revolution

Many scholars date the beginning of the Enlightenment and modernity with French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who launched a revolution in philosophy comparable to that of Copernicus in astronomy.2 According to his own testimony, he wanted to discover knowledge that cannot be doubted. He lived during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) that devastated Europe; much of it was about conflicting religious beliefs and loyalties. Descartes wanted to know if there is any certain knowledge not based on revelation, faith or even sense evidence, as the five senses, he thought, can always deceive. In short, he was looking for rational certainty and thought he discovered it in the simple thought cogito ergo sum—an idea that launched an era—“I think; therefore I am.” What he searched for and believed he found was indubitable knowledge, certainty, the ground of all certainty, a new foundation for knowledge including science and religion.

The result was, and has been up to the present, that Enlightenment-inspired thinkers tend to define knowledge as what one can be certain of, what cannot be reasonably doubted. Begin with a simple, clear and distinct idea that cannot be doubted, such as one’s own existence (because to doubt one has to exist) and from it deduce an entire body of knowledge. Whatever is logically required by the foundational concept cannot be doubted and therefore is certain to be true. This is knowledge according to what modern philosophers call foundationalism. All else is opinion or superstition. Most early Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes saw this new approach to knowledge as an ally of orthodox Christianity; they thought it could be pressed into service for the defense of the faith. Something else happened over time as modernity developed out of the Enlightenment. Perhaps the Enlightenment poet and essayist Alexander Pope (1688–1744) expressed the unintended outcome of Descartes’s and other early rationalists’ Copernican revolution in thought best: “Know then thyself; presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man.”3

The other root of the Enlightenment, besides philosophical foundationalism, was the scientific revolution that took place at about the same time and also launched modernity. The exact beginning of the scientific revolution is much debated, but everyone agrees a major catalyst was Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun—an idea proposed by Copernicus nearly a century before Galileo proved him right using mathematics and the new invention the telescope. What was so earthshaking about that? Simply that the Catholic church, of which he was a faithful member, had taught authoritatively for centuries that the sun revolves around the earth. Most Protestants agreed. (Luther condemned Copernicus as a heretic if not a lunatic.) Galileo’s discovery called the authority of tradition into question; this was no dispute about different interpretations of the Bible but a major attack on religious authority itself.

Perhaps Galileo’s main contribution to undermining religious authority was his “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615) in which he declared science independent of theology and church authority. Galileo asserted that scientific fact must alter religious belief when they conflict. (He acknowledged theology’s authority in matters of salvation.) The Catholic Church tried to suppress Galileo’s discovery and new ideas about authority; it recognized the serious threat they posed to the stability of society and culture which was based on the church’s authority (much of it confused with Aristotle’s philosophy). But there was no holding back the flood of new scientific discoveries, many of which flatly contradicted what religious authorities, including theologians, had taught for hundreds of years.

Years after Galileo a devout Christian scientist and mathematician, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), added ammunition to the scientific revolution’s assault on authoritative tradition. According to him, the entire universe is ruled like a vast machine by inexorable and mathematically describable laws such as gravity. Again, Pope expressed the popular Enlightenment sentiment: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”4 Newton himself was more interested in discovering the date of the second coming of Jesus Christ than in science, but the effect of his discoveries and world picture added to the general impression of Europe’s intellectual elite that tradition could not be trusted. Tradition, after all, said the universe operated by spiritual principles and beings. What could not be explained by observable and describable laws was explained by reference to a God of the gaps. Newton paved the way toward the closing of all the gaps, leaving no room for God or spiritual beings in the workings of nature.

What was the effect of the scientific revolution’s falsifications of some traditional religious beliefs and the churches’ attempts to silence them? Andrew D. White (1832–1918), president of Cornell University and chronicler of the warfare between science and theology in Christendom, declared that the effect “wrought into the hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea that there is a necessary antagonism between science and religion.”5

This has been merely the simplest and most basic overview of the Enlightenment and its modern challenges to traditional Christianity; early chapters will lay them out in more detail. The point now is to say that something we call modernity arose out of these events of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and gained momentum through later philosophers and scientists such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and that much of it introduced into the stream of Western culture impulses inimical to traditional Christianity.

Modernity Challenges Traditional Christianity

Before moving on to an introductory account of the ethos of modernity and its challenges to traditional Christianity it may be helpful to readers to know what is meant throughout this book by that phrase “traditional Christianity.”6

Traditional Christianity is a much disputed concept. Here it designates what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity” in his famous book of that title—which is not to commit to every expression of Christian belief Mere Christianity contains. Although Christianity has always included much diversity, at least since the days of the apostles a rough doctrinal consensus prevailed to unite Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians (even if not ecclesiastically). The fact that, at times, they have anathematized one another as heretics does not detract from the fact that they have traditionally agreed on certain basic beliefs. Spelling out that consensus would take another book, and many have done it. Here a few of the basic tenets of traditional Christianity will be pronounced.

The vast majority of Christians of all major branches believed in a personal God who transcends nature as its creator and who providentially rules over history. They also believed this God is supremely revealed in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate and who performed miracles and was raised bodily from death (such that the tomb was empty). They believed that the Bible, however exactly defined and understood, constitutes a written revelation of God. They believed that the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at least occasionally acts in special ways in human history to perform miracles that transcend anyone’s ability to predict or explain rationally. They believed that faith is necessary for knowing God in the way that God wants to be known by humans and that religion is essential to fulfilled human life. They believed that Jesus Christ is both human and divine and the Son of God from heaven whose death on the cross provided salvation for fallen humanity and who will return to this world with judgment and redemption. This is, of course, only a minimal account of traditional Christianity. Many Christians will want to add to it, but the point here is that at least this is what all Christians of all churchly persuasions believed doctrinally for about a millennium and a half. And, at least, conservative Christians of all denominational persuasions still hold these beliefs.

There is more to this story of traditional Christianity, however, than doctrine. For a millennium and a half most, if not all, Christians also believed such things as that the sun revolves around the stationary earth. Here it will be assumed there is a qualitative difference, in terms of basic Christianity, between belief in a personal God and, say,...