from God, Reason, and the Evangelicals, Chapter One
Nicholas F. Gier, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, University of Idaho
Ph.D. in philosophical theology at the Claremont Graduate University
Coordinator of Religious Studies from 1980-2003
University Press of America, 1987
copyright held by author
Chapter One: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Rationalists
If one uses the word “evangelical” in the broadest possible sense–i.e., proclaiming an important message–then I believe that most of us have been evangelical rationalists at some time in our life. In my early debates with the fundamentalists, I found myself playing this role. My “gospel” was that the fundamentalists were completely wrong in their interpretation of Christianity. I was just as dogmatic about this opinion as my opponents were about theirs. I thought I could prove the untruth of their claims with the same confidence that they thought they could demonstrate the truth of the Bible. I found myself in an ideological trap: my language was militant and polemical and the intellectual and psychological burdens of my crusade were enormous.
The use of the term “evangelical” in this book is of course not this broad, but surely we have to reject the narrow definitions that are evident everywhere in the literature. For example, in his book The Battle for the Bible, Harold Lindsell declares that those Christians who give up biblical inerrancy have relinquished the right to call themselves evangelicals. Ronald H. Nash proposes a more acceptable definition: “An evangelical refers to a Protestant Christian who accepts the traditional (orthodox) beliefs of the Christian faith, who believes that human beings need to be brought into a personal saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and who accepts the Bible as the ultimate authority on Christian belief and practice.”1
Although he is not an evangelical rationalist, Donald G. Bloesch could affirm this formulation, especially since it does not mention biblical inerrancy. He would, however, probably offer one proviso. In his book The Future of Evangelical Christianity, Bloesch emphasizes the catholic nature of Christian faith and recognizes that there are many Catholics who would meet Nash’s criteria. There is also another issue that Bloesch would raise with Nash. Although it is not part of his definition above, evangelical rationalists like Nash vigorously defend propositional revelation, while many evangelicals like Bloesch and Cornelius Van Til reject this theory. As we have seen, process theology has an innovative propositional revelation and Richard Swinburne, the philosopher of religion on whom I rely heavily in Chapter Two, supports a more traditional notion. Although I have not chosen to give a detailed analysis of the claim, I do not believe propositional revelation necessarily leads to evangelical rationalism.
An earlier title for this book was “The New Gnosticism: The Case Against Fundamentalist Christianity.” The meaning of the first part of this title will be made clear shortly, and I have decided not to use the word “fundamentalism” for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I found that the evangelical theologians on whom I have now decided to concentrate do not like the term. (Ironically, the only theologian in this group who uses the term is J. I. Packer, who stands against rationalism on essential points.) For more sophisticated evangelicals the word “fundamentalism” causes undue confusion and embarrassment, especially when they are identified with popular apologists like Josh McDowell or Francis Schaeffer, or when they are associated with Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. For evangelicals like Nash, fundamentalism represents an older, narrower form of evangelical Christianity, which in its radical separatism has virtually ignored the challenges of the modern world. In 1963 Nash published The New Evangelicalism in which he proposed that evangelicals should preserve the fundamentalist commitment to biblical authority and values, but strengthen their apologetic by taking philosophy, theology, and modern Bible scholarship seriously,2 and finally restore the historical church’s activism regarding social and political issues.
Fundamentalism got its original name from conservative Christians who, at the turn of the 19th Century, responded to the threat of modernism by reaffirming the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith. In the 1895 Niagara proclamation these basic axioms were an inerrant Bible, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, and Christ’s substitutionary atonement, physical resurrection, and Second Coming.
Ernest Sandeen has now shown that there has been a basic confusion about the origins of fundamentalism. The twelve volume The Fundamentals, published by evangelicals in Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, were unwittingly merged in historical consciousness with the Niagara declaration, even though the former was much less exclusivistic than the latter.3 In any case, defining evangelicalism in this historical sense is unsatisfactory, because many Christians, including many Catholics, would accept these basic beliefs. Nevertheless, the word still carries the meaning which I now want “evangelical rationalism” to bear.
An intellectual apologetic has of course always been found in the Christian tradition. Some of the early church fathers used Greek philosophy in this way, and we shall see a close connection between these first Hellenistic attempts and some evangelical rationalists. Medieval dialectical theology also contained strong rationalist elements.
Indeed, Ramon Lull (c. 1232-1316) was a Christian rationalist far more radical than any found in contemporary evangelical theology. Ignoring the careful Thomistic distinction between natural and revealed theology and using intricate circles and geometric designs, Lull attempted to demonstrate the truth of all articles of faith by necessary reason.4 Lull represents the extreme of dialectical theology, and even though thinkers like Anselm held that the necessity of incarnation and atonement could be proved without recourse to revelation, the major theologians avoided rationalism and kept within the Augustinian credo ut intelligam.
In Protestantism this method was threatened by theologians like Johann Gerhard and Francis Turretin; and 19th Century thinkers like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield carried this evangelical rationalism with full force into the 20th Century. A rationalist tendency has not been absent from modern Catholicism either. In the late 19th Century there was a vigorous reemphasis on biblical infallibility as well as the more often remembered declarations of papal infallibility. Early in this century the Catholic Church denounced all forms of fideism, and theologians like S. Harent argued that the contents of the creed must be accepted as rational propositions.5 Contemporary Catholic theology under the leadership of some unusually brilliant thinkers, has reaffirmed the traditional idea of faith as fiducia rather than scientia.
Defining Christian Rationalism
Before proceeding any further, I must define what I mean by “rationalism.” Many evangelical laypeople would probably be puzzled by the conjunction of the terms “evangelical” and “rationalism.” Indeed, some of them might reject it outright as an oxymoron. Since the Enlightenment it has been common, and usually correct, for skeptics of the Christian faith to be called “rationalists.” More and more frequently, however, evangelical apologetics in this century has attempted to reclaim the use of reason. In his amazingly popular book Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer proposes that Christians should no longer look upon reason as the opponent; rather, the real enemies of Christianity are those, mostly within the church itself, who claim that faith is a blind leap in the dark. Even before Schaeffer became popular, C. S. Lewis was urging Christians to dissolve their unnecessary fears about intellectual respectability. Representing a form of evangelical rationalism called “externalism,” Lewis sums up his Christian rationalism in these famous words: “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.”6
In the evangelical literature the word “rationalism” is used equivocally. Many times it is used as a term of derision to describe anti-Christian detractors. When it is used positively, these thinkers cannot decide which type of rationalism is the right one. The strictest definition of rationalism describes what might be broadly called the Platonic tradition of innate ideas in which the primary method is deduction. As we shall see, this type of rationalism describes a tight group of evangelicals (Clark, Carnell, Henry, Nash, Demarest) who follow a neo-Platonic Augustinian philosophy. At the same time, the empirical tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, and the British empiricists is also called “rationalist.” Bruce Demarest contends that Aquinas is too rationalistic in his claims that God’s existence can be demonstrated by unaided reason, and Carl Henry also defines rationalism in terms of induction.7 Both Demarest and Henry reject this form of rationalism for its hubris–viz., trying to prove too much (about God or against God) without the help of special revelation.
For the purposes of this book I define evangelical rationalism as a methodological attitude, using either inductive or deductive methods, which assumes that certain religious claims, which are either full Christian mysteries or simply unprovable hypotheses (e. g., biblical inerrancy), can be demonstrated as true or at least coherent. For example, I maintain that Aquinas is not a Christian rationalist because he preserves the distinction between natural and revealed theology. I believe that Aquinas is generally correct (except for the immortality of the soul and some divine attributes) in his claims about what we can know religiously within reason’s limits. At the same time Aquinas respects basic Christian mysteries–Trinity and Incarnation–an attitude which I find lacking in contemporary evangelical rationalism.
Demarest criticizes Anselm for drawing too much out of the innate idea of God, but I believe all the evangelical rationalists are guilty of this. Furthermore, in my definition of rationalism, it makes no difference whether the bounds of what is provable are broken by a reason which is unaided or “spirit” aided. As far as I am concerned, the claims of special revelation are just as human as the claims of general revelation, and these claims must be tested by the same human methods. To argue otherwise would simply be indulging in question begging of the highest order.
This means that there is a hidden humanism in evangelical rationalism. When Lewis claims that Christian apologetics is an attempt to see how far we can go “on our own steam,”8 and when other evangelicals tell with great confidence what God has said and what he intends, we are observing a Promethean self-assertion as great as anything in the history of secular humanism. This is found not just among the popularizers whom we can excuse, but among their best theologians. Apparently undermining his own “presuppositionalism,” Henry boldly claims that “the revealed facts of the Christian system of truth can indeed be coherently correlated with all other information, including empirical data involving chronology, geography, history, and psychological experience as well.”9 As we shall see, Henry does not succeed in distinguishing his position from externalism by calling his theology “revelational theism.” Henry’s position stands in stark contrast with other evangelicals like Jack Rogers, who stand squarely with the Christian tradition: “Too many Christian apologists seem to reverse the roles of the Holy Spirit and our reason. Some conservative evangelicals seem to feel that the authority of the Word and the facts about Christ must be proved before the Spirit can work.”10
I will comment on one last element of Christian rationalism, and I use the broader phraseology because I believe nonevangelical Christians are involved here as well. In his book Towards a Christian Political Ethics Jose M. Bonino makes us aware of some significant dimensions of Third World Christianity. One of them is the fact that it preserves the full-blown supranaturalism of premodernism, whereas modern Western Christianity has a limited supranaturalism. Premodern peoples believed in a whole pantheon of good and evil spirits (they attributed disease via human sin to the latter), but American and European Christians (especially Protestants) have reduced the supranatural to God and Satan (and for many, just God). This phenomenon can be fully attributed to the rationalizing of religious faith under the profound influence of the scientific worldview. As Bonino states: “Clearly we find ourselves here–within the religious sphere–in a Cartesian world.”11
For modern evangelicalism this results in an interesting irony: fundamentalism arose as a response to modernism, but evangelical rationalists are thoroughly modernist in their attempts to impose a scientific world-view on the Bible. When I lecture on the Bible’s three-storied universe and its view that sin causes disease, evangelicals are both offended and incredulous. They gladly join their secular contemporaries in rejecting claims of Big Foot, flying saucers, and the esoteric realm. (Another irony is that the existence of Sasquatch and extraterrestrials is at least physically possible, whereas in Chapter Three I will show that the Incarnation is logically impossible.) Some evangelicals have not been unaware of this paradox. As Harold O. J. Brown admits: “We may act like Christians; worship like Christians, and to a great extent even believe like Christians; but to an astonishing degree we think with the categories, values, and tools of a completely secularized mind.”12 I am reminded of a marvelous passage from Kierkegaard in which he satirizes modern Christians who do “not believe as shoemakers and tailors and simple folk believe, but only after long deliberation.”13
RELIGIOUS GNOSTICISM
Some evangelical rationalists have so thoroughly confused the function of reason and faith that they exhibit some of the characteristics of ancient Christian Gnosticism. Gnosticism, an ancient Christian sect that was declared heretical, claimed divine authority based on esoteric means of direct communication with God. Evangelical rationalists are not especially esoteric, and most of their knowledge claims are allegedly factual, not intuitive or spiritual. Nevertheless, they do claim an infallible knowledge (Gk. gnosis) as the basis for their religion. I am not the first to recognize a general, nonesoteric gnosticism in the Christian tradition. In their thorough historical critique of the doctrine of inerrancy, Jack Rogers and Ronald McKim define the gnosis of evangelical rationalism as “clear demonstration starting from the testimony of Scripture.”14 In the same way that the early Christian Gnosticism was strongly Hellenistic in its inspiration, so too do we find evangelical gnostics overemphasizing the cognitive aspects of religious knowledge and human nature.
An integral part of ancient Gnosticism was a radical dualism between spirit and flesh. It is my impression that this Gnostic idea manifests itself most forcefully in old-line fundamentalists, who call for the separation of church and world, rather than in Nash’s “neoevangelicals.” Insofar as some evangelicals do indeed claim that the secular world belongs to Satan, these Christians are like the Manicheans, the Persian followers of Gnosticism. Harold Lindsell, editor emeritus of Christianity Today, explicitly supports this view in his book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Lindsell contends that all of us are “sons of the devil,” and that Satan is an “evil principle, which subverts every will and performs counterfeit miracles.”15
When I speak to high school classes about religion, I am both surprised and disappointed to get so many questions about Satan. The basic belief behind this obsession with the Devil is the Manichean view that it is Satan who rules the world. Orthodox Christianity never granted this much power to Satan and never accepted the view of a separate, virtually equal, evil principle. But many evangelical rationalists believe in, as James Barr says, the “universal, almost metaphysical character of sin.”16 This is evinced most strongly in an ontological interpretation of Paul’s idea that there was no death of any kind before the Fall. For some evangelical rationalists Adam’s sin was not just personal, nor just collective for humanity, but it also changed the very nature of reality.17 The result is an imputation of evil to the world as strong as any Manichee’s or Gnostic’s.
In his book The Religious Right and Christian Faith, Gabriel Fackre proposes that a Gnostic dualism infects most of fundamentalist Christianity. The Religious Right does in fact portray contemporary events in terms of the forces of light (the moral majority) and the forces of darkness (immoral minority). Fackre mistakenly implicates Zoroastrianism in the Gnostic and Manichean movements. Zoroaster, like the priestly writers of the Hebrew Bible, never located the evil principle in the world or the flesh as the Persian prophet Mani did. Fackre shows that some evangelicals have forgotten basic biblical principles: the goodness of all creation and the fallenness of all human beings. In my experience with fundamentalists I have always been puzzled by their claims that since they are “new beings in Christ” they are immune from sin. This again compares favorably with the esoterism and separatism of ancient Gnosticism. As Fackre states: “The trauma of the new birth is sometimes mistaken for the adulthood of faith. The ‘delivery experience’ becomes so absorbing that the need for growth is lost from view. Soteriology is confused with eschatology: what is only a beginning is mistaken for arrival at the end point; justification and a struggling sanctification is mistaken for glorification.”18
Both Carl Henry and Ronald Nash, two leading evangelical theologians with whom I have communicated, bristle with indignation at my suggestion that their approach to Christianity has anything to do with Gnosticism. Their reaction is well taken, for my earlier formulations were not very well qualified. As neoevangelicals Henry and Nash are virtually free of the Gnostic and Manichean elements which Fackre and I have located in the old-line fundamentalists. This is why I have chosen to refer to the evangelical rationalists as “gnostic” in general (with a lower case “g”) rather than the particular Gnostic movement, whose esoterism, as I have already pointed out, differs greatly from modern-day fundamentalism and especially neoevangelicalism. Nevertheless, when evangelical rationalists like Henry, Nash, and others claim that God’s thoughts become our thoughts, a point of contact is established with ancient Gnosticism. One might also mention the tendency to individualism and the privatizing of faith which is especially strong in Protestant conservatism.
Now that I have read Henry’s God, Revelation, and Authority I am surprised at Henry’s initial reaction. In this work he uses the term “gnosticism” to describe humanistic views which claim too much knowledge using unaided reason.19 Recall that I am not impressed at all with the argument that evangelicals are excused from this charge because they claim that their knowledge comes via the Holy Spirit. God of course would have infallible knowledge, but it is just as gnostic to claim that any person has such knowledge from God as from any other source. Henry does not realize that he is very much a part of the modern gnosis that he criticizes. Henry does admit that Christians do not have the direct, unmediated gnosis that the Gnostics claimed, but his Logos Christology is exceedingly more intellectual and direct than any version since the first Christian centuries, if it existed even then. Although Henry rejects the contention, I believe that Wolfgang Pannenberg is correct in his assessment that any revival of this ancient theology of the Word would inevitably have Gnostic overtones.20
I am in the process of developing a distinction among major types of religion: religions of obedience (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) religions of knowledge–the “gnostic” religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—and the Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism as religions of practice. In the religions of obedience the basic sin is disobedience, but in the gnostic religions it is ignorance. (One could also describe a third view: sin as impurity in many primitive religions.) Devotees of the gnostic religions would find it difficult, I believe, to understand Yahweh’s prohibition about the trees in the Garden: the tree of eternal life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is significant that some Christian Gnostic accounts of the Fall portray Yahweh as an evil deity while the serpent is celebrated as a true spiritual teacher. I contend that many Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains would essentially agree with this rejection of the orthodox Fall: Adam and Eve did the right thing because moral knowledge and perfection, not obedience to God, are the highest human goals.
Modern evangelicals obviously reject this Gnostic account of the Fall, and they still stress, very emphatically, obedience to God. Nevertheless, their religious epistemology has strong gnostic tendencies. One gets the distinct impression from some evangelicals that it is their own unshakable knowledge about the Bible that will save them, rather than their faith and the grace of God. Many of them claim to know exactly what God wants, contravening the traditional notion of ignorance and impotence on the part of the Christian believer and the idea that saving knowledge is a divine gift. Evangelical rationalists, recalling the wise words of Wendell Berry “cut themselves off from mystery and …from the sacred” in their attempt to “impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge.” In terms of the definitions given in Chapter Two, I would change this to making “faith perform as knowledge.”
Religious gnosticism has not been limited to conservative Protestantism. Neoorthodox theologians are fond of saying that liberalism and fundamentalism “are two sides of the same coin–trust in reason over revelation.”23 Evangelical Donald G. Bloesch is correct that too many liberal Protestants have concentrated on “rational and spiritual insight” rather than a “moral regeneration of the will.”24 Bloesch is also right in claiming that liberals are mostly to blame for the “neo-Gnostic” tendency to dissolve the “boundaries between the infinite and the finite, the supernatural and the natural” and thereby threatening “the sovereignty and transcendence of God.”25 As I have already indicated and will argue further, process theology does preserve the transcendence of God and legitimately rejects the sovereignty of God, while at the same time avoiding an interpretation of the Incarnation which confuses the finite and the infinite. As we shall see in Chapter Three, this the evangelical rationalists definitely do. Furthermore, it is they who are guilty of Bloesch’s two charges of obscuring the kerygma by a gnostic apologetic and using a scientific method as a way of knowing God.
THREE EVANGELICAL TYPOLOGIES
We have already been introduced to two ways of distinguishing among the evangelicals. First, there is Nash’s division between old-line fundamentalism and neoevangelicalism. Second, there is my distinction between the rationalists and the nonrationalists. Nash’s typology, while helpful in many ways, is not satisfactory for my purposes. As we have seen, Nash and other contemporary evangelicals part company with many fundamentalists on the questions of separatism, philosophical theology, and social activism, but both camps still share a common rationalist epistemology. For some of them this is found not only in the faith and reason area but also regarding biblical inerrancy and “scientific” creationism. James Barr has identified inerrancy as “a constant principle of rationality” among fundamentalists and evangelical rationalists.
In my ongoing research I have gained a new respect for evangelical theologians who have not fallen into the rationalist trap. I do not share their views on the sovereignty of God, on the uniqueness of Christianity, on the inspiration of the Bible, on the Incarnation, on humanism, and on abortion; but I do appreciate their careful discussions of the reason-faith issue and I praise their courageous defense of the traditional view of the Bible’s inspiration and authority. Among the theologians whom I will henceforth identify as “nonrationalist” evangelicals are Donald G. Bloesch, Paul Helm, Bernard Ramm, Dewey M. Beegle, Jack Rogers, Donald K. McKim, F. F. Bruce, Robert K. Johnston, John Pelt, Gabriel Fackre, J. Ramsey Michaels, Clark H. Pinnock, J. I. Packer, and James Barr. Among prominent evangelical rationalists I will discuss Ronald H. Nash, Carl F. H. Henry, Bruce Demarest, Gordon H. Clark, Norman Geisler, E. J. Carnell, Stuart C. Hackett, John Warwick Montgomery, Harold O. J. Brown, and John Jefferson Davis. More popular evangelical rationalists like Francis Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Henry M. Morris will be mentioned occasionally and will be found to fulfill almost all the rationalist criteria that I will now list.
Christian rationalism can occur in at least five different topic areas: (1) On the issue of faith and reason one finds a gnostic tendency to subvert or obscure the basic fideism of the Christian witness and tradition (Chapter 2); (2) some evangelicals interpret the meaning of the Christian Logos as discursive reason (next section); (3) there are many who claim “detailed inerrancy,” a pseudoscientific attempt to assume, and prove if necessary, that the Bible is free from errors of all kinds (Chapter 6); and (4) there is “scientific” creationism, the result of an inerrant Bible being held as the standard for truth in geology, cosmology, and biology (see 13 and 14). The creationists contend that the “scientific” implications of the biblical record require the true Christian to reject modern evolutionary science in all of its ramifications. While it is easy to identify theologians and their errors under (3) and (4), it is far more difficult to establish the correct balance between faith and reason. The more sophisticated theologians whose alleged rationalism is of types (1) and/or (2) may feel that it is unfair to include them with the inerrantists and creationists in this study.27 But criticism needs be taken only when it is directed and justified. Furthermore, it is clear to me that the confusion on the faith-reason issue is at the root of the problems in (3) and (4).
The fifth rationalist criterion is one, which many evangelicals share with the Christian tradition in general. It is most certainly one of the causes for the occasional subordination of faith to reason in Christian theology. There has been a near unanimous opinion in the Christian tradition that the main feature of humans created in the image of God is that they are rational beings. This position is nowhere to be found in the Bible itself; rather it comes primarily from Aristotle’s definition of human beings as rational animals. In Chapter Nine I note that some contemporary Christians have begun to recognize the unbiblical nature of this view, but I also emphasize that some evangelicals have intensified the rational component of the imago dei.
Henry’s comprehensive six-volume systematic theology has been praised, according to the dust jacket, as “the most important work of evangelical theology in modern times” and a “brilliant defense of the rational character of biblical faith.” Henry’s work, the largest systematics ever written by an American, manifests wide reading and impressive erudition. The analysis of various issues is generally of good quality, although there are exceptions and far too much repetition. (He also exhibits one of my weaknesses: a tendency to quote authorities on a question rather than to develop my own independent analysis.) I have already noted that Henry does use the term “gnosticism” (but only for humanists who misuse reason), and he also employs the phrase “evangelical rationalism.” He reserves this term, however, for Christian theologians who assume that one can do natural theology without recourse to special revelation. Henry makes it clear that his rejection of natural theology is significantly different from that of neoorthodoxy: “To reject the validity of natural theology–as an enterprise that presumptively underestimates the epistemic predicament of finite man–in no way requires the rejection of the role of rational argument in theology or abandoning the intrinsically rational character of special divine revelation.”28 I shall argue that Henry’s “revelational theism” is just as presumptive, or more so, as any philosophical theology.
Henry’s comments bring to light the third typology, one used by the evangelicals themselves. The evangelical rationalists Henry criticizes are Clark Pinnock and John Warwick Montgomery, who believe that basic Christian truths can be demonstrated by the natural light of reason alone. In addition to Pinnock and Montgomery one can mention Stuart Hackett, J. J. Davis, C. S. Lewis, Norman Geisler and Francis Schaeffer. Historically, one can see this type of evangelical theology as a descendant of the Princeton school of Charles Hodge with its link in Scottish empiricism. Here one finds an empiricist epistemology and a preference for the correspondence theory of truth. In the “presuppositionalist” school, by contrast, one finds a rationalist epistemology of innate ideas and an emphasis on the coherence theory of truth. Instead of proving the truth of Christianity by external evidence (hence the term “externalism” yet another name for the empirical camp), one simply has to show that none of the claims drawn from basic articles of faith are internally inconsistent. In addition to Henry other prominent presuppositionalists are Clark, Nash, E. J. Carnell, Bruce Demarest, and Cornelius Van Til.29
“Logical deduction from Scripture is our method” is Clark’s succinct summary of his position, while Montgomery describes the empiricist position with these words: “On the basis of empirical method as applied to history, one can inductively validate the Christian revelation-claim and the biblical view of history.”30 Van Til contends that “evidentialism” leads to the “destruction of Christianity” because it encourages a humanistic pride and self-assertion which is alien to Christian faith.31 Henry maintains that evangelical empiricism “requires a herculean burden of demonstration that no evangelical theologian, however devout or brilliant, can successfully carry.”32 Henry claims that historical events are not self-explanatory and that prior assumptions are necessary for their proper interpretation. He states that “to appeal solely on the basis of historical research to God’s special historical act in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, apart from any reliance on revelational authority, will not enable us to establish the meaning and significance of the resurrection.”33
These responses are perceptive and constitute sound arguments against evangelical “externalism.” I believe that a general presuppositional approach is to be preferred because it is methodologically defensible, apologetically sensitive, and more compatible with the biblical witness and historical Christianity. Traditional Christian fideism is a presuppositionalist view, but it differs from Henry and his colleagues in one significant respect: historical Christian theology did not claim that articles of faith are rational propositions. For Catholics and Protestants the basic items of the creed are self-justifying truths. To ask for more or to claim more is to fall into Christian rationalism. Henry calls the evidentialists “presumptuous” but so is he in his claim that Christian truth is fully rational and universal in the philosophical sense of those terms.
The case against presuppositionalism can be phrased simply in terms of the basic logical fallacy of question-begging. Traditional Christian fideism escapes this charge because it does not make the extra epistemological claims that Henry does. I am sure that Henry would agree with John Hick that arguments in theology are more like links in a chain than ladders which are thrown away once the religious goal is reached. If so, then Henry must concede Hick’s conclusion from this analogy: “A chain of reasoning can be no stronger than its weakest link;…thus we can never properly be more certain of the truth of a revealed proposition than of the soundness of our reason for classifying it as revealed.”34 If Henry wants to incorporate philosophical theology into his revelational theism, then he must accede to Hick’s argument against a self-justifying revelation.
Another way of phrasing this response to Henry is to ask: Why his presuppositions rather than some others? Henry has an answer to this question:
Theological truth does not differ from other truth in respect to intelligibility; therefore, truth must be rationally cognized if it is to be meaningfully grasped and communicated. Nor does the difference lie in the fact that revelation is its source, for God is the source of truth. The difference…is that theological truth is divinely authorized, infallibly certain, and biblically attested; all other claims for truth are subject to correction and at most are but probable….35
There are several comments to make on this important passage. First, no one needs agree with Henry that all truth has to be rationally cognized. Many truths in the axiological disciplines–aesthetics, ethics, and religion–cannot be grasped in this manner. For example, we can perceive the truth and beauty of a great painting and find it very meaningful without rationally apprehending it. Second, Christian believers should not object to the last sentence as it stands. But it is the qualifier before the last sentence that represents the real parting of the ways. Christian fideists would ground their affirmation of the third sentence by affirming, not rejecting, the substance of the second sentence. The answer that they would give to my question above would simply be: “God has revealed it, period.” That is not sufficient for Henry, and I believe that is precisely where his presuppositionalism turns into something else.
Just as the evangelical empiricists can be shown to have hidden presuppositions, so Henry and his colleagues cannot avoid an “externalism” of some sort. Henry takes great pains to make sure that his arguments avoid an appeal to external evidence. He challenges evangelicals to show the superior internal logical consistency of their beliefs. It is a gallant attempt, but it fails. He admits that coherence is only a negative test for truth, and this is obviously insufficient for the claims that Henry wants to make. When he states that “any religion that would exert a universal truth-claim…must adduce criteria whereby Christian and non-Christian alike can test the veracity of their claims,” he must mean more than the formal logic he stipulates.36 Indeed, on the same page he quotes Carnell favorably with regard to the necessity of presenting sufficient evidence “not epistemologically dissimilar to the kind of cognitive information and historical data on which all historical, judicial or other everyday decisions depend.” Henry’s externalism is fully revealed when he states that “the Christian is armed with reason and does not evade the question of verifiability” and concedes that “persuasive counter evidence would discredit a biblical faith.”37 Finally, instead of just confessing Christ as a good fideist should, Henry says that evangelicals should seek “to convince mankind that Christ is the divine Savior.”38 One obviously does not do this merely on the basis of an internally consistent gospel.
I have shown that the standard typology of distinguishing among evangelicals breaks down on the question of basic apologetic strategy. Despite their very different epistemologies (which are not practiced consistently) one finds that they are both forms of the evangelical rationalism that I defined in the first section. Stuart Hackett of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is a good example of how the third typology fails. His recent book The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelational Claim is one of the best by an evangelical rationalist that I have read. The writing is smooth and elegant and the approach is original with touches of brilliance. Hackett is eminently fair to the critics of evangelical Christianity and he qualifies his points fairly well. Furthermore, he graciously admits that there is some truth in the non-Christian religions. There is virtually none of the polemical tone found among other evangelical rationalists. Finally, Hackett rejects both inerrancy and creationism, although I find his idea of “indefectible” scripture to be ambiguous and equivocal. If Hackett means complete indefectibility in every respect, then we are back to detailed inerrancy again.
Nevertheless, Hackett is definitely an evangelical rationalist on the faith-reason issue. Indeed, Geisler lists Hackett as the most prominent evangelical using a rationalist methodology to demonstrate Christian truths. His placement in the evidentialist school is entirely correct, because Hackett attempts to prove the plausibility of Christian claims by employing much extrabiblical evidence and speculation. At the same time, he calls himself a “rational empiricist” and supports the same Platonic-Augustinian realism that Henry and Nash recommend. Still working out of this Greek tradition, Hackett maintains that reason “constitutes the most unique and elevated dimension of human being….”39 Furthermore, Hackett claims that the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity must be assumed to have “full rational plausibility.” He implies, however, that a rational method is appropriate only for philosophical theology and not an empirical biblical theology, because “precision and logical compatibility…are far removed from the complex world of the Bible as a whole.”41 In a direct attack on the presuppositionalists, Hackett contends that the Bible does not lend itself to axiomization, and even if it did, the axioms drawn out would be neither self-evident nor self-interpreting.42 I believe that Hackett is completely correct in his assessment, but this appears to undermine his attempt at a rational biblical apologetic. There seems to be a world of difference between his alternative axiom-set–the metaphysics of essences and the God of Absolute Mind and Eternal Reason of his “Philosophical Prolegomena”–and any possible theological reading of the Bible itself.
CHRISTIAN LOGOS: LIFE NOT REASON
Throughout God, Revelation, and Authority Henry criticizes others for importing alien assumptions into Christian theology. In this section I shall demonstrate that Henry and other evangelicals have done this in their development of a Christian Logos. Local fundamentalists have always rejected my own attempts to explain the Johannine Logos in terms of Greek precedents. I felt vindicated when I found that my philosophical translation of John 1:1 as “God is the author of the logic of the world and his son is the expression of this logic” was almost identical to, although not as elegant as, Gordon Clark’s “In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God.”43 I emphasized, however that my translation was not meant to replace the traditional rendering of logos as “Word,” which definitely does more justice to the creative, dynamic, and soteriological functions of the biblical Logos. But Clark insists that this Logos has no redemptive role: it is strictly epistemological in nature. To prove this Clark lists the meanings of logos from the Lindell and Scott classical Greek dictionary. He is very satisfied to find that “Word” is the last and presumably least preferable alternative for logos.44 Many of course would ask why Clark did not consult a good New Testament Greek dictionary instead. Clark, even more than Hackett, is so committed to a classical Greek mind-set that his reading of the Bible is dramatically compromised.45
Although Clark’s position is extreme, I have discovered that his basic idea is supported by other evangelicals. Writers for the evangelical New Bible Dictionary suspect that Philo of Alexandria is behind John 1:1 and also state “the use of [logos] is singularly happy, for by it John was able to speak to Jews…to Christians…and to educated pagans who saw the Word as the principle of order and rationality in the universe.” English evangelical Michael Green declares that “Christ is the principle of coherence in the universe”45 (after all, Paul did say that in Christ “all things hold together” [Col. 1:17]); that Christ is “the universal principle of rationality so dear to Philo and the Stoics….”; and “it was all a reflection of that universal logos or reason that had taken personal and final form in Jesus of Nazareth.”47 It is, of course, in this sense that the Christian Logos is unique. The claim that the Logos had somehow found full and complete expression in a historical person would have been baffling to Heraclitus, the Stoics, and even Philo. (The contention that this somehow makes the Christian Logos superior is disputed at the end of Chapter Five.)
I shall now show that a rationalist interpretation of the biblical Logos does not have either philological or exegetical foundation. John 1:9–“the true light that enlightens every man”–is an instructive example. Henry, Nash, Carnell, Hackett, and Demarest all interpret this passage to mean the light of discursive reason. It is true that Christian theologians, including Calvin and William Temple, followed this reading of John 1:9; but no modern scholar that I have found will support it. This includes evangelical scholars such as William Hendriksen: “Although favored by eminent conservative exegetes and proclaiming an element of truth that must not be denied, we do not believe that in this context or anywhere in the Fourth Gospel where the term light (phos) is used–the reference is specifically to the light of reason and conscience.”48 Hendriksen’s interpretation is, I believe, correct: light refers to the new life in Christ.
The evangelical rationalists are favorably disposed to the Logos Christology of the Alexandrian theologians, but they do not seem to realize that they have no support from Clement on John 1:9. Although he believed in the preincarnate activity of God’s Word, he maintained that this passage was redemptively exclusivistic. As C. K. Barrett has pointed out, the light of John is also a judging light–it shines on some but not on others. A related dimension of the biblical word is seen in the word dabar, a Hebrew equivalent of logos. With the meaning of “deed” or “thing” this word shows how wrong Clark’s abstract Logos is: the biblical Word is firmly embedded in praxis. Evangelical rationalists betray their own scriptural roots by importing an alien epistemology rather than staying with the Bible’s own practical, fideistic soteriology.
Even though he emphasizes the intellectual aspect of the Christian Logos, Henry is, once at least, on the mark in this comment: “to ‘know God’ in John 8:54-55 does not basically have in view the intellectual apprehension of the truth of God’s reality, but rather the experiential knowledge of God as a liberating power found in a life commitment to his holy will.” Ronald Nash also moderates the extremism of Gordon Clark by maintaining that the biblical Logos is not only epistemological and cosmological, but soteriological as well. But true to his rationalism, the focus is always on the intellectual. We can have natural, objective knowledge of God because the Logos Christ “guarantees human rationality and certifies the ability of humans to understand the Word of God.”51
Nash claims that the best support for his Christian rationalism can be found in the works of Augustine. I contend, however, that he has overlooked the fideistic foundation of Augustine’s theology, a point I discuss at the beginning of the next chapter. Furthermore, Nash never solves the basic problem which most philosophical theologians have with Augustine’s epistemology. The divine illumination theory appears to completely undercut the possibility of independent human knowledge, because the human mind is, as Nash says, “a secondary and derivative source of light that reflects in a creaturely way the rationality of the Creator.”52 If We, as Nash maintains, “think God’s thoughts after him,” then we have Luther’s “captive” reason (see end of next chapter), a reason not worth having at all. If we think good thoughts and act on them, or produce new philosophical or scientific ideas, then we are not really responsible and cannot be praised. It would of course be God who would be responsible and praiseworthy. The very foundations of critical thinking would collapse if one follows Nash seriously. If Jesus is the embodiment of logic itself, then everything he said and anything Christians claim of him (e.g., the Incarnation) must be a priori correct. Nash’s alleged natural theology is a totally immune revealed theology in disguise.
FORMS OF THEOLOGICAL DIALECTIORMS OF THEOLOGICAL DIALECTIC
Carl Henry’s meager attempts at an etymology of logos are not very satisfactory, so I wish to introduce my own work in this area.53 Henry’s claim that in addition to the spoken word, the roots of logos indicate “reckoning and evaluation, reflection and explanation, hence a principle or law discernible by calculation”54 is not supported by, for example, Lindell and Scott. The first root leg means “to collect,” “to put together,” and later “to speak or say.” The second root Ölech means “to lay” as in lechos, the marital couch. From these roots I have proposed that there is a more original meaning of rationality which better describes our basic attempts to know the world. The first expressions of logos in Greek thought were thoroughly dynamic and synthetic in character. Except for possibly Parmenides, none of the pre-Socratic philosophers recognized any of the laws of logic. Criticizing the pre-Socratics for this deficiency, Aristotle was the first to formalize these laws in what he called, significantly for my thesis, “Analytics.” Even though analytic reason comes first formally and theoretically, synthetic reason always comes first temporally.
According to a broad, synthetic logos, human beings are “rational” because they can “put the world together” (lego) in a certain way, a way that makes “sense” to them. An individual does not have to be able to do a mathematical proof or construct a syllogism in order to be rational in this broad sense. Indeed, this person could consistently violate all logical rules and still be considered “rational.” Strict reason is therefore prescriptive and is identical with the philosophical method of the mainstream of Western philosophy. Philosophers and logicians generally are engaged in a normative science that tells people how they ought to think and reason. Broad reason, on the other hand, is a nonnormative way of describing how people have in fact thought, quite apart from whether they have thought correctly or incorrectly.
Broad reason obviously includes mythological constructions, for this is still the predominant way in which individuals put their world together. Therefore, the broad notion of reason bridges the gap between mythos and logos. In myth we see the “passive” interpretation of logos: the world and its order are already laid out by God or a divine agent, or simply just there. Humans then are exhorted to conform to this preestablished order, and to celebrate this union through ritual and magic. These individuals then do not actively put the world together, but passively submit to a fait accompli. The “active ” form of synthetic reason is a modern phenomenon, the best example being modern artists in literature and the fine arts. Artists actively shape new “worlds” and new ways of looking at the world, often in reaction against a world-view that has been given passively by traditional institutions. This is the modern “constructive” logos, which Henry rejects, but I contend that the Christian Word is a beautiful example of passive synthetic reason.
Lego is also found in the word “dialectic,” and I have used the same etymological clues to propose various types of dialectic.55 The dialectic of Aristotle’s Analytics and the dialectic of medieval theology can be called “either/or” dialectics. For example, after one separates all geometrical figures into their proper logical classes, then a figure is either a square, or a circle, or some other figure–a square cannot be both a square and a circle. As we shall see in the next chapter, logical arguments against the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation follow the same model: either Jesus is God or human; he cannot be both at the same time. In saying that he is both one violates the law of noncontradiction.
The method of the existentialists also involves either/or thinking, but it is dramatic and existential, not formal and logical. It is epitomized in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, who, in The Concept of Irony, claims that Socrates’ main aim was not logical clarity but conceptual confusion. According to Kierkegaard, the goal of the early dialogues was to lead the interlocuters into philosophical deadends. This led Kierkegaard to believe that ethical choices are based on faith not reason. Kierkegaard dramatized this point with the example of Abraham, who was faced with this choice: either follow God’s arbitrary will or follow the moral law and God’s previous promises. There was no way in which Abraham could have made a rational decision. The existentialist thinkers use situations like these to support their belief that logic and ethics are ultimately incompatible. Dialectic theology (early Barth, Bultmann, Brunner) also uses Kierkegaard to declare the complete autonomy of faith and to eliminate the role of reason and natural theology from the Christian religion.
In striking contrast to both forms of “either/or” dialectic is the “both-and,” synthetic dialectic of thinkers like Hegel. Hegel was very much indebted to the pre-Socratic Greeks, especially Heraclitus’ idea of a logos reconciling all opposites into a unitary process. Aristotle’s criticisms of Heraclitus and others prevailed, however, and the law of contradiction and traditional logic won out in the West. Until Hegel a both-and dialectic survived in the Western mystical tradition, most notably in Nicholas of Cusa and his doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum. The key to synthetic dialectic is the rejection of the law of contradiction, and the belief that opposites can be reconciled in a higher synthesis.
In his book The God Who Is There Francis Schaeffer offers a distinction between the methods of “Antithesis” and “Synthesis” which coincides nicely with my either/or and both-and dialectic. He correctly acknowledges Hegel as the chief modern proponent of “Synthesis” but incorrectly places Kierkegaard and the dialectic theologians in this same “irrationalist” tradition. Not recognizing the possibility of an existentialist form of his method of Antithesis, Schaeffer confounds two very different theological traditions. Schaeffer shows how Hegel’s dialectical method of Synthesis subverts the logical law that A is not-A, and he reaffirms the either/or argument that “if a thing is true, the opposite is not true; if a thing is right, the opposite is wrong.”56 Schaeffer is obviously correct, and for all of its creative dynamics, broad reason fails to provide a method by which we can make progress in any theoretical problem or arrive at even the most provisional truths.
The main problem with Schaeffer’s position is that for centuries the central doctrines of Christianity have been explicitly articulated as both-and, synthetic formulae. Hegel was correct in his contention that he had finally discovered the true logic of Christianity. The doctrine of the Incarnation literally means that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully God. The Christian doctrine of liberty, as phrased by the evangelical J. I. Packer, is that man is both “free and controlled.”57 Barth phrases the doctrine of faith as “altogether the work of God…and altogether the work of man. It is a complete enslavement and it is a complete liberation.”58 Finally, Luther expresses the Protestant doctrine of justification as simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinful).
Using his method of Antithesis Schaeffer must answer “either God or man” on the Incarnation, “either free or coerced” regarding Christian freedom, and “either saved or damned” on justification. There are no special logical problems with the idea that both God and humans participate in faith, for this is what happens in any situation of trust. In contrast Barth is not alone in using mutually exclusive, paradoxical language. The inescapable conclusion is that the Christian Logos has little to do with Aristotle’s Analytics or Schaeffer’s method of Antithesis; rather, it is in a direct line with Heraclitus and the coincidentia oppositorum. Therefore, we must reject Henry’s claim that “a rational metaphysics underlies the Hebrew’s depiction of the nature of reality,”59 and affirm that the biblical Word is creative, dynamic, synthetic, and has no apparent concern for the laws of logic.
Endnotes: Chapter 1
1. Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984.), p. 19fn.
2. In my reading I have been struck by how some evangelicals have selectively ignored this scholarship. Some of them also refuse to come to terms with the scholarship on the relationship between Jesus and Old Testament expectations. (See Chapter 8.) F. F. Bruce, although generally supporting conservative evangelical views, commands the respect of all Bible scholars because of his impeccable integrity. Letting the historical-grammatical method do its work, he has concluded, for example, that Isaiah had at least two authors and that Daniel was written two centuries (rather than six) before Christ (see James Barr, Beyond Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984.), pp. 156, 185fn.). We shall see that Bruce rejects the popular conservative solution to the conflicting genealogies of Luke and Matthew (p. 152 below). Ironically enough, Harold Brown cites Bruce as a great champion in defeating the forces of liberal scholarship (see “The Conservative Option,” p. 346).
3. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.), pp. xiv, 140.
4. See Frederic R. Howe, Challenge and Response (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982.), pp. 54-55.
5. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1979.), p. 96.
6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952.), p. 123.
7. Bruce Demarest, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982.) p. 33; Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, p. 266. Henry betrays his strict rationalism by affirming here the “externalism” which he otherwise forcefully rejects.
8. Lewis, op. cit., p. 37. 9. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 237.
10. Jack Rogers, Confessions of an Evangelical (Philadelphia: The Westminser Press, 1974.), p. 129.
11. Jose M. Bonino, Towards a Christian Political Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.), p. 61.
- Harold O. J. Brown, “The Conservative Option (Tensions in Contemporary Theology, ed., Grundy and Johnson, pp. 327-358.),” p. 332. Many others like James Barr have seen this irony: “It is the conservative evangelicals who are accepting from natural science their understanding of the nature of truth and insisting that the truth of the Bible must be this kind of truth” (op. cit., p. 93).
- Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton University Press, 1941.), p. 189. Let me repeat Geddes MacGregor’s Preface epigraph: “Bible-reading by those whose education is technological rather than literary can result in interpretations so distorted as to blind the reader from the essential insights that the Bible can give to those who come to it with an imaginative child’s innocence, curiosity, and wonder.”
- Rogers and McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, p. 8.
15. Lindsell, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (Washington, D.C.: Canon Press, 1973.), p. 18.
16. James Barr, op. cit., p. 26.
18. Gabriel Fackre, The Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982.), p. 52. Both J. J. Davis and J. I. Packer also see Manichean elements in some evangelical thinkers. See Davis, op. cit., p. 95 and Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, pp. 132-33.
19. Henry, vol. 1, p. 195; vol. 2, pp. 67, 328.
20. Cited in ibid., vol. 2., p. 302.
21. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, Hardback ed., 1979.), pp. 30-31.
22. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York: Avon Books, 1977), p. 130.
23. See Bloesch, The Future of Evangelical Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983.), p. 157.
24. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), vol. 1, p. 14.
25. Bloesch, The Future of Evangelical Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983., p. 145.
26. Barr, op. cit., p. 49.
27. Although most of the best evangelical theologians reject “fiat” creationism, they are usually equivocal about inerrancy. Both Clark and Geisler, however, are more definite: Geisler declares that the “Old Testament is without error (i.e., inerrant) in whatever it teaches…” (Christian Apologetics, p. 363); and Clark says that the Bible “is…inerrant in all it teaches, including John 3:16 and geographical and historical details” (In Defense of Theology, p. 94).
28. Henry, vol. 2, p. 122.
29. It must be said that Van Til, even though he is a presuppositionalist, is definitely not an evangelical rationalist. As a Barthian he insists that basic Christian axioms must be taken as articles of faith, but he does not claim that these are rational propositions. There are other qualifications that need to be made in these two lists. According to Clark, Carnell accepts the traditional arguments for God’s existence and therefore breaks with presuppositionalism on this point. In most other respects, especially his general epistemology, he definitely belongs in this camp. Even though Geisler rejects independent arguments for deity, his strong defense of Aquinas places him squarely within the empiricist school.
30. Clark, op. cit., p. 73; Montgomery quoted in Henry, vol. 1, pp. 230-31.
31. Quoted in Henry, vol. 1, p. 261. 32. Henry, vol. 1, p. 220.
33. Ibid., p. 221
34. John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (London: Collins Sons, 1974.), p. 22.
35. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 228.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 265.
38. Ibid., p. 228. When Henry describes the rational method, which Christians must support, he gives examples of induction: proving that the White House is white is methodologically parallel to proving that the Bible is divinely inspired (ibid., p. 266). Therefore, one of the basic Christian presuppositions “requires persuasive evidence.”
39. Stuart Hackett, The Reconstruction.… (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984.), p. 175.
40. Ibid., pp. 174, 195. Hackett’s unqualified rationalism is strong here: “In a theistic universe…I judge the concept of the Incarnation of God in Jesus to exhibit as full a degree of rational intelligibility as it would be plausible for the most stringent mind to expect” (p. 197). The protest that this seems to undermine basic Christian mysteries is called “impertinent” and simply “old ground revisited” that we need not “plow or even cultivate…again” (p. 196).
41. Ibid., p. 305. 42. Ibid., p. 41.
43. Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961.), p. 67; cf. his In Defense of Theology, p. 85.
44. Ibid., pp. 85-7. Clark admits that he has shocked many Christians with this translation. Clark responds in his inimitable fashion: “They needed to be shocked, for ‘Logic’ is as good as, indeed better than ‘Word’ or verbum. Why should anyone think it more sacrilegious to call Christ the Logic than to call him a word–a written ink mark on paper, or a spoken sound in the air?” (p. 85) One expects such naivete about the biblical Word among beginners, not seasoned thinkers like Clark.
45. Henry also uses such phrases as God as “Supreme Reason” (vol. 5, p. 383). It is interesting to observe that the prominent evangelical rationalists–Clark, Nash, and Hackett–are all philosophers by profession, while Henry had philosophical training under Brightman and Clark. Significantly enough, one does not find philosophers in the list of nonrationalist evangelicals.
46. The New Bible Dictionary, pp. 647/608, 745/704. The second page numbers refer to the new second edition.
47. Michael Green, The Truth of God Incarnate (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1977.), pp. 29, 26, 116.
48. William Hendriksen, The Gospel of John (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1954.), p. 78. Here is yet another English evangelical–besides Packer, Helm, Bruce, and Stott–who generally avoids evangelical rationalism. Even though William Temple does say that the Logos “enlightens every man alive in his reason and conscience,” he quickly shifts the emphasis to conscience and more generally to the new life in Christ (Readings in St. John’s Gospel, p. 13). J. C. Fenton contends that the Logos “enlightens every man” in the sense that he is the Savior and judge of the world (The Gospel according to John, p. 35). Raymond Brown argues that John’s light is the same as the saving light of Isaiah (9:3; 42:6; 60:1-2) and also supports the idea of light as judgment (The Anchor John, pp. 28, 9). There is of course the long Quaker tradition which interprets this passage in a strong nonrationalist sense, viz., as a universal spiritual illumination.
49. C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St. John (London: SPCK, 1955.), p. 134. Barrett agrees with the Alexandrians: “There was no natural and universal knowledge of the light” (ibid.). For more on the Alexandrian view, see J. H. Bernard, The Gospel according to John, p. 12.
50. Henry, vol. 2, p. 129. Henry acknowledges being led by a good New Testament scholar on this point: C. H. Dodd. If Henry implies that this meaning is restricted to just these verses in John, then he is obviously wrong.
- Nash, The Word of God … (Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 1984.), p. 68.
- Ibid., p. 81.
53. What follows is taken from my Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1981), p. 187.
54. Henry, vol. 3, p. 193.
- See my “Dialectic: East and West,” Indian Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1983), pp. 207-218. The Danish inventor of Lego toys obviously had a good classical education. Combining the Greek lego (“I put together”) and the Latin lego (“I play”), he came up with a perfect name for his plastic building blocks.
56. Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There (Downer Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1975.), p. 47. With all of their fierce commitment to traditional logic, some evangelical rationalists make not only the major error of refusing to see that basic Christian doctrines are incompatible with that method, but also make minor errors like confusing truth and validity. Henry uses the phrase “valid truth” thrice (at least) and then tells us that Christian truth can be falsified by the laws of validity and invalidity (vol. 1, 193, 213, 265; vol. 5, p. 366). C. S. Lewis does the same, according to John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, pp. 75-79). Finally, Schaeffer’s notion of “true truth” cannot be found in any logic text that I know.
57. Packer, op. cit., p. 117.
58. Barth, Church Dogmatics III, 3, p. 247.
59. Henry, vol. 6, p. 75.
Chapter 2: The Temptation of Belief
The man of faith ventures forth sometimes against all logic and reason out of fidelity to the inward call that comes to him from God.
—Donald Bloesch
By faith you are sure of all those things of which you have a firm conviction, but which conviction is not the outcome of observation or demonstration.
—Abraham Kuyper
They who labor to raise up a firm faith in Scripture by arguing are acting absurdly.
—John Calvin
We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
—Paul (2 Cor. 10:5)
Enlightened reason, taken captive by faith, receives life from faith, for it is slain and given life again.
—Martin Luther
True reason—i.e., reason determined by God’s word—is nothing else but faith: the receiving of the divine Word.
—Emil Brunner
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.
—John 20:29
Faith is a form of mental certitude about absent realities that is greater than opinion but less than knowledge.
—Aquinas
For the pursuit of the religious way a man needs to seek certain goals with certain weak beliefs.
—Richard Swinburne
The proper relation between faith and reason is without doubt one of the thorniest problems in the interface between philosophy and theology. The alternatives on this question range from the radical fideism of Tertullian and Kierkegaard through the mediating position of thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas (where reason is a helpmate to faith) to modern philosophical theologies where reason and speculation dominate. The medieval theologians called philosophical theology “natural” because it draws its data from nature (“general” revelation) and uses only our natural capacity for reason and imaginative speculation. Natural theology makes no appeal to “special” revelation, neither in the form of scripture nor other media besides nature itself. “Nature” is meant to include not only the external world but the vast realm of internal “nature,” that which is common to human experience in general.
Like all human methods, however, natural theology is limited. A good philosophical theologian will readily declare that there are some propositions about God which directly contradict reason (e.g., the Incarnation) or go beyond reason (e.g., a detailed account of God’s attributes). Natural theologians may reject these kinds of propositions outright; or they may move to a revealed theology and accept them as articles of faith. Mortimer Adler phrases the limitations of natural theology aptly: “As compared to the thickness of sacred theology, natural theology is very, very thin.”1 Reason cannot possibly comprehend the depth and breadth of religious experience; it cannot claim to be the kernel of human experience either. Reason and speculative imagination should still be the main guides for philosophy, but religious faith must be the response of the whole person, not some abstraction handed down from Greek metaphysics.
The term “fideism” is usually taken to mean that faith and reason exclude each other, and this is the meaning I wish to ascribe to radical fideists like Tertullian and Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, insofar as the Bible clearly establishes faith in God as superior to human understanding, and insofar as orthodox Christianity has generally accepted this doctrine, then I contend, against all forms of Christian rationalism, that “fideism” is the only term that properly describes the Christian religion. The radical fideist makes the mistake of totally divorcing faith from reason–exhorting us to make leaps in the dark and celebrating the absurdity of Christian doctrines–but Christian tradition has always affirmed the absolute primacy of faith and ultimately rejected the self-sufficient reason of natural theology. While radical fideists say “Believe, even against your understanding,” the mainstream Christian fideists believe in order that they may understand (credo ut intelligam). Ultimately all Christians must confess, as Robert E. Cushman describes Augustine’s position, that Christ is the first principium of knowledge and that “it is fides which alone apprehends the eternal within the historical….”2 The difficulties that such a partisan Christian epistemology causes for philosophical theology are raised later in this chapter.
BIBLICAL FAITH
That Augustine’s position is thoroughly biblical can be shown by an analysis of Hebrews 11, one of the most eloquent and insightful writings on religious faith ever written: “Now faith (pistis) is the assurance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, the conviction (elenchon) of things not seen.” The author’s use of the Greek pistis is intimately connected with the Old Testament term for faith ’emunah.3 The etymology of this term suggests firmness and certainty, especially through a related word ‘aman, which means to “confirm,” “support,” or “uphold.” ‘Emunah is also a cognate of ’emet, the Hebrew word sometimes translated as “truth” but which is usually rendered as “faithfulness.” Evangelical Roger Nicole argues that ’emet is definitely used in the sense of “conformity to fact” so that biblical faith is a cognitive “belief that” as well as a trusting “believe in.”4 I am much less certain, however, that these two are as equally balanced as Nicole and other evangelicals imply. Nevertheless, later in this chapter I shall side with the evangelicals against those who contend that religious faith has no cognitive dimension.
The Revised Standard translation does not really express the full meaning of hypostasis, which in creeds of the early church was used to describe the very nature of God. This is why the Anchor Bible uses the awkward but more correct translation of “groundwork.” Furthermore, the word elenchos comes from legal cross-examination (“basis for testing”), which gives a more epistemological tone to the passage. Indeed, Plato uses this term to describe the Socratic dialectic. The Anchor Bible translation is then in full: “Now faith is the groundwork of things hoped for, the basis for testing things not seen.” The examples in Hebrews 11 illustrate the meaning of this fideistic motto. Although he could not verify or predict events as yet unseen (v. 7), Noah had the groundwork of faith so that he could hope and be assured of the best. Similarly, Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was to go” (v. 8). For the nonbeliever this appears to be blind, unjustified action, but for the believer standing on the firm “groundwork” of faith it is definitely not. It was most absurd that Sarah should conceive and then unreasonable (even outrageous) that God should then require Abraham to sacrifice the product of this miraculous conception. Nevertheless, both of them found complete “support” (‘aman) in their faith.
Interestingly enough, the epistemological dimension of biblical faith appears in the author’s assumption that Abraham considered God able to raise men even from the dead (v. 19). This is perhaps one way for Christians to answer radical fideists like Tertullian and Kierkegaard, who wish to remove the cognitive dimension completely. For them faith and knowledge have nothing to do with each another. Nevertheless, human cognition is not ultimately decisive in biblical faith, for the Old Testament figures “died in faith, not having received what was promised” (v. 13). Therefore, Carl Henry ignores the message of Hebrews 11 when he contends that “the Christian religion champions rationality… and it promotes…the demand for verification and tests for truth.”5 There is not even the balance between “belief that” and “belief in” that people normally require for justified belief.
Donald Bloesch is correct in saying that the faith of Hebrews 11 “is not a rational but an existential certainty,” but he goes too far in supporting Barth’s claim that “faith is not…a standing, but a being suspended and hanging without ground under our feet.”6 This obvious use of Kierkegaard goes against the clear meaning of ’emunah as “firm ground.” But as we shall see, there is a qualitative difference between the God-given ground of faith and the rational grounds given by ordinary induction. Evangelical L. L. Morris observes that the author of Hebrews “is particularly interested in the opposition of faith to sight….and he emphasizes the point that men who had nothing in the way of outward evidence to support them nevertheless retained a firm hold on the promises of God.”7
Biblical faith can be summed up as: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight….For the Lord gives wisdom, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 3:5; 2:6). Even here in Proverbs, Wisdom literature which scholars say is supposed to be more humanistic, the subordination of human cognition is clear and emphatic. The certainty of biblical faith has nothing to do with scientific knowledge or any other form of human cognition; rather, saving knowledge comes from God as a divine gift. Additional key passages for this point are found in Paul: “…think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him” (Ro. 12:30); “for by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your doing, it is the gift of God” (Ephes. 2:8). These passages give further support for my interpretation of Hebrews 11: the meaning of elenchos must be seen in the context of complete trust in God; it does not have any independent ground in human cognition as does the Socratic elenchos.
Faith as a divine act is a doctrine found in the whole spectrum of the Christian tradition: in Augustine, among the medievals, the Reformers of course, and contemporary Catholics and Protestants. One particularly good medieval example is Gilbert of Poitier (1085-1154), who restricts Augustinian illumination theory to just one crucial event, viz., the granting of faith. For Gilbert the knowledge of God received in this act is a cognition performed exclusively by the Holy Spirit.8 For Calvin “faith…is both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”9
Barth held that it was by grace that we have faith and by faith our intellects come alive.10 Following the Reformers and Barth, Donald Bloesch strongly emphasizes the absence of human preparation and achievement. Within the classical Protestant tripartite definition of faith as knowledge (notitia), voluntary assent (assensus), and trust (fiducia), Bloesch warns against the tendency, most pronounced among the evangelical rationalists, to make fiducia contingent upon a preconversion gathering of facts and opinions. Bloesch maintains that all three elements should be integral to the same saving event; and even notitia, following the Pauline tradition summarized above, is God-given and not humanly attained.11 Bloesch is therefore completely at odds with Carl Henry, who in contrast to Christian tradition, holds that “the new birth is not prerequisite to a knowledge of the truth of God.”12
In addition to Bloesch, I also find evangelicals J. I. Packer and Paul Helm in agreement with the foregoing presentation of biblical faith. Packer makes it clear that faith in God is qualitatively different from the faith that one has that her dog will obey or that her car will start on a cold morning. Packer shows that religious faith is not on a continuum with other inductive beliefs, primarily because faith cannot be based on even the highest probability but must rest on absolute certitude. This is so because the object of religious faith is an infinite being, not a created thing; and God validates that faith, not human understanding.
Packer correctly emphasizes that there is of course a cognitive dimension to faith, but he rightly attributes this to the work of the Holy Spirit and not to human effort. As Packer states: “It is fundamental to the nature of faith to take God’s word for things; acceptance of the authority of God is the biblical analysis of faith on its intellectual side.”13 In other words, fiduciary “believe in” takes on the highest importance in Christian faith.
Paul Helm agrees with Packer: basic articles of faith cannot be demonstrated and the main reasons for believing that the Bible is the Word of God are religious, not philosophical or scientific. Helm accepts the term “fideism,” but attempts to establish, as I have done, a position between radical fideism and “externalism,” the term he uses for the inductive form of evangelical rationalism. In contrast to the latter’s attempt to prove the Bible true by outside evidence, I believe that Helm is completely faithful to Hebrews 11: he exhorts Christians to test (elenchos) what the Bible says on the ground (hypostasis) of complete trust in God. Helm rejects the rational certainty of externalism and supports Bloesch’s existential certainty. In contrast to E. J. Carnell’s view that “saving faith germinates only after the mind is first convinced of the sufficiency of the evidences,”14 Helm rightly claims that “God is proved by hearing and obeying Him and finding that He is as good as His Word.”15
RELIGIOUS FAITH AS UNIQUE
I have attempted to give an interpretation of biblical faith, and I have praised those evangelicals who I believe have been true to the biblical witness. In this section I wish to assess this idea of faith using the tools of the philosophy of religion. My principal objection to the biblical view of faith is the idea of its divine imputation. Such a view causes severe problems for human autonomy and responsibility and appears to be yet another example of God as absolute controlling power. Using the principle of contextualization mentioned in the Prologue, I freely “bracket” this concept of God as an unacceptable cultural intrusion, and I propose full human participation in all acts of religious faith.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith suggests that the major liability of the view that faith is a divine gift is that, during a time of a crisis of faith like ours, it would be easy to argue that faith’s “absence is simply God’s failure to bestow it.”16 A more acceptable view of faith would place the major responsibility of its inception on us rather than on God: viz., we must actively seek faith and prepare the conditions of its presence. Even though we have seen that some evangelicals embrace the principle of contextualization, I am certain that they are not ready to give up God’s absolute sovereignty, the basic axiom of evangelical theology.
In defense of the doctrine of faith as a divine gift, one might use the analogy of receiving a one million dollar gift from Chase Manhattan Bank. The point is that the lucky recipient still has to go to the bank and ask for the money. I believe that this analogy is faulty, like so many others which attempt to bridge the gap between God and finite beings. Unlike the assumption in the bank example, where we believe that one freely decides to pick up the money under one’s own power, the Christian tradition assumes something quite different. Stressing the sovereignty of God, Augustine maintained that God empowers those who turn to him as well as those who turn away from him.17 One of the most pervasive biblical themes is that human beings cannot escape God’s sovereign control. No bank or other human institution can force us to do anything against our will; but the biblical God allegedly can and does. According to the Bible, God controlled the wills of at least the Pharaoh, Judas, and Jesus.
In his book Faith and Knowledge John Hick emphasizes the voluntary element in faith and insists that it must be seen as a genuine human achievement. He defines faith as “an uncompelled mode of ‘experiencing as’–experiencing the world as a place in which we have at all times to do with the transcendent God.”18 He rejects the traditional Christian idea of faith as a divine gift, especially in its neoorthodox formulation. Hick uses the word fides to indicate the necessary cognitive element, and fiducia to represent the crucial trust dimension in Christian faith. He then correctly observes that “it is significant that in the Bible faith appears frequently as fiducia and hardly at all as fides.”19
I believe that Hick goes too far, however, in his attempt to protect the freedom of faith. In contrast to the gnosticism of the evangelical rationalists, Hick’s agnosticism is unnecessary and excessive. (See Chapter 1:2 for this use of the term “gnosticism.”) Hick contends that arguments and proofs play no role in comprehensive world-views: people simply step into the hermeneutical circle of a specific way of experiencing the world. There are, for Hick, no conclusive arguments that can be given for the superiority of one world-view over the other. Therefore, the cognitive aspect of faith is reduced to an interpretation (not a “justified belief” in traditional terminology), and fiducia is trust and loyalty to the transcendent as interpreted. Hick’s contention that any traditional natural theology would compromise the freedom of faith and force us to believe certain theistic propositions is mistaken, and I shall say more on this point later in this section.
In his stress on the voluntariness of faith, Hick rejects all theories which claim that religious faith is a necessary mode of existence or that it can be subsumed under a general idea of trust based on sufficient inductive evidence. I have already noted Packer’s arguments in this regard and I quote him once more for emphasis: “The Bible does not acknowledge as ‘faith’ any religious attitude of mind or heart based on other beliefs…”.20 Nevertheless, many commentators are fond of arguing that a person’s faith in God is no different than a scientist’s faith in the uniformity of nature. To the “faith” of science Cantwell Smith adds the basic faith of the philosopher (the love of wisdom) and even the faith that the secular humanist has in reason, truth, and personal dignity. As Smith states: “Faith, intellectually, is assent to truth, whatever it be.”21
Such comparisons destroy the unique character of religious faith: the unconditioned nature of the subject’s response and the unsurpassed nature of its object. Only the ideologues of science would claim that the laws of nature have the same status, either ontologically, epistemologically or psychologically, as articles of faith. As Hick states: “Religious faith is absolute and implicit belief; the articles of a creed are not merely provisional assumptions. The scientist…does not believe ‘religiously,’ i.e., absolutely and implicitly, that the universe will continue to exhibit the same ‘laws’ as yesterday and today.”22 Perhaps some humanists’ “faith” in human dignity and freedom approaches religious faith, but if it does then this most certainly would be a form of idolatry.
It is common to find evangelical apologists using this idea of a generic faith common to all people. For example, Carl Henry contends that “faith is an inherent aspect of all human endeavor,” and he quotes with favor from W. J. Neidhardt, who defines faith as “that illumination by which true rationality begins.”23 According to Neidhardt, faith supplies the “keystone” ideas for scientific theories, and he refers to a number of famous scientists who have used what Max Planck called “imaginative vision and faith.” But surely there is a difference between establishing knowledge about nature and receiving saving knowledge about God. Unlike Hick, I believe philosophical theology can offer justified beliefs that God exists and has certain attributes, but these cognitive beliefs are not the all-important fiducia of traditional Christian faith. Neidhardt’s notion of scientific faith consisting of keystone ideas is misleading: these are ideas about nature not trust in nature.
Although Henry once affirms the traditional idea of “personal faith as a divine gift of the Holy Spirit,” this is completely incompatible with his use of Neidhardt’s theory, which makes the acquisition of faith anthropocentric rather than theocentric. (This essential distinction is confused when Henry implies that scientific faith is simply an extension of biblical faith. Such a view, of course, undermines the integrity of science.) Henry reaffirms his evangelical rationalism by insisting that as opposed to “blind faith,” Christian faith, like scientific faith, must have “adequate evidential supports, empirical or nonempirical.”24 By their comparison of scientific and theological knowledge (Henry, incidentally, defends the traditional view of theology as science, i.e., knowledge), evangelical rationalists risk the reduction of fides to scientia. Traditional Christian theology has always resisted such a reduction: faith is a theological not an intellectual virtue.
FAITH AND “WEAK” BELIEF
Evangelicals are correct in insisting that faith consists of both cognitive and fiduciary elements, and many are wise enough to avoid the rationalist trap by fully subordinating the former to the latter. The task of the rest of this section is to establish the proper interpretation of the cognitive side of faith. A clearer understanding of “belief that” is much more important for us today, primarily because of the rise of religious skepticism. For the biblical writers there was no doubt that God existed and that God had acted in history. Now that these claims are under attack, religious believers, especially those living within a scientific world-view, are tempted to prove their faith by extrabiblical means. Hick’s observation that cognitive fides has logical priority, but that fiducia comes first temporally is correct. People of faith, as Cantwell Smith has so brilliantly demonstrated, have rarely ever thought in explicit logical terms, so the virtual absence of cognitive fides in religious literature is not surprising. This silence, however, does not mean that faith has no epistemological dimension at all.
The greatest challenge to the idea of cognitive faith since Barth is the work of Cantwell Smith, who documents this silence in great detail, with amazing erudition, and with real enthusiasm. In his book The Meaning and End of Religion, Smith showed that traditional faiths did not have any conception of “religion” as moderns use the term. Now in Faith and Belief and a companion volume Belief and History Smith has proposed an even more startling thesis: “Faith is not belief, and with the partial exception of a brief aberrant moment in recent church history, no serious and careful religious thinker has ever held it was.”25
For Smith, like Hick, faith is a direct encounter with the transcendent, while religious belief is the intellect’s attempt to understand the transcendent in human terms. We have seen that the Bible emphatically dissuades us from doing the latter. Therefore, Smith contends that the word credo has been wrongly translated as “belief,” and that this mistranslation has had tragic consequences for the life of faith. Since the word belief has now become so intellectualized and contains connotations of uncertainty, Smith maintains that it is now completely alien to the traditional idea of faith. He warns that insistence on specific religious beliefs may well lead to the demise of faith altogether.
One can illustrate what Smith means by using the recent English debate on the Incarnation as an example. (For more on this topic see Chapter Three.) Christian liberals who wish to redefine the meaning of the Incarnation are essentially saying that the orthodox belief that Jesus Christ was literally God has proved to be a stumbling block for many who would otherwise not reject the Christian faith. (The issues of biblical inerrancy and “scientific” creationism could also be used as examples.) Instead of faith being that human quality of love, trust, and loyalty to God, faith has now become something one receives by holding proper doctrines, so “believing is the price that one must pay in order to have faith….”26 Cantwell Smith’s provocative proposal could not be more opposite to Henry’s claim that Christianity is the only religion which has a “transcendental cognitive revelation as a basic axiom.”27 Although Cantwell Smith’s book is an intellectual tour de force, there are basic problems with his thesis. In what follows I will try to steer a middle course between Smith and the evangelical rationalists.
In Faith and Belief Smith covers Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic faith as well as the Christian tradition. He begins his presentation of Christian faith with an analysis of the lectures on baptism by St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Smith argues that in Cyril’s view this rite was not seen as a passage from nonbelief to belief. Rather, the credo of both the rites and the creeds literally meant “I set my heart,” or more in our vernacular, “I pledge allegiance.” Smith maintains that pistis in the New Testament and fides in church tradition had no propositional reference. Smith correctly observes that no one has ever believed in a proposition; rather, “a person believes (or rejects) what a proposition means…to him or her.”28 This is where Hick’s concept of faith as interpretation and the whole “new hermeneutic” enterprise have their starting point. Smith joins the new hermeneutic when he proposes that the term “understanding” replace the word “belief.” I am certain, however, that one can find “belief that” in Verstehen as well.
I believe that it is possible to grant Smith most of his points (including the hermeneutical ones), reap the full advantages of his view (more on this later), and still retain the idea of cognitive fides. As far as I can tell, Smith is right to conclude that the text of St. Cyril’s lectures on baptism does not contain exhortations to explicit belief. But there are hidden beliefs in every line, e.g., a belief that a triune God exists and that God can literally transform baptized human beings. The shocking effect of Smith’s thesis is mitigated considerably when we find that Smith agrees with my simple point. After daring his readers to translate the credo of Bach’s B Minor Mass as “I believe” (Smith’s “I do” is obviously more appropriate), Smith nonetheless concedes that “belief is presupposed. One believes what one’s culture takes for granted….”29
Although earlier he had stated categorically that the creeds had nothing to do with beliefs, Smith nevertheless formulates a basic credo as: “Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty.”30 If anything, this phraseology appears to give precedence to “belief that” rather than “believe in.” Therefore, Smith must concede that faith and belief are inseparable, a doctrine incidentally that he praises in contemporary Catholic theology. Finally, he admits that it would be “patently absurd to conclude that believing has historically had nothing to do with faith.”31
In addition to the preceding concessions, Smith’s innovative reading of Thomas Aquinas has come under the close scrutiny of Fredrich J. Crossan. Faith and Belief is filled with some revealing etymologies, and one of the most important, at least for Smith’s thesis, is the roots of assensio. This word is crucial for our topic because, ever since Augustine, the Latin verb credere has been defined as “to think with assent.” Smith shows that the etymology of assensio takes us back to sentio, sensus, and the realm of feeling.32 Both credo (from cordis=heart) and assensio have taken on intellectual meanings which they did not
originally have; so Smith proposes that we translate credo as “I give my heart” and assensio as “I applaud or recognize.”
Crossan cannot reject Smith’s etymology of assensio (it is in the Oxford Latin Dictionary), but he does show that Aquinas had his own personal etymology which gave it an unequivocal intellectual meaning.33 Confirming what we have already concluded above, Aquinas makes it very clear that there is an unqualified assent to what is spoken by God as opposed to the conditional assent of ordinary belief. In addition to this crucial correction, Crossan also shows that Smith is wrong to attribute a universal fides humana to Aquinas, who believed, along with the Christian tradition discussed previously, that saving faith was possible only through Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Smith’s dramatic attempt to bring the most intellectual of all Christian theologians into his camp (i.e., a world theology of faith in which beliefs are subordinate) has failed.
Among contemporary philosophers of religion Richard Swinburne is one of the strongest proponents of natural theology and cognitive faith. In The Coherence of Theism and The Existence of God Swinburne brilliantly defends philosophical theology, and in the final volume in this impressive trilogy, Faith and Reason, he builds a strong case for the necessity of “belief that” in addition to “belief in.” The contrast between Smith and Swinburne is striking. Smith is the historian who waxes eloquent about how grand faith used to be and does not conceal his nostalgia for the nonintellectual faith of the past. Swinburne, on the other hand, is the careful analytic philosopher, who does not particularly care how in fact history was; rather, he is much more interested in what is cogent for modern believers to hold.
Obviously, Swinburne is more realistic: for better or worse (Smith might be right that it is the latter), contemporary human beings use the word “belief” in an intellectual way foreign to premodern peoples. But there is no way that we can actually teach ourselves to use the ancient meanings of words. Furthermore, we have seen that Smith softens the impact of his provocative thesis by conceding that beliefs do have a role in faith after all. (These implicit beliefs are, incidentally, more than the “insight and response” with which Smith characterizes the intellectual dimension of faith in his concluding chapter 7-iii. These terms belong to the affective side of faith rather than the cognitive.) Finally, Swinburne contends that Smith’s claim that belief always implies uncertainty is obviously false. For example, my belief that I am now composing these lines is not open to much doubt.
Swinburne is convinced that all previous attempts to eliminate an epistemology of faith have failed. Smith is entirely correct when he says that no one has ever believed in a proposition, but belief that the proposition is true is part and parcel of its meaning for us. Using Smith’s own etymology of “to believe,” one could say that a person does not hold something “dear” without any beliefs about that something. Furthermore, one would assume that the person concerned would claim that he had true beliefs about what he held dear. For example, when I tell people that I love my daughter, I assume and they hold that the proposition “my daughter is a real person” is true. Swinburne agrees with many evangelicals that belief, trust, and even hope must have propositional content. For example, in response to Hick’s claim that his experiencing the world as God’s creation is nonpropositional, one could simply translate this into the proposition “Hick believes that God created the world.” As Swinburne states: “Is not to experience X as Y in this kind of case simply to experience X and in so doing automatically and naturally to believe that X is Y? The ‘nonpropositional’ aspect of Hick’s view of faith is simply a matter of the way in which he has expressed it.”34
Swinburne is not persuaded by Hick (or Aquinas for that matter) when they warn us that a cognitive faith will coerce religious belief. For Swinburne the freedom and responsibility of belief are not found in its initial stages, which Swinburne argues persuasively are essentially passive and involuntary, but in what we actually do with our beliefs. With regard to religious beliefs the responsibility is great: faith is meritorious only when it is formed by love and followed by good works. Recall that those first alleged to have recognized Jesus as God were the demons, but they obviously did not love God nor do his will. In support of Swinburne’s crucial point, one could hardly describe their belief as voluntary. The demons were not forced to hold Jesus “dear,” even though their belief that he was God was unavoidable. In this connection I repeat the epigraph from John Wesley from the Preface: “Neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinions. A man may be orthodox in every point…He may be almost as orthodox as the Devil…and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart.”35
Swinburne’s heavy emphasis on cognitive fides does not in the least displace fiducia. Indeed, he freely admits that the Bible and traditional Christianity have always stressed the latter while the former has been the concern of philosophers and theologians. He does point to a few passages that require explicit beliefs, such as “for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6). But Swinburne concedes that “the faith of many other heroes of the Old Testament …is a matter of their doing actions in hope rather than belief.”36 Abraham’s faith, for example, included the hope that God would provide a way out of the acute dilemma of Isaac’s sacrifice. He knew “that God was able to raise men even from the dead” (Heb. 11:19), but he did not know that God would do that on this occasion. Abraham could only hope that Isaac would be saved–he could not actually believe it–and such hope is at the heart of biblical faith.
One could say that Abraham’s beliefs were weak but his faith was strong. This is in fact how Swinburne characterizes religious faith: “For the pursuit of the religious way a man needs to seek certain goals with certain weak beliefs.”37 For Swinburne all that is needed for the cognitive foundation of Christian faith is a “weak” belief that Christianity is probably true and other religions are false. For the church to insist on “strong” belief, that each of the items of the creed is more probable than its negation, is for Swinburne an unreasonable demand. “…It is as though you are telling a man who needs a fortune and wishes to buy a lottery ticket in the hope of getting it, that he is only allowed to buy the ticket if he believes that the odds are in favor of the ticket winning.”38 As no human being could ever have such certainty about the cognitive content of Christianity, it would be totally unfair to require it. Swinburne claims, and Smith has done the research to demonstrate, that a “weak” belief that Christianity was true–that it was generally superior to the competing religions of the Hellenistic Age–was all that the early church would have required. It has been only since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that religious believers, under the pressure of competition from a scientific world-view, have been tempted to require “strong” belief for the Christian faith.
It would seem that some of the evangelical rationalists, with their demands for biblical inerrancy and “scientific” creationism, go beyond Swinburne’s strong belief to some sort of superbelief. While Swinburne’s strong belief requires that each of the items of the creed be true, some evangelicals require that the Bible be true in all matters pertaining to history, geography, and cosmology. Again we see the appropriateness of the term “gnosticism.” Swinburne’s idea of weak religious belief represents an attractive middle way between agnosticism on the one hand and the superbelief of Christian gnosticism on the other. Swinburne has defined strong belief in terms of creedal truths, but some of these–like the Trinity and Incarnation–cannot even be formulated as coherent propositions. (See my discussion in Chapter Three.) Therefore, I will argue that Swinburne is wrong in suggesting that church leaders ought to hold strong creedal beliefs. The only legitimate strong beliefs, if Swinburne is correct in his defense of philosophical theology, will be found in the area of the existence of God, the divine attributes, and other questions in the philosophy of religion.
Swinburne’s thesis stands in stark contrast to C. S. Lewis’ idea that, compared to the weak beliefs of science, Christianity requires “assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute.”39 Lewis’ formulation would be almost acceptable if he, like so many other evangelicals, had not confused belief with faith. According to the analysis above, fiducia requires absolute psychological certainty, but cognitive fides involves assent only to the proposition that a religion is most likely true. Trust beyond the evidence is sometimes appropriate, but belief beyond what one takes for the evidence is always irrational.
A basic problem in Christian theology has been the tendency to subsume religious claims under the strong logic of necessity rather than the weaker logic of contingency. This distinction is particularly crucial for religions like Christianity which make particular, historical claims. A claim that I heard from an evangelical acquaintance–“If Jesus Christ is God, like the scriptures say that he is, then everything follows deductively from that premise”–is a beautiful example of this mistake. E. J. Carnell’s deductive epistemology appears to be partially based on his axiom that “the more a value increases, the more our concern should respect the report of reason.”40 Carnell seems to have forgotten Aristotle’s advice about methodology in axiological studies: viz., we should not demand more precision than the subject matter allows. I would judge that religious claims based on historical events have even less cognitive basis than ahistorical moral imperatives. Our creaturely fate seems to be that about those things of highest value we must be content with the least knowledge.
The context of Carnell’s discussion is a critique of Kierkegaard which culminates with a parable about man faced with a choice of two roads–one leading to life (Christianity) and the other leading to death (unbelief). He ridicules Kierkegaard’s position by imputing these words to the man at the road’s fork: “My understanding tells me that if I go to the right I will find life; but in passionate faith I shall act against the understanding….”41 I think that all of us would agree with Carnell that such a man is “unbalanced,” but I do not think that he has been at all fair to Kierkegaard. The latter’s point is that it is impossible for the understanding to determine which way is the correct road.
Augustine tells another parable about two roads: Two travellers, one a skeptic who insists on clear understanding and strong beliefs, ask a farmer which road to take to their destination. The skeptic refuses to take the farmer’s advice because the latter could not possibly give Carnell’s “report of reason.” His colleague, however, trusts the farmer and the story ends with him at his goal “refreshing himself” and the skeptic standing in frustration at the fork. I submit that it is Augustine’s story, not Carnell’s, that is the true Christian parable. The skeptic insisted on strong belief but lost the prize; his partner had faith and won it. Many Christians miss the implicit rebuke of the doubting Thomas, who like Augustine’s skeptic wanted strong belief. Recall what Jesus said: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe [better: have fiducia]” (Jn. 20:29). Smith’s claim that virtually all of the renderings of ’emunah and pistis as “believe” are significant mistranslations is well supported by this verse.
Swinburne threatens to undermine a perfectly good thesis by suggesting that church leaders might want to cultivate strong beliefs. He states that “you often need deeper conviction to sell a product than to use it. So there may be a pragmatic case for a church to demand rather stronger belief from its officers.”43 I believe that this is unwise advice. Surprisingly, the otherwise precise Swinburne is not entirely correct in his choice of words. The word “conviction” could be much better read as trust, not strong belief. One could assent to all the articles of the creed and at the same time, as is the case for so many believers, fail to have any deep conviction about them.
Are we to believe that the great missionary efforts of history were carried out by evangelists who actually believed that each item of the Christian creed was more probable than its negation? To the contrary, I would submit that it was fiducia more than cognitive fides which inspired most genuine missionary efforts. Furthermore, I interpret the message of many great religious teachers–Gautama Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Nagarjuna, and Jesus–as promoting a gospel of weak belief. Both the Buddhists and the Taoists used their own forms of dialectic to extinguish the speculative desires of their disciples; and Jesus used dialectic (“the first shall be last…”), parables, and other nondiscursive speech to preach the coming Kingdom of God. Evangelical Jack Rogers correctly observes that Jesus’ disciples “continually wanted certain knowledge. Jesus instead called them…to trustful obedience.”44 The wise priest has always been the one who teaches trust and strength of purpose and warns of the dangers of strong belief.
There is one final problem that I have with Swinburne’s presentation: I do not find his arguments for the probability of Christian truth persuasive. In his two previous books Swinburne presented the most rigorous defense of philosophical theology in recent times. We must assume that he holds that the existence of God and a complement of divine attributes can be held as strong beliefs. But even sound philosophical arguments for the existence of God give us very little religious content. The cosmological and teleological arguments, if sound, would support a God who is revealed in nature only. In addition, the Christian has to contend with the faith claims by the devotees of Krishna or Buddha. The deciding difference among these competing religions is not scientific, historical, or logical–but fideistic. Christians may have a justified belief in their claims to the existence and some attributes of God, but almost everything else they claim about God–that God is a trinity, chooses one people for his favors, sends a divine son to save–all of these are articles of faith. These, I contend, cannot even be held as weak beliefs.
Swinburne would probably concede most of these points. His careful attempts to argue for Christian superiority, in the weak sense that Christianity is true and its competitors are probably false, do not fail because of a lack of philosophical acumen; rather, they suffer from an inadequate knowledge of the non-Christian religions. Both Hick and Cobb, who have this knowledge, propose that Christian uniqueness is found in Christian love. I am now convinced that Cobb is correct in his judgment that Christian agape is preferable to Buddhist compassion. But I am still impressed with the love of Krishna, which can be interpreted as preserving the individual self that Cobb requires and, as a bonus, assuming a form of process panentheism as well. In any case, even if Christian love were superior, this would not necessarily mean that the general Christian revelation claim was true. I prefer to join Cantwell Smith in his call for a world theology, a fides humana in which commitment to a nonsectarian God would be paramount and the specific belief systems of special revelation would be subordinate. (I also join Smith in his own personal preference for a theistic humanism.) Competing fundamentalisms of strong belief can only serve to perpetuate schism, disunity, and tragically, war.
General acceptance of Swinburne’s notion of weak belief would mitigate the tendency, especially in the Western religions, toward evangelical rationalism. If, in the dialogue of the world religions, the focus is on reconciling beliefs, then there will be precious little progress towards ecumenical unity. (In this way Smith’s proposal avoids the syncretism of other world theology proposals.) If, on the other hand, the focus is on faith as trust and loyalty to the transcendent power found in all these traditions, then we are indeed on the road to a world theology. As the Anabaptists have said for a long time, Christians must preach orthopraxis not orthodoxy.45 In this regard there is already a common agenda: the love of neighbor, fighting oppression and discrimination, and promoting social and economic justice. Most of us can affirm Swinburne’s assertion that it is strength of purpose and what we do with our beliefs that really count. It is Bloesch’s existential certainty, not rational certainty, that is the essence of faith.
TAKING REASON CAPTIVE
In the previous section I have been concerned to protect faith from the encroachment of religious beliefs. I have argued, taking leads from Hick, Smith, and Swinburne, that the cognitive element must be reined in so as to preserve faith’s crucial fiduciary dimension. At the same time reason must be shielded from an authoritarian, uncritical trust. Traditional attempts to establish the autonomy of faith in theology and absolute reason in philosophy have always been failures, primarily because autonomy in an interdependent world is an illusionary goal. It is a false dichotomy to assume that faith can give no ground to reason and vice versa, but to find the right relation between the two is not an easy task. Any theory that results in either exploiting the other must be rejected. This last section is devoted to staking out the legitimate claims of reason vis-a-vis religious faith. Reason cannot be autonomous, but it has an integrity that must be protected.
Evangelical rationalists write much about what they call the “unity of truth.” This means that when one uses the word “truth,” its meaning is univocal; i.e., truth is the same in science, philosophy, and theology. B. B. Warfield’s view on the unity of truth has been expressed as follows: “Christians should not postulate two different kinds of knowing…, one for knowing of truths of faith and the other for the knowing of the truths of history.”46 One can see that such an axiom is essential if one is to claim that Christian faith is rational and that it can be demonstrated as true. But there are many evangelicals who recognize that such an assumption simply cannot be a Christian one. Cornelius Van Til is especially forceful on this point. By taking scripture as one’s point of view, one has, according to Van Til, taken on a particular world-view that profoundly affects one’s perception of the world. This means that from the standpoint of faith all facts are “Christian facts.” Furthermore, this means that there is no common epistemological ground between Christians and non-Christians. Even our shared image of God, says Van Til, is a “point of conflict.”47
Although evangelical rationalists argue vigorously against Van Til and his allies, their own words belie their allegiance to the unity of truth. After claiming that God’s revelation is fully intelligible to philosophers, Henry admits that a biblical “way of knowing is…sharply contrasted with philosophical reasoning: it is not antireason, but rather is a profound Logos-revelation or intelligible Word-revelation.”48 Henry has dissolved the unity of truth obliquely, as Van Til did openly, by establishing a Christian reason independent from “secular” reason. Later on Henry is even more explicit about his break with a truth that all can share. He explains that the difference between Christian truth and other truth is that the former is “divinely authorized, infallibly certain, and biblically attested; whereas all other claims for truth are subject to correction and at most are but probable.”49 Not only is there no unity of truth here, but there is intellectual arrogance and question-begging as well.
Henry criticizes secular “gnosticism” and rationalism for making reason into an idol because “then the content of truth is soon conformed to the prejudices of some influential thinker or school of scholars.”50 Henry seems to ignore the obvious possibility that a theologian working out of a special revelation could distort the truth just as much or more. In my judgment Henry has done the latter in his claim to an infallible divine revelation. Reason can and has been taken captive by innumerable ideologues and ideologies.
Although he assures us that evangelical theology is a “humble” science, Henry claims nevertheless that it is the perfect science: “The theology of revelation has no reason for hesitancy in characterizing itself as science; it is neither vulnerable to perpetual revision as is merely empirical inquiry, nor is it consigned to ongoing contravention as is philosophical theorizing.”51 Henry’s close associate Gordon H. Clark appears to be the inspiration for such strong claims: “First, rationality, which is indispensable to all exchange of ideas, requires a unification of the sciences. Second, since modern scientism cannot supply its own norms, theology should redefine science and rule as queen.”52 Clark adds that evangelical theologians will do this armed with the “great truth in the law of contradiction.” The operative word here is “redefine,” for the specifics of Christian revelation will be the guidelines for this partisan “unification” of science.
Harold O. J. Brown of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, who otherwise joins evangelical rationalism with praise for both Francis Schaeffer and Henry, essentially sides with Van Til on the unity of truth. Brown acknowledges that dialogue with unbelievers is only a partial possibility, primarily because reception of the gospel requires a change of heart brought about by the Holy Spirit. Setting a tone quite different from Henry and Clark, Brown warns against the dangers of a Christian superscience:
The evangelical who is concerned to show the intellectual respectability of scriptural teachings sets himself a worthy goal; but unless he remembers that he can never fully secure the approval of unbelievers for his doctrine apart from their spiritual conversion, there may come a time when he is tempted to compromise the Bible’s proclamation in order to secure greater agreement from the participants in the dialogue.53
As I have already shown in the previous chapter, the evangelical rationalists have indeed compromised the biblical message by heavy importation of extrabiblical speculation. Brown’s theological contributions are usually disappointing, but he has definitely joined mainstream Christianity with these perceptive comments.
It was insights like Brown’s which tempted Luther to exclude reason from Christian theology altogether. We are familiar with his vitriolic outbursts against philosophy and reason in which he called reason the devil’s “whore” and denounced Aristotle as if he were reason’s pimp. Even when he was not indulging in rhetorical excesses, Luther made it clear that Christian revelation rules like an authoritarian master over reason. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1517, one finds the following theses: “Therefore, in articles of faith one must have recourse to another dialectic and philosophy, which is called the Word of God and faith….In articles of faith, the disposition of faith is to be exercized, not the philosophical intellect.”54 In a conversation with his students, Luther once said that “prior to faith and knowledge of God, reason is darkness, but in believers it is an excellent instrument…. Enlightened reason, taken captive by faith, receives life from faith, for it is slain and given life again…. A resurrected reason does not fight against faith but promotes it.”55 Such pronouncements establish an impenetrable wall between the truth of faith and wisdom of the world; and of course this is what both Paul and Luther wanted. But this does not unify truth, it rends it asunder. It opens the door to theological irrationalism.
I believe that Luther has expressed accurately the essence of biblical theology–recall Paul’s equally forceful “we destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5)–but no self-respecting philosophical theologian can possibly accept such a methodology. I believe that evangelicals are correct in insisting on the unity of truth, but this cannot be attained without preserving the integrity of reason as a critical tool. If truth is unitary, then critical reason cannot be a slave to any presuppositions, even though it cannot say it does not have any. Reason must remain constantly vigilant, checking carefully all claims, including the claims of faith. If reason is taken “captive by faith,” then reason completely loses its ability to recognize truth and unify it. If reason is enslaved by faith, then faith controls and dictates the results of reasoning. Reason would truly be a whore if she were open to such liberties. She could be forced to utter nonsense at the command of faith. Any statement could be “true,” by direct or indirect inference from one’s articles of faith. Critical thinking as we know it would come to an end.
In the theological anthropology I sketch in Chapter Nine, I propose a process view of human nature in which the various elements–reason, conscience, emotion, and sociability–are related in a dynamic and functional way. This means that Boethius’ concept of a person as a rational substance and the classical Greek idea that reason is an end in itself must be rejected. A process view of human nature assumes that human capacities developed as means to certain physical, social, and cultural ends. Reason is best seen as a functional adaptation out of the more basic human capacities of conscious awareness and the need to relate to nature, other humans, and the transcendent dimensions of the cosmos.
It has long been evident that reason has been used to reach certain ideological ends, so it is incumbent upon us to use it in a responsible way. Therefore, reason can be used for human ends as long as those ends do not subvert reason as the necessary means. Furthermore, using an analogy from Hick,56 we must view the steps of an argument as links in a chain, not as steps in a ladder which can be thrown away like Wittgenstein’s famous one, or the expendable rafts used to cross the Buddhists’ river of samsara. Reason must maintain its integrity and remain a constant companion.
In my judgment the evangelical rationalists have failed to meet the criteria above. Evangelical John Jefferson Davis recognizes reason as a means to an end, but this goal is obviously an ideological one. According to Davis, Christians must use reason, “the kingdom extending tool,” to declare “spiritual warfare against human philosophies and ideologies that deny the truth of the gospel….”57 (With the Religious Right this warfare becomes a dangerous political move to pass laws which enforce partisan views of biblical morality and creation science.) Davis handicaps the secular army in this war by stating “that unregenerate reason has no right to judge the truth of the gospel,”58 while “spirit-guided” reason can attack at will. For Davis the issue is not between faith and reason, but between a “faithful” and a “faithless” reason. The latter may not criticize articles of faith because “divine revelation has an inner coherence and rationality that must be understood on their own terms.”59
Before his untimely death, E. J. Carnell recognized some of the problems with his rationalist methodology and began speaking out against the excesses of fundamentalism, especially the doctrine of detailed inerrancy. In the area of faith and reason, he had previously spoken of “ontological” truth (whatever is real is true) and “propositional” truth (“whenever judgments conceptually house the real”). He felt obliged to add truth as “personal rectitude” as a necessary third level.60 Carnell is entirely correct in his argument and he expresses it in unusually elegant language. Carnell seems to imply that only Christianity has been successful in establishing truth as personal rectitude. Carnell is obviously wrong in his claim that classical philosophy did not offer “a method which answers the question ‘How is a knowledge of the imperative essence possible?'”61 Plato made famous the motto that “knowledge is virtue,” and it is clear that many of the church fathers, including Augustine, made use of the Platonic tradition.
Many classical humanists rejected Plato’s axiom that goodness and truth were necessarily related, but they definitely believed that they should be cultivated together. Furthermore, many of them, unlike Plato, had the theistic beliefs which Carnell requires. Ultimately, Carnell tells us, truth at the third level means that “to know is to be morally responsible for knowing.” This is of course precisely the conclusion that I drew from my process anthropology in the Prologue. I simply now ask readers to decide whether evangelical rationalists like Henry and Davis have really met Carnell’s standard. Truth as personal rectitude cannot be a truth that makes reason a slave, and it cannot be one which declares spiritual warfare against people of opposing beliefs.
It is widely assumed that there are three historical positions with regard to the issue of reason and faith. First, there is the credo quia absurdum of Tertullian, then the credo ut intelligam of Augustine, and finally the intelligo ut credam of Aquinas. Although it is true that Aquinas had one of the most positive views of philosophy in the history of Christian theology, I believe that this classification of him is incorrect. Like the general Christian tradition surveyed above, Aquinas believed that theological knowledge, being direct from God and thus incapable of error, was superior to philosophical knowledge, a mere product of human intelligence. In On the Truth of the Catholic Faith he states: “If in what the philosophers have said we come upon something that is contrary to faith, this does not belong to philosophy but is rather an abuse of philosophy arising from a defect in reason.”63 Aquinas believes that reason will never contradict faith, but his axiom, as is shown in the last quotation, has a fideistic base: reason will never contradict faith because reason is judged by faith.
Any beginning logic student should be able to see the fallacy in this argument. As Rem Edwards phrases it: “If true philosophy is understood to mean ‘philosophy that never contradicts revelation,’ then St. Thomas is telling us nothing more substantive than that ‘a philosophy that never contradicts revelation is a philosophy that never contradicts revelation.'”64 In the final analysis Aquinas is no more satisfying than Tertullian, Luther, or the evangelicals. Like them Aquinas is proposing a reason totally “taken captive by faith,” a reason not worth having at all.
I will now try to weave together and summarize the important points of this chapter. Faith as a divine gift and the doctrine that faith totally dominates reason are part and parcel of the doctrine of God as controlling power. Those who are interested in righting the balance between God and human beings must resurrect a fides humana along the lines that Cantwell Smith has suggested. Faith is not a natural part of the human self so that it becomes a necessary mode of existence; but neither is it the supranatural addition that we have seen in the Christian tradition.65 Rather, faith is that distinctive, freely chosen, human quality of trust and loyalty in the transcendent power in our lives. Even though we must recognize some form of divine initiative (like Whitehead’s “initial aims”), we are ultimately responsible for confirming the faith relationship to God, just as we are in any other relationship of trust. This means that some form of Pelagianism is inevitable. Both Smith and Swinburne strive to make this clear.
The logic of faith as a divine gift was obscured until Luther realized that it meant that we are justified by grace alone not by human works. The rejection of the intrinsic value of human achievement is again the result of a God who is seen as sovereign over his creation and who is responsible for all value via creatio ex nihilo. By contrast Smith’s fides humana is a virtue, whereas believing and understanding are not; and according to classical humanism and Roman Catholicism, virtues ought to be rewarded. The demons were certainly not praised for their belief that Jesus was God, but those Christians who have faith in Jesus will gain eternal blessedness. As we have seen, Swinburne gives the necessary philosophical analysis of why this must be so. As our initial beliefs are essentially passive and involuntary, moral responsibility begins with the conscientious working out of those beliefs in faith.
There is a final implication of the following view of faith, one which Smith stresses in the context of his world theology. We must recognize the fides humana in all people of faith, instead of concentrating on what might strike us as their odd beliefs. We must recognize that these people share a faith stance with us and that they may find our beliefs just as strange. John Cobb, however, challenges us to go beyond mere tolerance of the diversity of beliefs; rather, we must actively enter into other traditions (as Cobb has brilliantly done with Buddhism) and let them transform our own always limited self-understanding. (For Cobb this also means working outside the institution of the church.) This means that we cannot just take “God’s word for it” (Packer), but we have to use our own critical reason and creative imagination. I believe there are three essential attitudes for those who are aware of world religions and philosophies and who want to live with self-respect and intellectual integrity: trust and loyalty to one’s own world-view (which will never be completely transcended), an open, critical stance to that view, and finally a willingness to be changed by the wisdom of other great traditions. True religious faith is complete openness to the truth not a defensive attachment to the idols of specific belief.67
Endnotes
1. Mortimer Adler, How to Speak about God (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 154.
2. Robert E. Cushman, “Faith and Reason,” pp. 300, 306. Even a liberation theologian like Jose M. Bonino preserves Augustine’s axiom that Christian faith is a “specific form of apprehension, a specific epistemological principle” (Toward a Christian Political Ethics, p. 43).
3. In his Two Types of Faith Martin Buber uses the Greek pistis to indicate a cognitive faith while reserving the Hebrew ’emunah for noncognitive trust. Such a distinction has no etymological or exegetical basis, because one can discover an epistemological element in ’emunah as well as the meaning of trust for pistis. Indeed, evangelical Roger Nicole has shown that while the Hebrew ’emet meant both truthful and faithful, the LXX and the New Testament rendered ’emet as the cognitive aletheia, and the idea of faithfulness was borne primarily by the family of words surrounding pistos (“The Biblical Concept of Truth,” p. 292).
4. Nicole, op. cit.
5. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, p. 225.
6. Quoted in Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, vol. 1, pp. 239, 226.
7. Morris, The New Bible Dictionary (1st ed.), p. 413.
8. See Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century, pp. 116ff. Roger Nicole shows that there is an intimate connection between grace and truth in many biblical passages (op. cit., pp. 292-93). For contemporary Catholic theologians on faith as a divine gift see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 93-94.
9. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles. Library of Christian Classics, vols 20 and 21. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960. bk. 3. ch. 2, sec. 7.
10. See Bernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism, p. 59.
11. Bloesch, vol. 1, p. 237. 12. Henry, vol. 1, p. 229.
13. Packer J. I. Fundamentalism and the Word of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), p. 117.
14. E. J. Carnell, The Case for Biblical Christianity, p. 49.
15. Helm, Paul. “Faith, Evidence, and the Scriptures.” Scriptures and Truth, eds. Carson and Woodbridge, pp. 304, 310-11. Evangelical A. A. Hodge expresses the 19th Century form of “externalism” when he claims that “reason establishes the fact that God speaks” (quoted in John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, p. 30). Evangelical Jack Rogers also criticizes B. B. Warfield for placing rational certainty before the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit (Confessions of an Evangelical, p. 100).
16. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 140.
17. “From God also is the very power to be hurtful,” chap. 32 of Nature of Good, Against the Manicheans in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, p. 358. “And since no one can will unless urged on and called,…it follows that God produces in us even the willing itself” (Eighty-three Different Questions, ques. 68, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70, p. 164).
18. Hick, op. cit., p. 151.
19. Ibid., p. 3. 20. Packer, op. cit., p. 116.
21. Cantwell Smith, op. cit., p. 168; cf. p. 134. A number of other prominent theologians have committed themselves to a generic idea of faith. Both Karl Rahner and John Cobb believe that faith is present in all human beings insofar as they commit themselves to life, conscience, and a world-view. I must add, however, that both Cobb and Smith give a more specific theistic definition of faith that is almost identical to Hick’s. See Rahner, Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 2, p. 310; Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, pp. 88, 91; and Smith, p. 103.
22. Hick, op. cit., p. 55.
23. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 169.
24. Ibid.
25. Smith, op. cit., p. 127.
26. Ibid., p. 95. 27. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 217.
28. Smith, op. cit., p. 146.
29. Ibid., p. 104. 30. Ibid., p. 118
31. Ibid., p. 128. 32. Ibid., p. 283.
33. Frederick J. Crossan, “Fides and Credere: W. C. Smith on Aquinas,” Journal of Religion 65 (1985) pp. 399-412. p. 408.
34. Swinburne, Richard. Faith and Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 124.
35. Quoted in D. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage p. 129.
36. Swinburne, op. cit., p. 121. 37. Ibid., p. 198.
38. Ibid., p. 164.
39. C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, p. 16, quoted in John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, p. 96.
40. Carnell, op. cit., p. 51.
41. Ibid.
42. Excerpted in Medieval Philosophy, pp. 37-38.
43. Swinburne, op. cit., p. 164.
44. Rogers, Confessions of an Evangelical, p. 77.
45. See C. Norman Kraus, Anabaptism and Evangelicalism. Kraus points out that “Anabaptist confessions of faith are not viewed as universal orthodox…statements of the gospel. They are rather statements of the working consensus of the group, and they are open to revision by ongoing consensus” (p. 180).
46. Frederic R. Howe, Challenge and Response, p. 62.
47. Quoted in Norman A. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, p. 57.
48. Henry, vol. 1, p. 196 49. Ibid., p. 228.
50. Ibid., p. 226. 51. Ibid., p. 212.
52. Quoted in ibid., p. 212. Evangelical Harold Lindsell is just as emphatic as Clark: “The Bible must sit in judgment on science….Metaphysics belongs to those who start with Scripture” (Christianity Today, June 17, 1977).
53. Harold Brown O. J., “The Conservative Option” Tensions in Contemporary Theology, ed., Grundy and Johnson, p. 330. Having praised Brown, I must also point out that he equivocates considerably. He defends the unity of truth in one passage (pp. 336-37) and then goes on to support a position similar to Henry’s using Schaeffer’s hierarchical idea of Christian truth as “true truth” (p. 342).
54. Luther’s Works, vol. 38, pp. 239, 242.
55. Ibid., vol. 54, p. 183.
56. Hick, op. cit., p. 22.
57. J. J. Davis, The Foundations of Evangelical Theology, p. 117.
58. Ibid., 133.
59. Ibid. Davis really hedges on the rationality of basic doctrines: they “transcend the powers of natural reason but do not contradict it” (ibid.).
60. Carnell, op. cit., pp. 59-61.
61. Ibid., p. 61. 62. Ibid., p. 64.
63. Quoted in Rem B. Edwards, Reason and Religion, p. 77.
64. Edwards, Rem B. Reason and Religion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1972. p. 77. Evangelical Gordon Clark has the same problem. For example, when Averroes came to heretical conclusions about individual immortality, this should have been a warning to him, says Clark, “that he had made an error in his argumentation” (Religion, Reason, and Revelation, p. 31). Here again we have faith leading reason by the nose. In his discussion of Aquinas on this point Ronald Nash seems to agree: “God’s Word is true and what God teaches will always be consistent with whatever truth humans discover” (The Word of God…, p. 111).
65. Smith, op. cit., pp. 93, 129-30, 140. Smith, however, starts speaking of faith as a gift, because he realizes that “the
ability even to start to live, to decide to live,…comes to man from outside oneself” (p. 94). Certainly we have to grant Smith’s point insofar as God is the ground of our being. But this does not mean that faith, as a deliberately chosen attitude to God, comes automatically. Therefore, I find Smith’s phrase “one’s giving of oneself to transcendence is itself a ‘gift’ from transcendence” (ibid.) not only obscure but an unnecessary and dangerous concession for his fides humana.
67. I am indebted to Cobb for this pluralistic vision. See his Beyond Dialogue
and Christ in a Pluralistic Age (especially Chapter 13 on Christ and
Buddha). Initially, I was unhappy with his discussion of faith and reason in
the latter book (pp. 87-94), especially Cobb’s citation of Brunner which I
have used as an epigraph along with others who want to take reason captive. In private correspondence Cobb assures me that he believes in critical
reason as “relatively independent of one’s convictions and even of one’s
trust,” but he still challenges us to synthesize the two: “True reason occurs
as our thought is creatively transformed. Faith is trust in creative
transformation.” I do not identify creative transformation as Cobb’s Logos-
Christ, but I do support this general thesis.
Chapter Four: God, Freedom, and Evil
The Lord engages the living entity in pious activities so he may be elevated. The Lord engages him in impious activities so he may go to Hell…. By the will of the Supreme Lord he can go to Heaven or Hell, as a cloud is driven by the air.
Kaushitaki Upanishad 3.8
In his heart man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.
Proverbs 16:9 (NIV)
The lot is cast into the lap, but it is every decision from the Lord.”
Proverbs 16:33 (NIV)
Our life is, at every moment supplied by him, our tiny, miraculous power of free‑will only operates on bodies which his continual energy keeps in existence – our very power to think is his power communicated to us.
C. S. Lewis
The world has allowed itself to be seduced by the flattery doctrine of free‑will which is pleasing to nature.
Martin Luther
Therefore, to teach something [free‑will] which is neither prescribed by a single word inside the Scriptures nor demonstrated by a single fact outside them is no part of Christian doctrine.
Martin Luther
God from all eternity did…freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass…Yet…thereby is no violence offered to the will of creatures.
The Westminster Confession
. . . Freedom is found only in subjection to God and His truth; and the more subject, the more free. This is the biblical paradox of Christian liberty. Man becomes free only in bondservice to Jesus Christ.
J. I. Packer
If there is a God, then it is always His will, and I can do nothing against His will.
Kirilov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed
I act freely whenever I act, and unfreely whenever some other agency acts through me.
Roger Scruton on Kant
A. Determinism and Morality
The freedom of the will is one of the most difficult problems that challenges the human mind. We all would like to assert with confidence that we do have free‑will; indeed, our basic notions about morality require free‑will. Close and honest reflection, however, reveals a disturbing contradiction. On the one hand, we immediately feel the spontaneity and freedom of our mental processes, especially if the world is going our way. On the other hand, we habitually concede the assumption that all events and things have causes, causes which are independent of their effects.
The contradiction is this: free‑will requires a situation in which the will is not externally caused or coerced; but this is incompatible with our otherwise strong intuitions that every event has causes independent of itself. The principal assumption of morality is at odds with the principal assumption of science. In science we assume that all effects are rendered inevitable by their causes; in morality we attempt to make an exception to this universal law for the human will. Many philosophers agree that we are simply wrong in making this exception.
What does it take to say with assurance that the will is free? Let us first make an important distinction between a free‑will and a free act. The necessary conditions for a free‑will are internal. We can almost always observe human actions, but we cannot observe the will. A free‑will must stem from an originative power within us, i.e., a power that is truly our own.
Actions, on the other hand, are externally observable and the conditions for a free act are two: (1) open alternatives from which we can decide, choose, and act; and (2) an absence of external constraints or barriers in the acting out of a choice. It is clear then that a person can have free‑will and yet be prevented from acting freely. A person chained from head to foot may have the originative power necessary for a free act, but obviously is prevented from using that power by external constraints.
Let us use the case of Patty Hearst as another example. F. Lee Bailey probably advised his client to plead “no contest” on the sporting goods store charge because of the fact that Patty was at one time completely alone outside in the getaway truck. In other words, there were no external constraints preventing her from driving off without her companions. On the other hand, Bailey did take the bank robbery charge to court, hoping to convince the jury that the SLA gang coerced her to go along with the crime, thus leaving her no alternatives. Bailey was foiled: the jury was not even persuaded in this case. A court of law deals with the external conditions of a person’s behavior, not the internal conditions. A jury can decide whether or not a person acted freely but it cannot decide whether the will is free. It is here where science and philosophy step in; and it is here, unfortunately where the real dilemma lies.
The major stumbling block is the necessary condition for a free‑will. Is it possible for any agent to have the originative power to perform those acts for which the agent is morally responsible? If that power is derivative and not originative, then the agent cannot be held responsible for her acts. Is a self‑determining moral being a possibility given what we know about the causes and conditions of human behavior and the nature of reality? The physical sciences tell us that there is no escape from determinism; therefore, human will cannot be exempted from the universal law of cause and effect. (Incidentally, some free‑will theorists are wrong in appealing to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle for a metaphysical basis for self‑determinism. See Section G.) The behavioral sciences are now telling us the same thing: humans are in no way self‑determining; rather, they appear fully determined by the environment, previous conditioning, and general psycho‑physiological laws. Some “socio‑ biologists” are even now adding genetic determinism as well.
B. God and Free‑Will
Some people have thought that if we bring God into the picture, the problem is somehow miraculously solved. But calling on God makes the problem worse rather than better. The God of orthodox Christianity is all‑powerful; God is the only being with originative power. Most theologians (Descartes and Luther excluded) thought that God has the power to do anything short of self‑contradiction. For example, God could have created a world in which all people would have been saved; or God could have created a world in which all people would have been damned. God finally decided, at least according to some religions, to create a world in which some will be damned and some will be saved. But there is one choice that even God is not allowed: to create a world in which all would be damned and all would be saved. For philosophical theology, at least, God must be limited by the laws of logic.
Some people have the misconception that God’s causal relations with the world ended with the Creation. God must continue to sustain this creation, because all entities depend upon God’s originative power. God is the only necessary being in the universe; everything else is contingent, i.e., all things would cease to exist without God’s sustaining power. Luther contends that people Alive under the absolute sovereignty of God…in such a way that they cannot subsist for a moment by their own strength.”1 For Luther this meant that God is the active cause of all things and all events, even the acts of Satan himself. Recall that Paul asserts that Jesus Christ has a “power that enables him to bring everything under his control” (Philip. 3:21, NIV).
J. L. Mackie states that “if men’s wills are really free, this must mean that even God cannot control them, that is, that God is no longer omnipotent.”152> Some Christians do in fact hold that God controlled the wills of some important agents in biblical history, e.g., his son Jesus and Judas. If God can control the wills of some people, then God can constrain the will of anyone. If immunity from this sort of control is a necessary condition for genuine free‑will, then free‑will is impossible in the biblical perspective.
C. “Our Tiny, Miraculous Power”
The evangelical writer C. S. Lewis unwittingly confirms the impossibility of free‑will within the orthodox Christian framework. In his book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis states: “Our life is, at every moment supplied by him, our tiny, miraculous power of free‑will only operates on bodies which his continual energy keeps in existence – our very power to think is his power communicated to us.”153
Free‑will is the action of an autonomous, self‑determining being with the power to think and decide on its own without external support or impediment. If, according to Lewis, our “very power to think” is supplied by God, how can the Christian be called a free and autonomous being?
In this same book, Lewis reiterates the biblical analogy of the potter and the clay. Such an analogy leaves no room for free‑will in “clay‑like” humans. Is the clay “free” to be what it wants to be? As Lewis states: “He makes us, we are made: he is original, we derivative.”154
The doctrine of free‑will assumes originative power on the part of humans. Lewis’ Christianity gives us no metaphysical ground for such power. As Roger Scruton says of Kant’s ethics: “I act freely whenever I act, and unfreely whenever some other agency acts through me.”155 In orthodox Christianity God is always acting through us.
Lewis stresses the derivative nature of human beings in this passage: “For we are only creatures; our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male [sic!], mirror to light, echo to voice.”156 A mirror is worthless without light, an echo is a mere epiphenomenon, but a female, contrary to Lewis’ sexism, is perfectly able to take care of herself. These are definitely not appropriate images for free agents and morally responsible beings.
Let me quote more in order to emphasize the utter lack of any foundation for free‑will in Lewis’ evangelical theology: “Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God…is to experience it as our surrender to his demand, our conformity to his desire… but in the long run the soul’s search for God can only be a mode…of his search for her, since all comes from him, since the very possibility of our loving is his gift for us, and since our freedom is only a freedom of better or worse response.”157
It is obvious that if there is free‑will here, it must indeed be a miracle, a paradox, or more bluntly, a logical contradiction. Another evangelical writer, J. I. Packer, concurs with Lewis: “…Freedom is found only in subjection to God and His truth; and the more subject, the more free. This is the biblical paradox of Christian liberty. Man becomes free only in bondservice to Jesus Christ….”158
D. Luther and Free‑Will
In his famous response to the Christian humanist Erasmus, Martin Luther admits that “you would not call a slave free, who acts under the sovereign authority of his master; and still less rightly can we call a man or angel free, when they live under the absolute sovereignty of God.”159 In terms of the humanism which is at the basis of our western civilization and which in forms modern political systems of representative democracy, any form of slavery, even slavery to God, would be an abomination.
In terms of our epigram from John Fowles, the orthodox God is not “the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.” Fowles goes on to give implicit support the view I prefer: “The novelist is still God, since he creates…What has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.”160
If one were to ask most Christians if humans had free‑will, they would not hesitate to say “Yes.” Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, saw the implications differently. Luther was unflinching in his recognition that divine omnipotence implied that God was the original cause of all things and actions, including the actions of Satan.
Our own Jonathan Edwards was also emphatic about the absence of human free‑will, and he, like Luther, provided both scriptural and philosophical arguments for this view. Edwards was convinced that divine foreknowledge recorded in the Bible pre‑empted any idea of self‑determination.161
Luther’s position is also clear: “God works all in all…God even works what is evil in the impious….[Judas’] will was the work of God; God by his almighty power moved his will as he does all that is in the world.”162 All contingent wills then are extensions of God’s will, including the will of Satan. “Since God moves and does all, we must take it that he moves and acts even in Satan and the godless;…evil things are done with God himself setting them in motion.”163 Luther, therefore, concludes that “the world has allowed itself to be seduced by the flattering doctrine of free‑will which is pleasing to nature.”164
Since most Lutherans believe in free‑will, more quotations might be appropriate: “Man, even when he does and things what is wrong, is not responsible”; and “all is of necessity, for we…live and act not as we will, but as God wills. In God’s presence the will ceases to exist.”165
The following passage from The Bondage of the Will not only continues the point, but shows Luther’s supreme rhetorical skills: “The human will is like a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills. Nor can it choose its rider….The riders contend for its possession.”166 In Luther’s reading of divine omnipotence, there is no basis for human autonomy and self‑determination.
Rem B. Edwards states that divine omnipotence means that “all power and the exercise of all power belong to God.”167 Luther is not always philosophically astute, but his definition of omnipotence contains an important clarification: “By the omnipotence of God…I do not mean the potentiality by which he could do many things which he does not, but the active power by which he potently works all in all….”168 John Locke concurs: God has no passive power, but has complete active power.169 This is the first type of divine power in Chapter Eight.
In other words, God is not like a power plant, upon which many autonomous electrical machines draw their current. In such a system, it would be absurd, for example, to blame the power plant for a fire caused by a short‑circuit in one of the appliances. The notion of God as some passive source of power is of course totally foreign to revealed religion as well as most natural religion.
If one were to add attributes like active will, intelligence, and providence to the power plant, then one is forced to a very different conclusion about our hypothetical fire. An omnipotent agent with these attributes would not allow such a disaster to take place in the first place. Furthermore, if such a agent were also the creator of the appliances, then it would also be responsible, in the same way that manufacturers are responsible, for the defect that caused the fire.
E. An Objection and Response
A possible solution to the God vs. free‑will dilemma is the following: if God is a free being then God can choose not to be the originative cause of every event. God can allow human creatures to be morally autonomous and to choose good or evil for themselves.
But the deficiencies of this argument are numerous. By choosing not to cause some events (and this will involve at least every event in which human will is or has been involved), then the deity has chosen to limit itself. God, in order to remain the orthodox God, cannot do this. God’s power and control over the universe would be severely compromised. God would no longer be the omnipotent being that Christians assume God is.
If, for example, Adam’s decision to disobey God originated from Adam, then God was not the cause of this act. But this would also mean that God, then, is not all‑powerful, but shares power with other agents in universe. This is the solution of process theology, and it requires a different view of divine power. (See Chapter Eight.)
There is a deeper dilemma for orthodox Christians who follow Harold Brown at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Brown and many other evangelicals believe that God does not want us to be autonomous beings at all. In a letter to me, Brown declared that only God, not human beings, has rights. We do not have natural rights and we do not own our own souls. As the will has always been located in the soul, we cannot have our own wills either. As Lewis has confirmed above, our wills are simply extensions of the divine will.
The evangelicals are probably right as far as the Bible is concerned. The ancient rabbis believed that our souls were actually God’s breath in us, and Paul said that “God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philip. 2:13). Even Thomas Aquinas admitted that the will is an unmoved mover, which at least implies that it is divinely directed if not divine itself.170 Martin Luther agreed: free‑will is a divine attribute and can never be an attribute of human beings.171
Therefore, the only “freedom” for the orthodox Christian, as Lewis aptly phrases it, is a “freedom of better or worse response” to God’s inexorable will. For the conservative Christian there are essentially only two alternatives: to comply with God’s will or to burn in Hell. And as Lewis states above, all initiative comes from God and that includes the divine initiative to turn to God as well as the divine initiative to turn away.
God empowers all things and all events; it is not the orthodox God if this does not hold. God’s will shall be done, regardless of what other agents want or realize for themselves. In The Bondage of the Will, Martin Luther affirms that “God foresees, foreordains, and accomplished all things by an unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free‑will sinks shattered to the dust.”172
F. Incompatiblism and Compatiblism: Four Views
The following extended deduction allows us to draw out various alternatives to the problem of free‑will. Each view will respond differently to these premises.
1. The thesis of universal determinism is true.
2. Universal determinism is not compatible with free‑will.
3. Hence, there is no free‑will.
4. If there are no free wills, then humans are not responsible for their actions.
5. If humans are not responsible for their actions, then there is no reason to blame or praise them.
Hard Determinism
Hard determinism accepts all premises as true and therefore accepts all the conclusions. As there is no rational foundation for praise or blame, hard determinists usually propose a behavioristic approach to human problems. All punishment would then be practical, future‑oriented rehabilitation. In practice, the “soft” determinist and hard determinist would use the same methods. Theoretically, the soft determinist believes that a revised concept of moral responsibility is intelligible within the confines of universal determinism.
The following is a syllogism which attempts to prove hard determinism.
1. All events in nature are determined by physical forces.
2. All human actions are events in nature.
3. Therefore, all human actions are determined by physical force.
It would be quite difficult to deny the truth of the second premise, but there is no reason for a non‑materialist to accept the first premise as true. If Karl Popper and John Eccles are correct in assuming there is such a thing as “downward” causation from the mind to physical events, then this represents a plausible alternative to the view expressed in the first premise. Determinists cannot force us to accept the first premise until they have convinced us of the validity of the materialist arguments.
Radical Free‑Will Theory
Martin Buber poetically expresses this position: “The unlimited sway of causality in the it‑world, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the man who is not confined to the it‑world, but free to step out of it again and again into the world of relation. Here I and Thou confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here man finds guaranteed the freedom of this being and of being.”173
Some authors (like Halverson) call this view “libertarianism,” but I prefer to reserve this term for political philosophy. I use the adjective “radical” to qualify “free‑will theory,” because “teleological compatiblist” still assumes a self‑determining will.
Radical free‑will theorists accept the second premise, but reject the first; therefore, none of the conclusions follow. For the sophisticated free‑will theorist determinism is true, but it is not universal. It would be foolish to insist that the events in the natural world on which we rely for our normal activities are exempt from cause and effect. The free‑will theorist need only have some indeterminism, so that voluntary events for which we can be praised or blamed can have an acausal or contra‑causal basis.
Some free‑will theorists have used Heisenberg’s “indeterminancy principle” as support for the indeterminism they need for the will to operate. There are at least two grave problems with this view. First, some believe that the indeterminism of particle physics is epistemological only; that is, it involves an uncertainty in our knowledge about atomic particles. (After all, if an electron had consciousness, it would certainly “know” where and what it was.)
Second, even if there is true metaphysical indeterminism at the subatomic level, this would actually be the worst possible basis for a self‑determining will. There is a world of difference between chaotic subatomic events and the deliberate actions of the human will.
Hick phrases the point well: “It is very difficult to see how such concepts as responsibility and obligation could have any application if human volitions occurred at random instead of flowing from the individual nature of the agent. From the point of view of ethics the cost of equating freedom with volitional randomness would thus be so great as to be prohibitive.”174
A common line of argument for radical free‑will theory is the appeal to the fact that we deliberate. If hard determinism is true, decisions ought to come as soon as the right causes and conditions are in place. According to universal determinism, effects ought to spring immediately and unhesitatingly from their antecedent causes.
The behaviorist, however, has a quite plausible counter‑ argument to this. The reason why we deliberate is that there exists certain sets of conditioning which are of equal “strength.” One could visualize this as a sort of tug‑of‑war in the mind of a college student who is caught between “doing his duty” (making up an exam) or “having a good time” (going to the Phi Delt’s Turtle Race).
In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes gives a similar argument: “When in the mind of man, appetite, and aversions, hopes, and fears, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and diverse good and evil consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts, so that sometimes we have an appetite to it; sometimes an aversion from it; sometimes hope to be able to do it; sometimes despair, or fear to attempt it; the whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears continued will the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call deliberation.” As a determinist and proto‑behaviorist, Hobbes defines the will as the “last act” of deliberation.
Soft Determinism
Hard determinism and radical free‑will theory are sometimes called “incompatiblist” theories, because they both believe that the second premise of our deduction above is true – that universal determinism is incompatible with free‑will. Hard determinism chooses determinism over free‑will and the radical free‑will theorist does just the opposite.
“Soft” determinism believes that the premise is false. The proponents of this view contend that our dilemma is a false one, primarily because we have insisted on too strict a definition of free‑will. The soft determinists redefine free‑will as the free action we discussed in Section A. They reject the notion of an inner power or faculty called the will as a metaphysical fiction. All that is necessary for a person to be morally responsible is for that person to be unrestrained in what they truly want to do. Halverson calls the free‑will of the soft determinist a “circumstantial freedom of self‑ realization” as opposed to the “natural freedom of self‑ determination” of the radical free‑will theorist.
Teleological Compatiblism
This view and soft determinism are called “compatiblist” theories because they reject the second premise in the extended deduction above. In their respect their respective ways, they believe that universal determinism and free‑will are compatible. Soft determinism differs significantly from teleological compatiblism in that it rejects any teleology and accepts only one type of causation, the “upward” causation of mechanistic views. This is sometimes called “efficient” causation, the causation of pushing and pulling.
Teleological compatiblism is based on Whitehead’s metaphysics, in which every actual occasion (AO) is a self‑determining agent which seeks its own end. (See Chapter Nine for more on Whitehead’s views.) In one speculative blow, Whitehead solves the dilemma of free‑will and determinism by declaring a universal self‑determinism. Most AOs seek ends which are very trivial: like the end of simple conformation to the past or simple alternation, physical behavior which shows up, e.g., as a sine wave on an oscilloscope. But some AOs, those which make up the mind, seek and achieve true novelty and therefore are the basis of human creativity and moral responsibility.
TYPICAL “LIVES” OF ACTUAL OCCASIONS
PAST PRESENT FUTURE
Conformation: A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8 A9 A10 A11 A12
Alternation: A1 B1 A2 B2 A3 B3 A4 B4 A5 B5 A6 B6 A7
Novelty: C E P P E C D ? ? ? ? ? ?
(Note: The novel events are not completely arbitrary or chaotic.)
While the final causation of each AO may truly be called a natural freedom of self‑determination, this teleology does not happen in a vacuum. Human freedom in process philosophy is not as radical as that which we find, e.g., in existentialism. It is not ex nihilo and not hostile to the past nor to natural or social limits. Just as in Popper’s interactionistic view, Whitehead accepts the role of the “upward” causation of efficient cause, but an efficient cause is interpreted as an incarnation of the cause in an effect which is a self‑determining agent.
Each concrescing AO is inescapably a product of its past and surroundings, but it is also able to synthesize this data according to a telos of its own. Final causes stem directly from a causally efficacious environment, but the difference is that the environment does not dictate the particular effects but only conditions a personal agent who is the locus of the final cause. The actions of personal agents are their own unique unification of the past according to their own desires.
Whitehead has actually resurrected all four of Aristotle’s causes. In addition to the final cause inherent in each AO and the efficient cause of the past, there is “creativity” as the “material” cause and God as the “formal” cause offering the divine initial aim. Whitehead’s solution to the problem of free‑will is without doubt ingenious, but the speculative metaphysics which support it can be subjected to the criticisms formulated in the Chapter Nine.
It is instructive to compare this Whiteheadian proposal with Hick’s idea of humans having “limited creativity.” Hick explains: “…Whilst a free action arises out of the agent’s character, it does not arise in a fully determined and predictable way. It is largely but not fully prefigured in the previous state of the agent. For the character is itself partially formed and sometimes partially reformed in the very moment of decision.”175 This is also a rejection of freedom ex nihilo and a process view.
END NOTES
- Martin Luther, Luther’s Work, Vol. 33, p. 103.
- J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64 (1955), reprinted in Baruch A. Brody, ed. Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‑Hall, 1974), p. 165.
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944). pp. 41‑2.
- Ibid., p. 41.
- Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64.
- Lewis, op. cit., p. 51.
- Ibid.
- J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, p. 143.
- Luther, Luther’s Work, Vol. 33, p. 103.
- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 82.
- See John E. Smith, “Jonathan Edwards as Philosophical Theologican,” Review of Metaphysics 30 (December, 1976), p. 307.
- Weimarausgabe” of Luther’s Works, Vol. 2, p. 145; Vol. 18, p. 175.
- Ibid., Vol. 18, p. 709; Luther’s Works, Vol. 33, p. 189.
- Weimarausgabe, Vol. 7, p. 146.
- Ibid., Vol. 18, p. 715; Vol. 7, p. 145.
- Luther’s Works, Vol. 33, pp. 65‑66.
- Edwards, op. cit., p. 177.
- Luther’s Works, Vol. 33, p. 189.
- John Locke, Of Human Understanding, XXI.2.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Q. 83, Art. 1, Reply Obj. 3.
- Luther’s Works, Vol. 33, p. 68.
- Ibid., p. 37.
- Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), p. 100.
- John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, p. 312.
- Ibid., p. 313.
Chapter Five: The Challenge of the World Religions
He who knows one religion knows none.
– Max Müller
He who knows me as unborn, as the beginningless, as the Supreme Lord of all the lords – he, undeluded among men, is freed from all sins.
– Krishna
A monk sees the Dharma and seeing the Dharma he sees me.
– Gautama Buddha
When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me.
– Jesus Christ
In its historical form, as a mode of doctrine, life and order, the Christian religion cannot be the one to which the truth belongs, per se – not even if that form be the Reformed.
– Karl Barth
It pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the most important articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians….
– L. H. Mills
Max Müller, German Indologist and editor of The Sacred Books of the East, was committed to the truth of Christianity, but he and others worked all of their lives to make available vast material on non Christian religions. Close study of the world’s scriptures has revealed fascinating parallels which have enabled us to under¬stand the phenomenon of religion much better. In addition, these similarities constitute a challenge to those who propound truths on the basis of one special revelation. Is it now possible for devotees to claim that their religion contains unique truths? Many scholars, among them Christian theologians, give a negative answer to this question.
The impact of the study of comparative religion on 20th Cen¬tury Christian theology has been great. Many liberal Christians have openly confessed that the uniqueness of Christian claims is subject to honest dispute. Paul Tillich was profoundly influ¬enced by his encounter with the religions of the Orient; and John Hick, once the most respected defender of Christian orthodoxy and uniqueness, has now published a book entitled God Has Many Names. After learning of the Pure Land sects of Japanese Buddhism, Karl Barth, the giant of neoorthodox Christianity, had to admit that “in its historical form, as a mode of doctrine, life and order, the Christian religion cannot be the one to which the truth belongs, per se – not even if that form be the Reformed.”1 Curi¬ously, on the next page Barth goes on to declare adherents of the Pure Land sect “heathen, poor, and utterly lost.” It is not at all clear how Barth can join these two thoughts without contra¬diction. Barth’s ultimate answer is a forensic fideism: the objective similarities are ultimately unimportant, because the true Christian believer calls on the salvific name of Jesus.
Other attempts to secure the uniqueness of Christianity have been just as tenuous or outright incorrect. The contemporary Catholic theolo¬gian Edward Schillebeeckx proposes that “in reli¬gion outside of Christianity man cannot normally reach to an experience of God except in a vague and often nameless way.”2 One would expect such a claim from the fundamentalists, not a highly respected thinker such as this one. Francis Schaeffer does indeed contend that only the Judeo Christian tradition contains worship of an “infinite personal being.”3 Schaeffer’s mistake is common among evangelicals as can be seen from this claim in the The New Bible Dictionary (2nd ed.): “The Christian religion is distinctive in that it claims that God can be known as a personal God only in his self revelation in the Scriptures” (p. 427). There is a Bhagavata tradition that Krishna actually dictated the Vedas to five scribes, and he is also understood to be found in the Vedas. Both Schillebeeckx and Schaef¬fer are obviously wrong: Islam, Zoroastrianism, Bhagavatism, and Pure Land Buddhism hold to a personal theism just as profound as Christianity’s.
A. Personal Theism, Grace, and Sacrifice
In his book Basic Christianity evangelical John Stott states that “Christianity is a religion of sal-vation, and there is nothing in the non Christian religions to compare with this mes¬sage of a God who loved, and came after, and died for, a world of lost sinners.”4 Both evangelical Hinduism and Pure Land Buddhism are major savior religions that also have this message. Stott is wrong too in the following claim: “This self centered¬ness of the teaching of Jesus immediately sets him apart from the other great religious teachers of the world. They were self effacing. He was self advancing. They pointed men away from themselves, saying, ‘That is the truth’…but Jesus said, ‘I am the truth; follow me.’ The founder of none of the ethnic [sic!] religions ever dared to say such a thing.”5
Stott obviously has not read the Bhagavad-Gita where Krishna self advancingly states: “Intelligence, knowledge, forgiveness, truthfulness…are created by Me alone” (10:5). Krishna also self assertively declares: “He who knows me as the unborn, as the beginningless, as the Supreme Lord of all the worlds – he, undeluded among men, is freed from all sins” (10:3). After quoting similar claims by Jesus, Michael Green asks: “What reli¬gious leader has ever spoken like that?”241 My answer to Green is Krishna. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna even presumes to take the highest Hindu god Brahman as a subordinate part of himself (14:3).
One could also use the Buddha, who in an early sutra said: “A monk sees the Dharma and seeing the Dharma he sees me”6 Here is another similar quotation: “With you, Ananda, it is a matter of faith, when you say that; but with the Tathagata, Ananda, it is a matter of knowledge”7 – the Buddhist equivalent of Jesus saying: “When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me” (Jn. 12:45).
John Stott’s characterization of other religions as “ethnic” is especially unfair and crude. Such rhetoric is the unfortunate dark side of much evangelical apologetic. Stott denigrates the prima facie claims of universalism in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. Indeed, it was not so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from Zoroastrianism (Darius’ inscrip-tions, for example, mention other Persian gods); rather, it was the idea of the universal scope of God’s salvation.
Hebrew univer¬salism does not explicitly appear until Second Isaiah, which by all scholarly accounts – except of course for some evangelical ones – was written during and/or after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian captivity was a great blow to many Jews because they were taken out of Yahweh’s divine jurisdiction and they believed that a Hebrew prayer could not be answered in a foreign land. There is a good possibility that Zoroastrian priests taught the Jews that God was not limited geographically.
As we have already seen, Michael Green is no better than Stott or Schaeffer when it comes to dealing with non Christian faiths. For example, he states that “no man made religious sys¬tem…can bring a finite sinful man into lasting relation with an infinite personal God.”244 Can Green truly prove to us, without resorting to a fideism which he usually rejects, that his evan-gelical Christianity is not a man made religion and that it can actually do what he claims it can?
Green assumes that only the Christian God offers universal and unconditional grace. This claim, however, runs into two immediate difficulties. First, except for a small number of sectarians, orthodox Christianity has never supported universal and unconditional grace. Many Christians take Jesus at his word when he said that those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit will not be saved (Mk. 3:29); and most Christians do place some minimal conditions on the bestowal of God’s grace. Second, two Oriental savior religions, Pure Land Buddhism and Bhagavatism, are much more radical religions of faith and grace than Christianity. One is reminded of the young Krishna’s unconditional salvation of demons who sought to destroy him.
One is also inspired by the image of the grace of the Heavenly Buddha which falls gently, equally, and uncondition¬ally on all the world; and the Bodhisattva who patiently stands at the edge of Nirvana until all the world’s sentient beings are saved. Donald Bloesch is therefore wrong when be claims that the “doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith is both the basic and the distinctive article of Christianity, by which it is distinguished from all man made [sic] religions as the only true and divine religion.”245
Christian apologists frequently claim that the uniqueness of Christianity lies in the claim that Jesus is the only savior who redeems by a real blood sacrifice. It is true that none of the major world religions bases redemption on a sacrifice of human blood. This includes Judaism whose Old Testament rules allowed animal sacrifice but explicitly disallowed human sacri¬fice. I contend other religions are far superior in not incorpor¬ating blood sacrifice of any kind in their doctrines. Insofar as Christianity is interpreted in terms of a literal blood sacri¬fice, it remains among the most primitive of religions.
Further¬more, it is odd that this would be a Christian doctrine in the first place: the Crucifixion was a bloodless form of execution. In fact, in Roman crucifixions the spikes were driven to avoid major arteries. Death, then, came from severe torture, exposure, exhaustion, and finally asphyxiation. The crown of thorns would have drawn very little blood; and the spear thrust in the side brought forth water and other bodily fluids, not blood.
There were mystery religions contemporaneous with Christiani¬ty which did embody the idea of blood sacrifice. The sacred rites of Tammuz were celebrated every spring when the Syrian rivers ran red with the “blood of Tammuz,” probably the fallen blooms of the red anemone.246 Devotees of Attis made an effigy of their dead god, tied it to a pine log, offered their own blood in imitation, placed the effigy in a tomb, and sang resurrection hymns such as this one: “Be of good courage, oh ye of our mystery, for our God is saved, for us there shall be salvation after our sorrows.”247
The bull sacrifice of Mithraism required that the rich initiate be bathed (“reborn”) in bull’s blood, while the poor people had to be content with being “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” There is also a Mithraic parallel to John 6:53 58: “He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.”248
Some scholars have seriously doubted whether these accounts are actu¬ally pre Christian; therefore, the possibility of bor¬rowing from Christianity on blood sacrifice and resurrection cannot be ruled out. This, however, cannot be the case for Osiris, the dying and rising god of the Egyptians. In a brilliant article S. G. F. Brandon argues that Paul’s formulation of the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice followed the “principle of ritual assimilation, which in its practice constituted a remarkable parallel to the ritual pattern so long observed in Osirianism.”249. Brandon does not argue for religious syncretism, but simply points out an important phenomenological coincidence.
Although it is not a blood sacrifice, there is also vicarious atonement in the East, especially in the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism. The Bodhisattva is a savior who “will give up his body and his life” for the deliverance of humankind. Much like the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52 3, the Bodhisattva of the Siksasamuccaya declares that
“I have taken upon myself, by my own will, the whole of the pain of all things living. Thus I dare try every abode of pain, in…every part of the universe, for I must not defraud the world of the root of good. I resolve to dwell in each state of misfortune through countless ages…for the salva¬tion of all beings…for it is better that I alone suffer than that all beings sink to the worlds of misfortune. There I shall give myself into bondage, to redeem all the world from the forest of purgatory, from rebirth as beasts, from the realm of death. I shall bear all grief and pain in my own body, for the good of all things living.”250
Similar to central New Testament themes the view of salva¬tion in Mahayana Buddhism is corporate. In the Bodhicharyavatara Shanti¬deva describes the Bodhisattva as a sinless being who none¬theless will take on the sins of the whole universe: “I will think of my¬self as a sinner, of others as oceans of virtue; I will cease to live as self, and will take as my self my fellow crea-tures. We love our hands and other limbs, as members of the body; then why not love other living beings, as members of the universe?”251 One is reminded of Paul’s organic analogy to explain the body of Christ: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…” (1 Cor. 12:12).
B. Monotheism and the Trinity
In his Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion, a text once used at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, J. O. Buswell states: “The concept of the Triune God is found only in the Judeo Christian tradition. Just as there is only one doctrine of omnipotence, so there is only one Triune God among all the reli¬gions of the world.”252 Buswell appears unaware of the possibility that the monotheism of Zoroaster, especially if early dates for his life (ca. 1000 B.C.E.) gain wide acceptance, antedates Jewish monotheism. Zoroastrian scholar Mary Boyce claims that Zoroaster had a “strict monotheism – stricter even than that of the Hebrew prophets.”253
There is of course a long standing tradition that Moses was a monotheist; but most scholars agree that the develop¬ment toward monotheism occurred during the monarchy through to the Babylonian exile. Close scrutiny of the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible shows polytheistic remnants as well as a fairly strong henotheism, i.e., Yahweh as the chief God of a di¬vine council. This henotheism is especially evident in the psalms (e.g., 29:1, 68, 82, and 89), Job (1 2), and Deuteronomy 32:8. Attempts by conservative commentators to explain the Hebrew phrases bene ‘elohim, and bene ‘elim as angels or judges have been singularly unsuccessful (see Chapter 13, passim).
Buswell’s claim about creatio ex nihilo is riddled with difficulties. First, there is shaky biblical foundation for such a doctrine (see Chapter 20 A). Even though the priestly writers demythol-ogized and historicized inher¬ited Near Eastern cosmolo¬gies, it is clear that the idea of a preexisting watery chaos remained a part of the Hebrew adaptation of these proto¬types.
I am convinced that creatio ex nihilo came into being as a result of the philosophical reflections of late Jewish and Chris¬tian thinkers. It was Philo and the early Christian theologians who explicitly argued that God’s omnipotence and perfection deman¬ded that no other being could be equiprimordial with God, for such a being would compro¬mise God’s absolute sovereign power.
Even if creation out of nothing were a biblical idea, it would still not be unique among the world religions. The Egyptian Ptah of Memphis created the world by his thought and word; the Babylonian Marduk, who first fashions the world from the body of Tiamat, must prove that he can also create by “word” alone; and Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian “Wise Lord,” creates a material universe out of nothing.254
Buswell simply cannot be serious about his contention that only Christianity has a doctrine of an omnipotent God. Although Zoroastrian theologians, especially the ones during the Sassanian period, had serious difficulties reconciling omnipotence with a separate evil principle, they nonetheless held that Ahura Mazda was omnipotent. The Bhagavad-Gita is replete with references to Krishna’s unlimited power, with explicit claims that Krishna does everything, including evil.
Therefore, Christians are certainly not alone in claiming divine omnipotence, but they are usually the only ones – except for the inimitable Luther – who refuse to ac¬knowledge the implications that this doctrine has for moral responsibility and evil. We have seen that the prophet Isaiah admits that Yahweh creates both good and evil (45:7, AB), but the Zoroastrians were firm in their resolve that all evil was the result of a separate metaphysical principle.
One might conclude that the Zoroastrians traded true omnipotence for a clean solution to theodicy. As R. C. Zaehner once said: “Ac¬cording to the Zoroas¬trian, the Moslem God is not good, neither does Allah pretend to be, while the Christian God advertises him¬self as good, and plainly is not.”255
Finally, Buswell’s claims about the Christian Trinity are just as tenuous, because both Hinduism and Buddhism have triune concepts of deity. The relation of the persons is obviously different, but who can claim with confidence that the Christian Trinity is formulated correctly? Indeed, is the Trinity ac¬tually a biblical concept? There are also some logi¬cal problems that generate tension between the Trinity and the Incarnation. If Jesus is truly identical with the Father, then this appears to undermine the divine status and equal relation of the Spirit.
Contrary to popular conceptions, the Hindu and Buddhist trinities are not simple triads or tritheisms, but com¬plex triune deities comparable to the sophisticated Chris¬tian Trinity. D. T. Suzuki describes the Buddhist Trinity: “Though they are conceived as three, they are in fact all the manifestation of one Dharmakaya – the Dharma¬kaya that revealed itself in the historical Sakyamuni Buddha as the Body of Trans¬formation, and in the Mahayana Buddha as the Body of Bliss. How¬ever dif¬ferently they appear from the human point of view, they are nothing but the expression of one eternal truth….”256 Finally, few commentators have discovered that the Zoroastrian heptad is actu¬ally two sets of trinities under Ahura Mazda – a set of three mas¬culine attributes and a set of three feminine ones.
C. Bodily Resurrection and Personal Immortality
It is common to hear the claim that only Christianity offers bodily resurrection and personal immortality. Such claims are al¬so incorrect and again show a lack of knowledge about the world’s religions. Zoroastrianism most likely antedates Judaism in the belief of the resurrection of the body and an eter¬nal life with God in such a spiritual body; indeed, as these concepts are not found explicitly in the preexilic books of the Hebrew Bible, these doctrines might have been borrowed from Zoroastrianism.
I call the eschatology of the preexilic Hebrews a “bare bones and dust” view of death. This eschatology even con¬tinues in some postexilic works, like Ecclesiastes: “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same…. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts….All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to the dust again” (3:19 20).
Even writers for the evangelical New Bible Dictionary have to concede that, except for a few obscure indications otherwise, the preexilic Hebrews did not believe in the resurrection of the body nor in eternal bliss for the righteous and eternal suffering for the wicked. As G. E. Ladd states: “Sheol is not nonexistence; but it is not life, for life can be enjoyed only in the presence of God.”257 Isaiah says that the kings of the earth – along with all other creatures (even aborted fetuses) – will be made low and they will all end in Sheol (14:9ff). There is no hint of either resur¬rec¬tion or a separation of the righteous and the wicked.
Some¬times passages like 1 Samuel 2:6 are cited as evidence of a prom¬ise of resurrection: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.” But Norman K. Gottwald is convinced that this “raising up” probably refers to the fact that God can create other creatures from the dust.258 This must be the prefer¬red reading in the absence of an explicit concept of a bod¬ily re¬surrection, which appears first in Zoroastrianism.
Job 19:26 is another passage used to support resurrection. This is a very obscure verse in a text which is one of the most corrupt in the entire Hebrew Scripture. Even if this passage did in¬dicate some sort of resurrection and meeting with God, this is in¬compatible with the standard Hebrew view which is also ex¬pressed explicitly in Job: “And a man lies down and never rises/ They wake not until the heavens decay/They rouse not from their sleep” (14:12, AB).
Job would really like something more than this dreary end, and he discusses that possibility. But his speculation is in vain, because “You Yahweh destroy man’s hope, you overwhelm him forever and he passes dies” (14:19 20, AB). Traditional Christian eschatology does start to appear in postexilic works, most explicitly in Daniel, a work which is per¬vaded with Persian allusions and ideas.
Contrary to popular conceptions, there is a doctrine of indi¬vidual, personal immortality in Hinduism. Too many laypeople, as well as knowledgeable commentators, tend to interpret Hinduism in terms of the absolute monism of Vedanta, which holds that all dis¬tinctions will dissolve into a divine unity upon liberation. Such a view overlooks the original metaphysics of the yogis: the amaz¬ingly sophisticated Sankhya Yoga dualism of purusha and prakriti.
Individual souls (purushas) are eternally plural and individual and through yogic practices can liberate themselves from the material trap of prakriti. This dualism is securely implanted in the Bhagavad-Gita, and we may safely interpret Krishna’s promises of personal immortality within this framework. As Krishna states: “Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor yet these lords of men; nor will there be a time when we shall cease to be – all of us hereafter” (2:12; cf. 2:15; 13:12). Therefore, Chris¬tian apologists are incorrect when they claim the Oriental soteri-ologies are all “transpersonal.”
D. Religion and History
A standard objection to all of the foregoing may already be present in the minds of some critical readers: Christianity is unique because of its activist God of history and this God’s in¬carnation in a real historical person. Michael Green phrases it well: “There is, therefore, no compelling reason in the multi¬plicity of faiths and the number of their ad¬herents to abandon, as Hick does, the finality of Jesus and reduce him to the level of one of the mythical avatars of Vishnu.”259
First, there is one small correction: no one denies the histor¬icity of Gautama Buddha, who is taken by Hindus to be an incarna¬tion of Vishnu. Second, there is serious scholarly effort, still controversial of course, to establish grounds for a historical Krishna.260 Third, in terms of my Savior Archetype – in which I show that the great world saviors take on common attributes and have similar feats attributed to them – the principal features of the Archetype are formal and ahistorical. (See Chapter 14.)
The psychological effect of the Arche¬type is the same whether the figures are historical or mythical, or whether time is cyclical or linear. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians historicized mythological motifs, but this in no way eliminates the possibility that the motif had ahistorical origins. For example, the tendency toward a triune deity appears to be at least a sociopsychological fact, and whether a historical person happens to be part of such a view of God is irrelevant. Further¬more, there is probably just as little history in the temptation of Jesus as there is the temptation of the Buddha during his time under the Bo Tree.
In establishing the Savior Archetype I used a strictly descriptive method, similar to the one used in most comparative religion work. In my presentation of the accounts of the world’s saviors I simply let the devotees speak for themselves; I let the accounts stand as prima facie evidence about how people viewed these great indivi¬duals. By using this method I do not need to make any judgments about the historicity of the events reported or the truth of the various attributes assigned to the saviors.
Even if I wanted to make such judgments, I would be prevented from doing so in most instances. For example, no one can prove to anyone’s satisfaction that either Gautama Buddha or Jesus Christ had the miraculous con¬ceptions attributed to them. On the other hand, I have made the provisional judgment that because of similar ac¬counts for both Krishna and Zoroaster, and because of negative inferences from a detailed history of Herod, this king’s alleged slaughter of the infants probably represents a mythical pattern from the Savior Archetype – viz., the savior is threatened in infancy.
Although the Indian tradition as a whole does not have any strong historical sense, it is incorrect to say that it is defi¬cient altogether. The Buddhists had a clear grasp of the histor¬ical development of their religion. For example, the Buddha, af¬ter reluctantly giving in to those who wished to allow women into the Sangha, predicted that Buddhism would decline after 500 years because of this compromise.
At the beginning of the Common Era, Mahayana Buddhists used this prophecy as an apologetic for the ma¬jor innovations they proposed. The Buddhist sense for history is most keenly manifest in the phenomenon of the Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of the Future. D. Howard Smith describes this most impor¬tant figure of Buddhist “millenialism”:
“There was a period, during the fourth and early fifth centuries C.E., when Maitreya occupied an even more prominent place than Amitabha. The ardent hopes and expectations which were aroused by the thought that on the completion of a thousand years after Gautama’s en-lightenment some new revelation would appear on earth, coupled with a belief that human society was rapidly deteriorating, no doubt stimulated faith in Maitreya, the Coming One, who, at the command of Buddha, would descend from…Heaven…and establish a great millen¬nial kingdom.”261
The critic might still persist: Christianity is unique not only in the sense that its savior was a historical figure, but al¬so in the sense that the divine purpose is worked out in decisive acts in history: e.g., the Exodus, the return from Babylonian ex¬ile, the Incarnation, etc. As evangelical Christopher Butler phrases it: “The Greek philosopher looked upwards towards a time¬less deity above the cosmic spheres. The Jewish believers looked forwards to a God who would ultimately reveal his power in an act that would end all mundane history, the eschaton or final divine triumph.”262
While there is no event equivalent to the Exodus in Zoroastrian theology, Ahura Mazda did, according to the Gathas, take a historical Zoroaster up into heaven for a divine revelation and will bring final judgment on humankind at the end of history. As we have already mentioned, there is a good possibility that the Hebrew religion, once without concepts of Heaven, Hell, and Last Judgment, borrowed from Zoroastrian eschatology.
But it is not necessary to go as far as Persia to counter this common misconcep¬tion. James Barr maintains that the Moabite god Chemosh behaved “in a manner remarkably similar to that of the God of Israel”; and Bertil Albrektson states that “historical events as a medium of revelation is a general Near Eastern conception.”263
Some Christian apologists claim that Jesus Christ is the only savior who was anticipated in texts that were definitely written before the scriptures which witness to the saving acts themselves. But this contention is clearly wrong. A personal, cosmic savior (purusha) is in the earliest Vedas (Rig veda 10.90, written ca. 1,000 B.C.E.); it is reiterated in the Upanishads (Svetasvatara 3.7 30; Katha 2.21; Mundaka 3.1.3,8) and there is explicit refer¬ence to Krishna as the saving purusha in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Chris¬tianity is fortunate to have New Testament manuscripts which in some cases date less than 300 years from the alleged events, but apologists who use this fact do not realize that they invest the Old Testament with equal authority. The Masoretic text, however, is over two millenia distant from the earliest Hebrew histories. What the Dead Sea Scrolls have proved once again is that the Masoretic text is to be trusted in the main because of the care and caution that priests and scribes used to preserve their scrip¬ture. But intellectual integrity requires us to ac¬knowledge the same textual preservation in the East as well as in¬credible feats of memory in maintaining scripture in oral form.
In his work for the book The Saviour God, S. C. F. Brandon maintains that Attis and Tammuz are not real saviors, because they do not offer postmortem salvation; rather, these rites ap¬pear to focus exclusively on this worldly concerns, like the return of the seasons and relief from suffering.264 In other words, the blood of Attis redeems this life only and does not, like the blood of Christ, secure a supranatural life after the grave. But why should we restrict the definition of a savior so severely? Such strictures would eliminate all talk of the preexilic Yahweh as savior as well as any of the Chinese saviors.
Other critics might continue with Brandon’s examples of Attis and Tammuz to claim that Christianity cannot be compared to the mystery religions at all. The latter have a cyclical view of time connected with the sea¬sons, while Judeo Christian history is lin¬ear, and God acts prov-identially at specific points in time in a unique way. Mythical figures such as Attis and Adonis save the world every year in an unending cycle of death and rebirth, but an historical Jesus saves humankind once and for all in one unique redemptive act.
This distinction is correctly drawn, but the Christian view is still not unique. We have already seen that Zoroastrianism has a linear view of time and that a savior born of Zoroaster’s seed will come at the end of history to redeem all humankind. Furthermore, how can we be sure that a linear view of time is soteriologically superior? In Cosmos and History and other works, Mircea Eliade has argued that those religions which affirm linear history will ultimately desacralize all experience. According to Eliade, the truly religious person recognizes the “terror” of history and is led to recapture the sacred time of primordial beginnings through annual rituals.
E. Religion and Ethics
With regard to claims of unique ethics in the Judeo Christian tradition, the following quotations from evangelicals are typical. James Orr states that “this is precisely where Christianity dis-tinguishes itself from other religions – it does contain doctrine. It comes to men with definite, positive teaching; it claims to be the truth; it bases religion on knowledge, through knowledge which is attainable under moral conditions.”265
Michael Green claims that “no ethical insight has emerged in the two thousand years since his day which cannot be derived from the teaching of the man of Nazareth….It is peerless stuff, quite literally incomparable.”266 Finally we have Dewey M. Beegle who declares that “it is indisputable that Israel came to a level of moral, ethical insight that none of her neighbors achieved.”267 Dewey goes on to say that only Yahweh acts in history in a moral way.
Again, any beginning student of the history of religions should be easily able to show such claims to be exaggerated and incorrect. Many commentators have hailed Zoroastrianism as the world’s first religion of ethical individualism with universal scope. Insofar as many scholars view the original Decalogue as a tribal ethic which assumed a corporate personality (in which, for example, the sins of the fathers could be visited upon the sons), Zoroaster’s ethics in the Gathas are far superior.
As L. H. Mills once said: “It pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the most important articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through their literature to the Jews and our¬selves.”268 Recall that the first Hebrew prophet to speak explic¬itly of individual moral responsibility was Ezekiel, a prophet of the Zoroastrian influenced Babylonian exile. In response to an early date for Zoroaster – which now is supported by a growing con¬sensus – F. C. Whitley argues that
for his advanced doc¬trines of a righteous God, his frank admission of the problem of evil, his emphasis on moral living, and, above all, the prominence he attached to the belief in a life after death so su¬premely surpass even the beliefs which the Israelites held one thousand years before Christ, that, if it be conceived that Zoroaster be¬longed to that period 1,000 B.C.E., then he was one ‘born out of time’ and was unquestionably a prophet in advance of his age…. His profound ethical and uni¬versal conception of God cannot be products of the virtually dark age of 1,000 B.C.E….269
In matching the details of Orr’s claim, one can use the ex¬ample of Buddhist ethics very profitably. In the Deer Park ser¬mon at Benares, Guatama presented the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths which contained “definite, positive teaching,” and which Gautama claimed to be the truth. In later sutras Gautama laid out a detailed and sophisticated epistemology which allowed him to verify each of the Four Noble Truths.
Finally, there is no ques¬tion that the knowledge the Buddhist requires for salvation is “attainable under moral conditions.” Contemporary life in the Orient is evidence to demonstrate that Buddhist morality is not just empty preaching but an actual practice which has produced good results for over two thousand years. If only Christian America could match Buddhist Japan in terms of a nonadversarial and self sacrificial ethics. Christopher Butler implies that only Christianity offers a religion of “heart,”270 but he need only read a couple of sutras or chat with a Buddhist monk to see how wrong he is.
Bishop Stephen Neil claims that he cannot find any ethical dimension in saviors outside the Bible. He even admits that there is a gap between Old and New Testament on this point: Yahweh as savior meant only that God would deliver Israel from captivity. Neil simply needs to read the Bhagavad-Gita or the sutras of Pure Land Buddhism. These are definitely pre Christian move¬ments and they contain answers to Neil’s question “Where can I find a parallel to ‘he shall save his people from their sins’?” (Matt. 1:21).271
The Amitabha Buddha is such a savior: “And it matters not how great a sinner a man may be, he should not give way to doubts; for, as it says, Amitabha does not hate a man, how¬ever deeply stained with sin he may be.”272 The Amitabha Buddha bestows his grace on the lowest of human beings so that they may live sin free in the blissful Pure Land.
Some apologists also claim that Jesus’ ethics of self sacri¬ficial love and embracing one’s enemies is not found in other re¬ligions. Again this cannot be supported. The basic concept of not returning evil for evil is found in Confucius, the Buddha, Lao tzu, and Socrates, all pre Christian figures. Jesus’ form of this ethics of complete compassion and nonviolence is radicalized primarily because of his belief in the imminent coming of the end of the world. It really does not matter what your enemy or the state do to you if this world is quickly passing away.
As I have already mentioned, Cobb makes the best case for the unique¬ness of Christian love in his book The Structure of Christian Ex¬istence. Cobb, however, makes no attempt to argue that Christian¬ity is a superior religion. In fact, he is one of the principal partici-pants in a liberal Christian Buddhist dia¬logue. In his Beyond Dialogue Cobb proposes that Buddhists should not be allowed to convert to Christianity unless they promise to preserve their non Christian wisdom in their new Christian lives.273
F. Religion and Incarnation
In response to my arguments in Chapter Five, some Christians might concede the logical incoherence of the Incarnation but in¬sist that this is not important because of the superior religious ad¬vantages of such a doctrine.
One of the most novel arguments for the religious necessity of the Incarna¬tion is found in Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. At odds with most in¬terpretations of the Book of Job, Jung claims that Job is the vic¬tor and Yahweh the vanquished. Jung contends that the “God image” has been severely tarnished by Yahweh’s mistreatment of Job, a charge in which I concur. The di¬vine reputation can only be restored by a supreme act on the part of God: a divine incar¬nation as a human being and a promise that ultimately all humans would be raised to sonship and man Godhood. Jung has of course turned Christianity on its head: the necessity of redemption is not due to human sin but a divine offense to a human being.
Many Christian commentators on the John’s Logos doctrine have correctly located the essential difference between the Christian Logos and its non Christian predecessors: only the New Testa¬ment claims that the logos became a man and lived in the flesh on earth. Pagans who used the Greek logos would have found such a claim incomprehensible. Indeed, as Green states, “no Hebrew prophet would ever have dared to say this about anyone – that the Word…became flesh and lived among us.”274
One cannot deny that this Christian adaptation of the Greek logos is unique, but one can question the alleged religious advantage that such a doctrine has. If there is a religious advantage to the Hebraic principle, and I contend that there is, and if the orthodox incar-nationists violate this principle, then an indubi¬table religious advantage has been traded for a very dubious one. In Chapter Five I have indicated that the Hebraic principle protects religion from the worst forms of mythology, and the Incarnation, I contend, is one of the main vehicles in remythologizing biblical religion.
In his Anchor commentary on John, Raymond Brown suggests that a fundamental difference in world view – the Greek search for sal¬vation outside of the body and history versus the Christian view of God as active in the base materials of the world – brought about the distinctive Christian Logos. Unlike the Greek philosophical gods, the biblical God is a providential deity, a loving creator who cares deeply for every single part of his creation. The famous message from John 3:16Cfor God so loved the world that he gave his only Son – definitely implies that the Incarnation is the necessary outcome of the supreme God of providence.
The argument is religiously persuasive, but I detect some fundamental problems. The New Testament makes it clear that God cares not only for human persons but also lower creatures like the flowers and the birds. There appears to be an implicit anthropo¬morphic twist to the claim that divine providence requires a human incarnation. The implication of a supremely providential deity in the orthodox incarnational sense would be a God who somehow becomes like everything that he cares for. In another work, I have argued that there is something radically humanistic – even “Titanistic” – about a theology which would declare, like Athanasius once did, that the Logos “became man so that we might become God.”275
In his attack on the incarnational revisionists, Michael Green argues that a literal Incarnation is necessary in order to prove that God is a personal, loving Father. Green boldly asks: “If there is no incarnation, how can I know that God is Love?”276 In¬deed, Green claims that without Incarnation, we could not know God at all; the biblical God would remain indistinguish¬able from the unknowable gods of the pagans. A literal incarna¬tion, however, would make God not only knowable but directly known.
Green’s re¬ligious gnosticism is not only at odds with the biblical record, but as we shall see, with himself as well. In his famous passage on natural theology, Paul states that “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly per¬ceived in the things that have been made” (Ro. 1:19 20). Later in the same epistle Paul makes it clear that even the moral law is written on the pagan’s heart (2:15ff.)
Green might have countered by saying that knowledge of God in nature and even as the author of the moral law is not saving knowledge; he would most certainly claim that personal knowledge of God made flesh is required for salvation. Strangely enough, Green does not really say this; rather, he states that
“the Chris¬tian Church has never maintained that overt knowledge of the per¬son and work of Jesus was essential for salvation. How could Abraham and the Old Testament saints have been reconciled with God?…Abraham knew nothing of the Incarnation or the Cross. But he knew that God had set his love upon him and called him: he responded in obedient faith….”277
To be fair, Green does add one important theological proviso, namely, that Abraham “was accepted because of what God in Christ was going to do for him on Calvary.” This traditional Christian doctrine with regard to the Old Testa¬ment saints does not convince either skeptics or Jews. But most importantly, it does not mitigate the fact that Green has conceded that Abraham could know Yahweh as a personal, loving fa¬ther with¬out any knowledge of the incarnate Christ or the Cruci¬fixion.
There is nothing logically incorrect about requiring that one’s ultimate salvation depends upon some future christological event, but Green’s argument that intimate knowledge of God is di¬rectly contingent upon the Incarnation is refuted by his own ad¬missions. Abraham is a knight of faith before and without the In¬carnation. Green might hold that Judaism is incomplete without Jesus of Naza¬reth, but even he cannot pretend to divorce Jews from their God. Only a demagogue like Jerry Falwell has dared to sug¬gest such nonsense.
What then about Green’s contention that final atonement is impossible without the literal Incarnation? First, Green can only hold this view fideistically, not philosophically. Second, Green risks the dangers of remythologizing primitive notions of reli¬gious sacrifice. Insofar as Christians insist that they are saved by Jesus’ literal blood, they are clinging to an unsophis¬ticated mythological relic of the past.
Green does not choose to describe Jesus’ sacrifice in these terms, but his depiction is just as figurative and just as unsatisfac¬tory: “It was on the Cross that God took personal responsibility for our wickedness and let our sins crush him.”278 As one committed to ordinary lan¬guage, I want to know the meaning of these phrases. I want to know how it is possible for God to take responsibility for our sins without completely destroying human autonomy; or how it is possible for such an act to “crush” God, who is presumably by definition uncrushable?
Thus far I have just dealt with the question: “Does reli¬gious salvation require incarnation?” I shall now address the Christian claim that among incarnational religions, Christianity is superior. There are at least three claims that apologists make: (1) Christianity is the only religion to at¬tribute divinity to a historical person; (2) incarnation in these other religions cannot be the same because Hinduism and Buddhism do not hold to the full reality of the body; and (3) religions which speak of many incarnations are inferior. Objections (1) and (2) have actually already been answered.
While a historical Krishna is still a controversial figure, there is no question about the existence of both a real Guatama Buddha and a pre Christian belief that he was indeed devatideva – God beyond the gods. In addition, pre Christian figures like the Jain Mahavira and Zoroaster were either deified or given divine attributes. With regard to the nature of the body, I have already indicated that the Sankhya Yoga dualism underlies the Bhagavad-Gita and this metaphysics assumes the full reality of matter. I have already noted that the notion of God becoming flesh was just as scandalous to some Hindus as it was to the Jews. Otherwise, Krishna would not have had to say that “fools scorn me” in the “human form I have assumed” (9:11).
With the above in mind, Brian Hebblethwaite is incorrect in claiming that Christianity, while sharing the Hebraic principle with other religions (presumably Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam), is nonetheless unique in claiming that “God has made him¬self known fully, specifically and personally, by taking our human nature into himself, by coming amongst us as a particular man, without in any way ceasing to be the eternal and infinite God.”279
As we have seen, Krishna makes this claim for himself and many Buddhists maintain the same about Gautama. Both of these reli¬gions, especially Bhagavatism, also teach, as Hebblethwaite claims only for Christianity, “a God who is Love and an internally dif-ferentiated and relational deity.”280 Hebblethwaite goes on to argue that the Incarnation cannot be repeatable: “If God is one, only one man can be God incarnate…. The doctrine of the Incarna¬tion is emptied of its point and value in referring to a real person to person encounter if we suppose that a series of human beings from different times, places and cultures were all God in¬carnate. On such a view, God at once resumes the characteristics of vagueness and dread that the Christian doctrine of the Incarna¬tion teaches us to overcome.”281
I simply fail to see the force of this argument. I believe that a man god is a logical impossibility, but for the sake of discussion let us assume the possibility of such an entity. If the divine can actually incarnate itself once, then there seems to be no reason that it cannot do it repeatedly. It seems reasonable that we should exclude the possibility of God being Buddha and Jesus at the same time; and fortunately, the chronology of the world’s saviors is such that we are not faced with the problem of contemporaneous incarnations.
This is the only sense that I can make of Hebblethwaite’s claim that “if God is one, only one man can be God incarnate.” I find it impossible to conceive of God as a man in the first place, and I fully appreciate the added diffi¬culty of conceiving of God being more than one person at once. If Hebblethwaite means that the nature of monotheism itself prevents God from repeated nonsimultaneous incarnations, then I am at a loss why this follows logically from the concept of one God.
Likewise, I see no reason whatever in Hebblethwaite’s claim that God, through a series of incarnations, will become vague and dreadful. It would seem to me that of all the major deities Yahweh is the most vague and dreadful, and that several more in¬carnations of the loving Christian God could have consoled someone like Martin Luther, who was so tormented by the wrath of God.
With the preceding “logic” of incarnation, there seems to be a prima facie case for preferring periodic incarnations. If “God so loved the world” that God came once, it would seem plausi¬ble that a combination of God’s unbounded love for creatures to¬gether with their penchant for sin and forgetfulness might very well require many incarnations. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna gives this very rationale: “For whenever the law of righteousness withers away, and lawlessness raises its head, then do I generate Myself on earth. For the protection of the good, for the de¬struction of evildoers, for the setting up of righteousness, I come into being, age after age” (4:7 8).
If I were shopping for a savior religion, I would choose one which promises that the savior personally bestows his or her saving grace in every age. The logic of divine providence would seem to require this. Hebble¬thwaite lays great emphasis on face to face encounter and personal knowledge, something which both Bhagavatism and Buddhism provide, and again he misunderstands Oriental incarnation when he implies that other saviors only express general divine character¬istics. To the contrary, the evangelical scriptures of the East teach that both Krishna and Buddha were the fullness of divinity.282
Endnotes: Chapter 5
1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I 2, p. 342.
2. Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament, cited in A Reader in Contemporary Theology, eds. Bowden and Richmond (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), p. 76.
3. Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, p. 94.
4. John Stott, Basic Christianity, p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 23.
6. Michael Green, The Truth of God Incarnate, p. 27.
7. Quoted in David J. Kalupahana, Buddhist Philosophy, p. 116. These passages from early Pali texts show that Gautama took on divine character¬istics early in the development of Buddhism. The earliest Buddhist texts refer to him as mahapurisa, (i.e., super person), as one who is omniscient and higher than the gods (see the Dhammapada).
8. Quoted in Sacred Texts of the World, eds. Smart and Hecht (New York: Crossroads, 1982), p. 238.
9. Green, op. cit., p. 118.
10. Bloesch, Essentials…, vol. 1, p. xiv.
11. See James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, condensed version, 1960), p. 382.
12. The source, the Christian father Firmicus Maternus, does not actually identify the god in question. Several scholars have attributed this hymn to Osiris. See F. Maternus, The Errors of the Pagan Religions (New York: Newman Press, 1970), p. 207.
13. See Joscelyn Godwin, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 28.
14. Brandon, “The Ritual Technique of Salvation in the Ancient Near East” in The Saviour God, ed. Brandon (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 32 33.
15. Cited from The World of the Buddha ed. Lucien Stryk (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 292.
16. Cited from The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, ed. E.A. Burtt (New York: Mentor Books, 1966), p. 140.
17. J. O. Buswell, Systematic Theology of the Christian Reli¬gion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1962), p. 102.
18. Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), vol. 1, p. ix.
19. For Ptah see The Anchor Bible Proverbs, p. 70; for Marduk, see Ancient Near Eastern Texts ed. J.B. Pritchard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), p. 66, 1st col.
20. R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 55.
21. D. T. Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), pp. 245 6.
22. The New Bible Dictionary (1st. ed.), p. 383.
23. Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (New York: Orbis Books, 1979), p. 681.
24. Michael Green, op. cit., p. 119.
25. See B. Majumdar, Krishna in History and Legend (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1969).
26. D. Howard Smith, “Saviour Gods in Chinese Religion” in The Saviour God, p. 224.
26. Christopher Butler, “Jesus and Later Orthodoxy” in The Truth of God Incarnate, p. 92.
27. James Barr, Old and New in Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 72; and Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods (Lund: Gleerup, 1964), p. 114.
28. Brandon, op. cit., p. 29.
29. Quoted in Ronald Nash, The Word of God…, p. 48.
30. Green, op. cit., p. 42.
31. Dewey M. Beegle, Scripture, Tradition…, p. 35.
32. Quoted in Rustom Masani, Zoroastrianism (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 19.
33. F.C. Whitley, “The Dating and Teaching of Zarathustra,” in Numeirn 4 (1957),p. 220.
34. Christopher Butler, op. cit., p. 100.
35. Stephen Neil, “Jesus and Myth” in The Truth of God Incarnate, p. 63.
36. Cited from The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, p. 213.
37. Cobb, Beyond Dialogue (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 51.
38. Green, op. cit., p. 26.
39. Athanasius, De Incarnationae, 54.3.
40. Green, op. cit., p. 135.
41. Ibid., p. 118.
42. Ibid., p. 136.
43. Brian Hebblethwaite, “Jesus, God Incarnate” in The Truth of God Incarnate, p. 101.
44. Ibid., p. 102.
45. Ibid., pp. 103 4.
46. Carl Henry contends that Bhagavatism teaches that Krishna is subordinate to Vishnu or nirguna Brahman (op. cit., vol. 5, p. 328). But there are passages in the Upanishads which clearly indicate that the personal manifestation (purusha) is the highest reality (cf. Katha III, v. 11; Mudaka II, i, v. 2). Many passages in the Gita emphasize this point; indeed, in one, Brahman is called Krishna’s
Chapter Six: Inspiration and Inerrancy
It is surely a strange apologetic that says faith in Christ is all you need for salvation; and then says, you have no right to your faith in Christ unless you believe that the Bible is without error.
–Francis L. Patton
When discrepancies occur in the Holy Scripture, and we cannot har¬monize them, let them pass. It does not endanger the articles of the Christian faith.
–Martin Luther
Difficult though it may be to understand, God chose to make his authority relevant to his creatures by means that necessitate some element of fallibility.
–Dewey M. Beegle
They did not err in what they proclaimed, but this does not mean that they were faultless in their recording of historical data or in their world-view, which is now outdated.
–Donald G. Bloesch
It is urged…that unless we can demonstrate what is called the inerrancy of the biblical record down even to its minutest de¬tails, the whole edifice of belief in revealed religion falls to the ground. This, on the face of it, is the most suicidal posi¬tion for any defender of revelation to take up.
–James Orr
The Bible does not give us a doctrine of its own inspiration and authority that answers all the various questions we might like to ask. Its witness on this subject is unsystematic and somewhat fragmentary and enables us to reach important but modest con¬clusions.
–Clark H. Pinnock
In the last analysis the inerrancy theory is a logical deduction not well supported exegetically. Those who press it hard are elevating reason over Scripture….
–Pinnock
In common parlance the fundamentalist Christian is the person who “takes the Bible literally.” This description is not quite accurate, because we shall see that many “liberal” scholars, particu¬larly in connection with Old Testament cosmology (see Chapter 13), take the texts much more literally than conservatives do. With regard to biblical authority the ruling axiom for evan¬gelical rationalism is inerrancy, not literalism. James Barr has shown that evangelical exegetes generally naturalize Old Testament miracles and divine interventions, rather than taking the events literally. As Barr states: “In order to avoid imputing error to the Bible, fundamentalists twist and turn back and forward between literal and nonliteral…exegesis….The typical conservative evangeli¬cal exegesis is literal, but only up to a point: when the point is reached where literal interpretation would make the Bible ap¬pear ‘wrong,’ a sudden switch to nonliteral interpretation is made.”1 This fanatical devotion to inerrancy compromises the in¬tegri¬ty of evangelical theology right at its roots.
Although there were protofundamentalists among Lutheran and Calvinist scholastics (Johann Gehard, Frances Turretin and J. A. Quenstedt), evan¬gelical rationalism had its origin in the Anglo-Saxon world in Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary. At the basis of Hodge’s theology there is a pre-Kantian, empirical rationalism, shared ironically with the deists of the Enlighten¬ment. In contrast to the latter, evangelical rationalists believe that the Bible can be vindicated by this philosophy rather than be de¬stroyed by it. It is Barr’s thesis that a deist mode of explana¬tion, naturalizing miracles by saying that God used secondary causes, is pervasive in conserva¬tive evangelical exegesis.
Charles Hodges’ rationalism can be clearly seen in his view that the Bible “must be interpreted in accordance with estab¬lished facts”; that “reason is necessary for the reception of a revela¬tion; that reason must judge of the credibility of a revela¬tion”; and that reason “must judge of the evidences of a revelation.”2 Furthermore, theology must follow the model of natural science: just as the latter deals with facts and the laws of nature, the former must deal with biblical facts and principles. Hodge has unwittingly converted Christianity into the gnostic religion de¬scribed in Chapter One (www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/GREchapt1.htm).
DEIFYING SCRIPTURE
To insist that the Bible is factually correct in all respects is to impose a scientific world-view on a prescientific document. Indeed, one cannot make this claim of even the best scientific documents. As Rudolf Bultmann emphasized, the Bible is the proc¬lamation (kerygma) of God’s saving grace; it is not to be taken as an encyclopedia of empirical facts. Bultmann would have been sym¬pathetic to Robert M. Smith’s comments about God’s Inerrant Word, an anthology of articles by fundamentalists: “The authors… are right about the Bible being a perfect book but are wrong in the way they define perfection….They are defining perfect the way a mathematician or scientist would define it; they are not defining perfect the way the cross of Jesus Christ defines it.”3 Evangelical rationalists repeatedly use extrabiblical standards to distort basic biblical meanings. Thomas Torrance of the University of Edinburgh maintains that the fundamentalists’ crucial mistake is a form of nominalism: identifying the truth with statements about the truth. Torrance contends that the Bible, like all other cre¬ated things, must have an element of deficiency so that it can point beyond itself to the truth of God.4 Torrance follows Karl Barth who declared that the Bible “is not the Revelation” but “the witness to the Revelation, and this is expressed in human terms….”5
The “detailed inerrancy” of evangelical rationalism is an ex¬cellent example of religious syncretism–a very ironic instance of it. In their bitter battle against modernism, they are just as modernist as their opponents in calling the Bible a factual treatise as well as a religious one. Both modernists and these Christians accept the same criterion for truth: the scientific method. In doing so these evangelicals unwittingly forget that for Christians God is the sole standard of truth. Bible scholar George E. Mendenhall phrases the preceding point this way:
Biblical fundamentalism, whether Jewish or Christian, cannot learn from the past because in so many re¬spects the defense of presently accepted ideas about religion is thought to be the only purpose of bibli¬cal narrative. It must, therefore, support ideas of comparatively recent origin–ones that usually have nothing to do with the original meaning or intention of biblical narrative because the context is so radically different.6
A. G. Hebert concurs: “Hence, the inerrancy of the Bible, as it is understood today, is a new doctrine, and the modern fundamen¬talist is asserting something that no previous age has understood in anything like the modern sense.”7
By insisting on detailed inerrancy evangelicals have in effect deified the Bible: they have made it into a divine enti¬ty. Nothing humans have ever written is without error. Granted, any person can say or write self-evident truths like “all circles are round,” or a human writer could get many historical facts right, but writing flawless history would require a divine author. To say that a thing is perfect is to say that it is divine. Evan¬gelical rationalists have again violated the Hebraic principle: God is in heaven and humans are on God’s earth, a created world radical¬ly different from God. Every created thing, even those things created by humans, reveal God’s glory, but they are defi¬nitely not divine or godlike in any way. Perfection is a divine attribute, not a creaturely one.
Donald Bloesch confirms my point: “Ronald Nash, following the evangelical rationalism of Gordon Clark and Carl Henry, as¬serts that…the propositions in Scripture are identical with di¬vine revelation…I contend that although we find the truth of revelation in Scripture, this reve¬lation is not to be identified with the very words of Scripture, for this is to confuse the in¬finite with the finite.”8 Bloesch calls such a confusion “neo-Gnosticism,” which I have clarified as religious gnosticism in general, so as not to imply any substan¬tial identity between the evangelical rational¬ists and the ancient Christian Gnostics. Al¬though it is doubtful that Luther believed in detailed inerrancy, he sometimes expresses himself in ways which show the ultimate im¬plications of such a position. Luther’s great rhetorical powers get the best of him in hyperbole such as this: “Sacred Scripture is God Incarnate” or the Word of God “is just like the Son of God.”9 If detailed inerrancy is correct, then Luther’s exag¬gerated words are the plain truth. One can now understand the full implication of Barth’s warnings about the dan¬gers of bibliol¬atry.
The following syllogism is used frequently by advocates of detailed inerrancy:
God is perfect and cannot lie.
God revealed himself to humankind.
Therefore, the written Word of God must
be perfect, i.e., free from all error.10
The first two premises may be true; in fact, all pagan natural theologians would probably agree with them, as long as the revela¬tion is taken as natural and not special. The conclusion, how¬ever, simply does not follow from the premises. The writers of the Bible were human beings, and there is nothing in the syllogism which demonstrates that they were infallible. The syllogism fails for lack of a proper “middle term,” one which is impossible to supply–at least on the basis of a Christian doctrine of creation.
In the epigraph from Dewey M. Beegle he implies that God could have chosen an infallible means to reveal the divine mes¬sage. The logic of Christian creation prevents any such possi¬bility. In creating something outside of the divine nature, God created something quite unlike himself. The doctrine of creatio ex deo, which was held temporarily (and probably unwittingly) by creationist Duane Gish, was declared heretical because of its pantheistic implications: viz., that the world is simply a part of God which emanated directly from the divine nature. The ortho¬dox creatio ex nihilo was designed expressly to prevent such her¬esy. Augustine formu¬lated his doctrine of creation correctly when he proposed that every created thing is imperfect and defi¬cient because it is mixed with “nothing.” Therefore, Harold Lindsell is thoroughly heret¬ical when he claims that “fallible men were made infallible with respect to Scripture they indited.”11 Therefore, the Bible can be a divine product only in the sense that the world is a divine pro¬duct–finite, deficient, imperfect, corruptible–all the elements of what I have called “metaphysical evil,” the basic evil of the world which issued forth directly from the creator God. (see www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/305/3dp.htm, Sec. E.)
In Roman Catholic circles the motto “inspiration without in¬er¬rancy” has gained increasing currency. Contemporary evangeli¬cals like Donald Bloesch and Dewey Beegle appear to support a similar view, and James Barr, usually not considered an evangeli¬cal, proposes a theory of inspiration along these lines. Rather than focus on divinely inspired prophets and apostles, Barr would place inspira¬tion within the people of Israel and the early Church. On this view the divine inspiration of the Bible is taken very seriously, but the doctrine of creation is taken with equal seriousness. This means that there is definitely divine intention behind the biblical message, but the written words must be taken as cre¬ated, fallible things. One must be reminded that, as op¬posed to physical things, human writings are twice removed from the direct creative act of God.
In his recent The Scriptural Principle former inerrantist Clark H. Pinnock exhorts Christians to reaffirm the humanity of the Bible. In the same way that an overemphasis on the deity of Christ led to docetism, inerrancy has alienated the Bible from its human authors and their fallible but creative freedom to express the mighty acts of God in their own limited ways. Clark, however, still wishes to preserve the word “inerrancy,” but I believe that this is simply the wrong word to use. If nonrationalist evangeli¬cals want to stress the Bible’s humanity, then they must, like the courageous Stephen Davis, also affirm biblical fallibility and use words which express creaturely finitude and corruptibility.
AUTOGRAPHS, INSPIRATION, AND HERMENEUTICS
A popular defense against prima facie textual errors has been the assumption that the books of the Bible were inerrant only in their origi¬nal autographs. On the face of it, this maneuver can be seen as a clever methodological tactic: the chances of finding such auto¬graphs are nil, so critical scholars will be unable to check them for errors. This is yet another ironic twist in the development of evangelical rationalism. Rationalists boast about the vindication that the biblical record receives from the sci¬ences; but with the inerrant autograph theory, they remove the real Bible from such empirical verification. Harold Lind¬sell’s thesis that God did not secure the survival of the auto¬graphs out of fear of idolatry certainly does not help the credi¬bility of this view; nor has it stopped Lindsell’s own tendency to bibliola¬try.12
There are problems with this theory other than methodo¬logical integrity. Ronald Nash admits that “strictly speaking, the Bible does not teach the inerrancy of its original MSS.,” but he argues that it is a natural corollary of the biblical doctrine of inspi¬ration.13 I have argued in the preceding section that such a corollary is not natural at all if we take the Christian doctrine of creation seriously. More importantly, as evangelical F. F. Bruce surmises, it is unlikely that autographs ever existed for many biblical books.14 For example, Bruce speculates that there was probably no signed copy of Romans; rather, Paul’s scribe prob¬ably prepared several copies for distribution–each with its own peculiar scribal errors. The Bible itself does not make any dis¬tinction between autographs, copies, and translations. Further¬more, the New Testament writers’ loose use of the Septuagint, Targum paraphrases, and their own translations demonstrates that inerrancy was simply not on their minds. As Rogers and McKim have pointed out, the very word inerrant is of recent origin, coming out of the early period of modern science. Concerns about iner¬rancy, therefore, are pseudoscientific, not biblical.
Even if we grant inerrant biblical texts, the main theologi¬cal battle–that of hermeneutics–has only just begun. Evangeli¬cal Beegle phrases the problem well: “The adherents of inerrancy vary considerably in their interpretation of key issues. It would seem that if God was really so concerned about giving his word inherently in the autographs, he would be equally concerned to help biblical interpreters determine that inerrant meaning.”15 At this point Lindsell’s fears about idolatry turn into a very different argument. One can understand what Lindsell means about iner¬rant texts becoming divine relics jealously guarded by priests. But an inerrant interpretation would (or should at least) be greeted jubilantly by these evangelicals, concerned as they are about infallible knowledge as a ground for faith. Mainline Chris¬tians, who have fortunately not fallen into this gnostic trap, are quite content to have fallible texts and incomplete interpreta-tions. They live in faith, not sure knowledge, relying as they do, and should, on the grace of God for their salvation.
There is yet another problem with verbal or plenary inspira¬tion, the doctrine that every word of the Bible is directly in¬spired by God. Even though most evangelicals have given up the mechanical dictation theory, which was held by the church fathers until Reformation scholasticism, they still take seri¬ously the proposition that God, using human instruments with their own styles and Sitz im Leben, actually wrote the Scrip¬tures. Making God the literal author of the Bible is just as much an anthropo¬morphism as conceiving God’s creation as a potter molding clay, not to mention the problems this causes for human freedom and creativity. Francis Schaeffer believes that the image of God means that human beings are created as the only verbalizers, modeled of course after the divine verbalizer.16 I do not believe that God can speak, so as far as I am concerned, Schaeffer is actually making God in his own image. (Schaeffer should have been asked if deaf-mutes are created in the image of God.) Schaeffer speaks for many evangelicals when he argues that God must liter¬ally speak if God is truly God. My opinion is that any anthropo¬morphic theology is bad theology.
The Bible’s divine inspiration is supported by a single pas¬sage from 2 Timothy: “…from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salva¬tion through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God (theopneutos, lit. “God-breathed”) and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righ¬teousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (3:15-17). If Paul is the author of this passage (as most evan¬gelicals believe), no Christian could have read any of the New Testament books from childhood. Given this evangelical assump¬tion, the inescapable conclusion is that only the Old Testa¬ment is being labeled “God-breathed.”17
Nowhere in the authentic Pauline letters is there a hint that there is other scriptural authority besides the Old Testament. For Paul the gospel of Christ is spoken, not written. For ex¬ample, when Paul speaks of the divine word (logos) in 1 Thes. 2:13, it is clear that he is talking about the gospel he is pro¬claiming, certainly not his own writing. Indeed, it is very doubt¬ful whether Paul intended his private letters to have scrip¬tural status. As F. G. Bratton, states: “That this correspon¬dence was to become…an integral part of the new Bible called the New Testament…would have been news to Paul himself. Such an idea was far from his mind. He was writing personal letters to certain people, and if he had been able to visit them in person, he would not have written them.”18
Most scholars believe that 1 and 2 Timothy were written long after Paul’s time, perhaps as late as 140 C.E. If this is the case, then it would have been possible for Christians to have read some of the Pauline epistles and gospels in their formative years. Indeed, many scholars believe that the writer of 1 Tim. 5:18 must be quoting from Luke’s gospel. For Paul to have written this, we would have to assume that he had access to the same early sources as Luke did. There is no evidence, however, that he did. By the time the so-called pastoral epistles were written, the New Testa¬ment canon was already in formation. Hence, we find that in 2 Peter 3:16 Paul’s letters are on a par with inspired scripture. This is highly unlikely if the apostle Peter was the author of this work. (Even Calvin believed that he was not.) Again, it is bet¬ter, for many more reasons than this one, to place the Petrine letters in the early second century.
Even if Paul wrote 2 Tim. 3:16, there is nothing there which explicitly supports the de¬tailed inerrancy of modern evangelical¬ism. Scripture is supposed “to instruct us for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus”; it says nothing about instructing us in history, geography, or the natural sciences. Following our earlier discussion of logos in Chapter One, one could say that just as logos is primarily life, divine inspiration is to be in¬terpreted in the same way. For Christians God’s Word is not a gnostic but a life-giving gospel.
Finally, from a strictly phil¬osophical standpoint, there is something fundamentally suspect about the argument using 2 Timothy. The Christian is essentially saying that the Bible is inspired be¬cause it says that it is inspired. The error here is both circu¬lar reasoning and the informal fallacy of irrelevance (i.e., ap-peal to authority). Without external support, the doc¬trine of di¬vine inspiration is valid only for those believers who hold it as an article of faith. The attempt to prove inspira¬tion by empirical verification is pseudoscientific and rational¬istic in the worst way. Clark Pinnock offers an apt conclusion to this discussion on 2 Timothy 3:16: “The Bible does not give us a doctrine of its own inspiration and authority that answers all the various questions we might like to ask. Its witness on this subject is unsystematic and somewhat fragmentary and enables us to reach important but modest conclusions.”19
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE: LUTHER AND CALVIN
The question of whether the Christian tradition has supported detailed inerrancy is a controversial one. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s extensive work The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, has come under heavy attack by John D. Woodbridge of Trinity Evan¬gelical Divinity School. In his Biblical Authority Woodbridge alleges that Rogers and McKim quote theologians out of historical context, rely too heavily on sec¬ondary sources, and misuse those sources on many important points. Rogers has refused to respond publicly because he believes that Woodbridge is only interested in pursuing his own evangelical ideology. In his res¬ponse McKim contends that it is he and Rogers who have been sensi¬tive to Sitz im Leben, while Woodbridge reads modern scientific notions back into the minds of historical figures.20
Woodbridge also refuses to distinguish between the terms “in¬fallibil¬ity” and “inerrancy,” a distinction that Rogers and McKim make great efforts to maintain. I do not have the expertise to judge these historical matters, but in this section I will use some passages from Luther and Calvin which seem to me at least to demonstrate a clear difference between them and modern evangelical rationalists. Biblical infallibility was obviously an assumption of traditional Christianity, but to interpret this in a modern in¬errantist way is very problematic. It is certainly not wrong of Rogers and McKim to insist that the burden of proof in this matter lies completely with Woodbridge and his colleagues.
Luther’s teachers at Erfurht were nominalists in the tradi¬tion of William of Ockham, who intensified the split between rea¬son and faith and emphasized God’s absolute power. For them God empowers us to believe and supports us in our faith; autonomous reason has no place in theology. One of the greatest Occamists, Gabriel Biel, stressed the self-authenticating nature of scripture and made it clear that its function–following 2 Timothy 3:16–was to instruct, to console, and to exhort.21 In his Bible schol¬arship Luther was sensitive to the historical-critical method, which had just begun to be used. He questioned the tradi¬tional authorship of Genesis, Ecclesiastes, and Jude; he doubted the can-onicity of Esther, Hebrew, James and Revelation; he talked about “error” in the prophets; and he pointed out historical discrepan¬cies in Kings and Chronicles.
Luther called James “that epistle of straw,” and it is ob¬vious that Luther’s antipathy to this book was because of its strong “works” doctrine. Problems like these with the biblical text did not bother Luther, because he was not a protofundamen¬talist. He states: “When discrepancies occur in the Holy Scrip¬ture, and we cannot harmonize them, let them pass. It does not endanger the articles of the Christian faith.”22 Rogers and McKim show that Luther’s statement “In this doctrine about the Word of God there is no falsehood”–used by some evangelicals attempting to support detail¬ed inerrancy–is taken out of context: “When we read the state¬ment in its context, it is evident that Luther was not talking about factual errors or lack of them.”23
John Calvin was of course profoundly influenced by the ini¬tial reforming activities of Luther, but he went on to mark out his own distinctive theological genius. Even with the effects of Renaissance humanism, Calvin continued the general view of scrip¬ture which he had inherited from the Christian tradition. As Rogers and McKim state: “Calvin’s training as a humanist rhetori¬cian helped him to understand that the Bible’s purpose was to per¬suade a person to be saved. It was not necessary that the Scrip¬ture display exact, technical accuracy.”24 Woodbridge opposes this conclusion, using several respected authorities as support. Rogers and McKim list a series of passages in which it appears that Calvin is attributing errors to Scripture. Woodbridge’s gen¬eral response is that if Calvin actu¬ally believed this, then Cal¬vin would not have spent as much time as he did trying to harmo¬nize all the discrepancies. Woodbridge claims that Calvin be¬lieved that the alleged astronomical mistakes were due to the writers’ use of phenomenological language; and that the rest of the errors were those of copyists and not in the original auto¬graphs.
Even if we grant Woodbridge’s argument here, Calvin’s general the¬ological statements make it clear that he is definitely not an evangelical rationalist. In the Institutes of the Christian Reli¬gion Calvin declares that “we seek no proofs, no marks of genuine¬ness upon which our judgment may lean…”; for scripture is self-authenticating and “hence it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning.”25 Calvin was convinced that Christians could not prove the Bible was inspired of God. This must be taken as a ba¬sic article of faith attested to and suppor¬ted by the activity of the Holy Spirit, whose “testimony…is more excellent than all reason.”26 Calvin gives a stiff rebuke to fundamentalisms of all ages: “…Those who wish to prove to unbelievers that Scripture is the Word of God are act¬ing foolishly, for only by faith can this be known.”27
THE AMAZING KNOWLEDGE OF THE ANCIENTS
Because of their unorthodox, pseudoscientific view of the Bible, evangelical rationalists attempt to do something that no church fa¬ther would ever have thought of: to prove the Bible di¬vinely in¬spired by human criteria. Repeatedly, modern scientific evidence is used to prove the Bible true. For example, some evan¬gelicals are fond of claiming that the Bible reveals amazing knowledge about medical matters. The Israelite tribes did in fact practice medi¬cal quarantine, but does this mean that they had a scientific view of disease? It is quite clear that they did not. All the peoples of the Bible believed that disease was caused by evil spirits and was the result of human sin. The first disease came into the world as a result of the Fall (Gen. 3:17-l9; Ro. 5:12). A common Hebrew word for disease or illness–dabar–liter¬ally means “evil matter.” A sick man cries out: “Heal me, for I have sinned against you” (Ps. 41:4); the man has had a “deadly thing (dabar)…fastened upon him” (v. 8).
The New Testament clearly continues the same view of disease. Luke describes the Apostles as healing all those who were oppres¬sed by the devil (Acts 10:38); and the first great healing story of Jesus’ ministry (Mk. 2) definitely implies that the man was paralytic because of his sin. A woman that Jesus healed had a spir¬it of infirmity for l8 years, a spirit subsequently identified as Satan himself (Lk. 13:10-18). An evangelical microbiologist ex¬presses aptly the character of biblical medical science: “It is re¬markable that medical practice changed so little…and there was scarcely an element in it which could be dignified with the name of science.”28
If we want to be truly impressed by ancient medical prac¬tices, all we have to do is take a look at Chinese medicine. The prac¬tice of acupuncture goes back at least 2500 years. Its discovery is attributed to the famous Yellow Emperor who knew many medical facts–e.g., he knew the correct cause of liver spots and knew that the liver controlled the lungs. The idea of a second nervous system was scoffed at by Western medicine until a North Korean re¬searcher verified the existence of the classical acupunc¬ture meri¬dians.29 In addition to acupuncture’s capacity to kill pain (sti¬mulation of certain meridians releases endorphins in the brain), acupuncture can be used to cause the body to absorb brain tumors, to stop brain hemorrhages, and to regenerate damaged nerve cells. This is far more amazing than the quarantine practices of the an¬cient Hebrews. Using inerrantist reasoning, we would be forced to entertain the hypothesis that Chinese thought was also divinely inspired.
The widespread claim that the Bible anticipates scientific cosmology is dismissed in Chapter Thirteen. Suffice it to say that the ancient world was filled with far better astronomers than the Hebrews. The protoscience involved in Stonehenge is far su¬perior to anything in the Bible. In contrast to the Hebrews, the Per¬sians and Tibetans knew that the earth was spherical, and the Ti¬betans somehow knew that the earth’s diameter was 7,000 miles. The people who made the most astronomical contributions were the Babylonians, who were routinely predicting solar and lunar eclip¬ses in the 8th Century B.C.E. As Cyrus Gordon states: “Details of this sort reflect the sophistication and scientific superiority of the Babylonians as against the Hebrews who were satisfied with less astronomical data.”30 The Greeks, Hindus, and Arabs were su¬perior in mathematics–with the Greeks making impres¬sive geometri¬cal discoveries and the Hindus inventing the all-important concept of zero. The Hindus also excelled in psychol¬ogy, anticipating some of the ideas of Freud and the distinc¬tion between deep sleep and dream sleep (i.e., sleep with rapid eye movement), only re¬cently discovered by modern scientists.
Without sounding too offensive, we have to conclude that the ancient Hebrews were in fact culturally and scientifically inferi¬or to their neighbors–Egyptians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Phoeni¬cians, and Persians. Their greatest achievements came in litera¬ture, the prophets’ concern for justice, and theology, where we can point to the concept of divine transcendence with its strict distinction between God and the world. (Even here Zoroaster prob¬ably preempted the Hebrews.) I have called this discovery the Hebraic principle, which unfortunately has been seriously compro¬mised by the reintroduction of the pagan idea of the man-God in the Christian doctrine of Incarnation and the idea of human immor¬tality. Hebrew theological genius is also severely compromised by making the Bible a perfect thing. A rabbinic story that Yahweh deliberately tore the parchment of the Decalogue on Sinai is a colorful confirmation of the Hebraic principle.
THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE AMONG EVANGELICALS
Even with the theological axiom of scripture’s inspiration, contemporary evangelicals cannot agree on what this really means. In his frank and honest book, Evangelicals at an Impasse, evangel¬ical Robert K. Johnston states: “That evangelicals, all claiming a common biblical norm, are reaching contradictory theological formulations on many of the major issues they are addressing sug¬gests the problematic nature of their present understanding of theological interpretation. To argue that the Bible is author¬itative, but to be unable to come to anything like agreement on what it says…is self-defeating.”31
Popular opinion holds that all evangelicals believe that divine inspiration means detailed inerrancy. But, as Johnston shows, this is only one of at least four contem¬porary evangelical positions on the authority of the Bible; and he makes it clear that of the four alternatives, “detailed inerrancy” is by the far the weakest and least defensible. It is also of course the most divisive, for the shrill exclusivis-tic language of the inerran¬tists threatens evangelical as well as general Christian uni¬ty. Evangelicals like Jack Rogers and Ste¬phen Davis were deeply troubled by Harold Lindsell’s Battle for the Bible and his declar¬ation of “excommunication,” viz., no one can be an evangelical without believing that the Bible is liter¬ally true in everything that it affirms. Rogers, Davis, and many others wished to pre¬serve their evangelical identity so they began to speak out against this unfortunate extremism. In this section I will let these courageous dissenting evangelicals speak for themselves.
The logic of inerrancy leads Lindsell and Schaeffer to make statements about the Bible which embarrass many fellow evangeli¬cals. Johnston criticizes Lindsell for his interpretation of the morning stars which “sing” in Job 38:7. Lindsell wants us to be¬lieve that this passage is scientifically verified because astro¬physicists now know that heavenly bodies emit radio signals.32 Johnston claims that this is a blatant confusion of poetry and fac¬tual assertion. The pseudoscience of the detailed inerrantists has another troublesome aspect. Although these people are willing to take the findings of astrophysics as a guide when they believe it suits their purposes, they feel free to reject its other find¬ings and assumptions. For example, Lindsell’s use of the idea of radio stars would require that he also accept another fundamental assumption: that the information from these stars is millions of years old. Lindsell and other inerrantists are also “fiat” crea¬tion¬ists who hold to the so-called “young universe” (10,000 years old or less) hypothesis.
Directly opposed to Lindsell and Schaeffer are evangelicals like Dewey Beegle and Stephen Davis who believe that there are errors in the Bible, even errors in the various authors’ inten¬tions, but none of these errors compromise the fundamentals of the Christian faith. As we have seen, the writer of 2 Timothy did not say that inspiration implied inerrancy, but that it was “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righ¬teousness.” Johnston summarizes Beegle’s criticism of the inerr¬an¬tists: “They are overly rationalistic, obscurantist in fix¬ing upon the ‘autographs’ of Scripture, naive linguistically in think¬ing language can be precise, misguided in their use of proof-texting, docetic in their denial of Scripture’s humanness, and wrong in their commitment to a domino theory regarding inspira¬tion.”33 Stephen Davis, who would gain the sympathy of philosoph¬ical ethicists, admits that the Old Testament writers err badly when they use God to justify the genocide of the Canaanites. With regard to the New Testament Davis concedes that Mark was probably wrong in his account of Peter’s denial of Christ.34
As we have seen, Clark Pinnock has chosen to keep, unwisely I believe, the term inerrancy; but as Carl Henry has said in an ad for The Scriptural Principle, it is a “flexible and permissive” or “irenic” inerrancy. Pinnock’s motto is that though the Bible “contains er¬rors” it “teaches none.” “Inerrancy,” as Pinnock states, is “a good deal more flexible than is supposed, and does not suspend the truth of the gospel upon a single detail, as is so often charged.”35 Lindsell’s and Schaeffer’s overbelief about the Bible ignores that it, although directly inspired by God, was written by human beings. Most of the errors then can be attributed to an author’s time and place. For example, Paul Jewett claims that Paul’s sexist stance was the result of his rabbinic past and at odds with God’s true intention of full equality between the sexes.36
The position of Jack Rogers and David Hubbard is called “com¬plete infallibility.” As the seminary’s president, Hubbard partici¬pated in a controversial change in the Fuller’s Statement of Faith which eliminated the phrase “free from error in the whole and in the part” from an earlier reference to the Bible. Hubbard believes strongly in the inspiration, infallibility, and authority of scripture, but he believes that the word “inerrancy” and phrases which imply it are unfortunate. Hubbard believes that the word misleads in at least four ways: (1) it as¬sumes a scientific atti¬tude which was foreign to the minds of the biblical authors; (2) it distracts the Christian’s focus from the central soterio¬logical concerns to secondary matters; (3) it en¬courages the superficial and pseudoscientific investigations we find in Lind¬sell and Schaeffer; and (4) inerrancy is a modern philosophical concept incompatible with the nature of religious scripture.
Johnston’s own position is closest to Hubbard’s. He believes that modern evangelicals have lost sight of a crucial Reformation assumption about the Bible–that it is self-evidencing and self-validating. As Calvin said: “It comes with its own credentials and hence is not to be accredited by our critical judgment of ex-ternal evidence.”37 Johnston’s stand against evan¬gelical ration¬al¬ism is clear: “The question is this: do we need convincing ob¬jec¬tive reasons prior to our faith, or can we rely on the Holy Spirit’s witness to Christ heard through the Biblical evidence? No longer admitting that the witness of the Holy Spirit in and through the Word is sufficient, certain evan¬gelicals have at¬tempted to develop rationalistic supports for their faith.”38
The faculty of conservative Gordon-Conwell Theological Semi¬nary have recently put together a book of articles entitled Iner¬rancy and Common Sense. The authors follow the standard evangeli¬cal approach in attempting to harmonize biblical accounts with modern science. J. Ramsey Michaels’ article, “Inerrancy or Verbal Inspiration? An Evangelical Dilemma,” is the refreshing excep¬tion. Michaels believes that the term “inerrancy” should be dropped in favor of “verbal inspiration” unless it can be purged of its misleading implications. First, Michaels believes that the term “inerrancy” blurs the distinction between error and false-hood. For example, a Gnostic gospel may contain perfectly the words of a spirit who has spoken to the Gnostic devotee, but a Christian may still reply that the spirit is of Satan and de¬clare that the text therefore contains lies. Second, the term “iner¬rancy” does not do justice to various types of biblical litera¬ture. For example, it does not make any sense to speak of an iner¬rant psalm or an inerrant parable.
The main problem with the word “inerrancy” is of course its alien, cognitive implications. According to Michaels, the de¬tailed inerrantist “imposes on the Bible a standard of truth or facticity external to God himself, by which God’s Word may (in¬deed must) be judged….In his attempts to ‘defend the Bible’ he will find himself actually defending a unified, logical, self-con¬sistent structure of his own making….” Michaels is com¬pletely in line with the Reformers when he declares that “the role of faith is to accept God’s revelation on His terms, not ours.”39 Johns¬ton’s and Michaels’ return to the Reformers’ main theological axiom leaves one crucial problem: other scriptures of the world claim to be similarly self-evidencing and self-validating. How is one then to decide among them? It is clear that Johnston’s fide¬istic posi¬tion can give no satisfactory answer to this question.
The figures above are from Gabriel Fackre’s Religious Right and Christian Faith.40 They serve as an excellent graphic illus¬tration of the basic errors of evangelical rationalism. Figure III represents traditional Christianity with saving truth (T) emanating directly from a self-authenticating Bible. Figure IV represents evangelical rationalism, where the Bible is “proved” true by ex¬ternal evidence from the secular world. The dark circle segment on the right side of Figure IV symbolizes both the selec¬tive and ad hoc use of secular data and also the sectarian nature of most evangelicalism. This sectarian focus is absent in Figure III, because evangelicals like Fackre and Bloesch are catholic in their acceptance of all Christians who accept the Gospel.
Endnotes: Chapter 6
1. Barr, James, The Bible and the Modern World (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1973). Barr observes that conservative evangelicals are willing to use any argument, however contrary to their religious convic¬tions and however religiously trivial, to support biblical inerrancy, (Fundamentalism, p. 259).
2. Barr, James, Fundamentalism (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1977).
3. Smith, Robert H., Lutheran Forum (May, 1975), p. 38; quoted in Bloesch, Donald G., Essentials of Evangelical Theory (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1978).
4. Torrance, Thomas, Zygon Newsletter (Summer, 1980), p. 5.
5. Bloesch, Donald, G., Essentials of Evangelical Theory (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1978).
6. Mendenhall, George E., The Tenth Generation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
7. Hebert, A.G., The Authority of the Old Testament, quoted in Beegle, Dewey M., Scripture, Authority, and Infallibility (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, rev. ed. 1973).
8. Bloesch, Donald G., The Future of Evangelical Christianity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983). Jack Rogers believes that the root problem for Hodge, Warfield, Clark, Henry, and Nash is their univocal theory of language in which God’s thoughts become our thoughts (“Mixed Metaphors, Misunderstood Models, and Puzzling Paradigms…,” p. 23).
9. Rogers, Jack B. and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1979).
10. Beegle, Dewey M., Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 1973).
11. Lindsell, Harold, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1976).
12. Ibid., p. 36.
13. Nash, Ronald H., The New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1963).
14. Beegle, Dewey M., Scripture, Authority, and Infallibility (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 1973).
15. Ibid., p. 263.
16. Schaeffer, Francis, He is There and He is Not Silent (Wheaton: Tundale, 1972).
17. A surprising number of leading evangelicals actually concede this point. See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 160 and John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, p. 109, both quoted in Barr, James, Fundamentalism, (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1984); Geisler, Norman, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1976); and Clark Pinnock, op. cit., p. 45. An alternative RSV reading “Every scripture inspired by God…” even might imply that some Old Testament writings (parts of Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes?) were not God-breathed.
18. Bratton, F. G., The History of the Bible (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1959). Barr concurs: “Paul’s letters were not written…in order to produce written ‘scripture’ but in order to communicate by letter” (Beyond Fundamentalism, p. 14).
19. Pinnock, Clark, The Scriptural Principle (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984).
20. McKim, Donald K., “An Evaluation of an Evaluation,” Theological Students Bulletin (April, 1981).
21. Rogers, Jack B., and Donald K. McKim The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1979).
22. Quoted in ibid., p. 87.
23. Ibid., p. 88
24. Ibid., p. 109.
25. Institutes, bk. 1. chap. 7, sec. 5.
26. Ibid.
27. Rogers, Jack B., and Donald K. McKim The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1979).
28. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J.D. Douglas (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1962, 1982).
29. Holbrook, Bruce, The Stone Monkey (New York, NY: Morrow, 1981).
30. Gordon, Cyrus, The Ancient Near East (New York, NY: Doubleday, 3rd ed. rev., 1965).
31. Johnston, Robert K., Evangelicals at an Impasse (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1979).
32. Lindsell, Harold, Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1976).
33. Johnson, Marshall D., The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies, New Testament Mongraph Series, volume 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); op. cit., p. 23. On the front cover of Dewey M. Beegle’s book, Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility, re¬spected conserva¬tive F. F. Bruce also rejects the “domino” theory and writes that he endorses “as emphatically as I can Beegle’s deprecating of a Maginot-line mentality where the doctrine of Scripture is concerned.”
34. Davis, Stephen T., The Debate about the Bible (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1977).
35. Johnston, Robert K., Evangelicals at an Impasse (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1979).
36. See ibid., p. 44.
37. Quoted in ibid., p. 41
38. Ibid., p. 40
39. Michaels, J. Ramsey, “Inerrancy or Verbal Inspiration”, Inerrancy and Common Sense, eds. Nicole and Michaels, pp. 52, 65, 63.
40. Fackre, Gabriel, Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982).
My new book on Archeology and the Bible.
“In fact, in 570 the prophet himself revised one of his own earlier oracles (29.17-20), conceding that the promise of 586 that Nebuchadnezzar would capture Tyre was mistaken (26.1-4). Instead, he now insists, Yahweh will give Nebuchandnezzar Egypt in the place of Tyre. (As a matter of act, Ezekiel and Yahwe were wrong the second time since neo-Babylonia was never able to capture Egypt!) Norman K. Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 488.
Chapter Seven: “Historical” Theology
The Hebrews did not at all raise themselves to the standpoint of properly historical contemplation, and there is no book of the Old Testament, however much it may contain material that is otherwise objectively historical, that deserves the name of true histori-ography.
–W. Vatke
The faith of Israel is not a historical faith, in the sense of a faith based on historical event; it is rather a faith within history…its justification is not in the evidence of past events …but in the assertion of future promise.
–Thomas L. Thompson
It is therefore not necessary to try to reconcile the course of events described in the Old Testament with the archaeological evidence, and it is in fact very difficult to do so.
–Kathleen Kenyon
As a source of history Ezekiel’s oracles are worthless; to main¬tain their historicity, one must reject all of the rest of the biblical record.
–Yehezkel Kaufman
The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of govern¬ment. It is incredible that they should have taken a census viz., Lk. 2 according to such a fantastic system.
–E. W. Barnes
Luke’s census is all outside the plane of reality….It is incredible that such an unusual and disturbing proceeding, as the census spoken of by Luke must necessarily have been, should have escaped all notice in Josephus….
–Charles Guignebert
We have no way of reconciling the two genealogies of Luke and Matthew completely, but there is no particular reason why we should try. To a considerable extent both are artificial.
–Bruce Vawter
SCRIPTURE AS HISTORY
Most scripture is generally suspect from the standpoint of histori¬cal accuracy, although these writings have now been found to be more accurate than formerly assumed. The reign of the Budd¬hist emperor Asoka (3rd Century B.C.E.) was thought to be legen¬dary until archaeologists discovered the artifacts which proved his existence as well as some facts about the Buddha’s life. Krishna has long been thought to be a mythical being until recent scholarship has proposed a genuine, historical Krishna. But it is evangelical Christianity, more than all the others, which has claimed the historical accuracy and significance of its scrip¬tures. When Luther pro¬claimed that “faith rests upon history,”1 he was not assuming the meth¬ods of modern historical science. Luther made this statement in an argu¬ment against the allegorical methods of early church fathers. In his search for the literal sense of biblical passages, Luther made it clear that this was the “saving” sense and not any scientific or modern historical sense.
Francis Schaeffer also believes that “faith rests upon his¬tory,” but Luther would have had none of what Schaeffer calls “historic” Christian¬ity.2 Schaeffer’s choice of terms is unfor¬tunate because the first idea that comes to mind with the word “historic” is “relic.” Even the term “historical” is misleading, because we then might think of any number of movements, both Protestant and Catholic, as “historical” expres¬sions of the Christian faith. While the phrase is an infelicitous one, Schaef¬fer does make it clear what he means, and it is here where he and fellow evangelicals part company with “historical” Christianity. Earlier Christians would have agreed that God entered history and performed saving acts, but they would have simply not un¬derstood Schaeffer’s extra epistemological baggage. Schaeffer is thor¬oughly modernist, thus out of step with historical Christian¬ity, when he assumes that Christian truth is verifiable from the stand¬point of historical science.
The science of history as we know it is a fairly young disci¬pline. Even some of the histories done as recently as the l9th Century are woe¬fully inadequate from the standpoint of con¬tempor¬ary methodology. For example, the l9th Century biographers of George Washington (in particular Jared Sparks) used little or no documentation and took no precautions about the credibility of their sources. Thanks to “historians” like Sparks and Weems, there are dozens of legends about Washington (e.g., his praying at Valley Forge) which are still widely accepted as fact. Not only is history one of our youngest sciences, it is also one of our weak-est. Even the other social sciences, like sociology and psychol¬ogy, usually have the benefit of repeatable evidence. But his¬tory’s evi¬dence is nonrepeatable and most historical documents contain the inher¬ent bias of the observer.
The problem becomes acute with scripture which, although sometimes in the guise of historical fact, is primarily a vehicle of faith with no intrinsic commitment to historical accuracy. Indeed, the first two epigraphs for this chapter indicate that such a commitment would have been impossible for the ancient Hebrews. The “historical” theology of evangelicalism makes two initial mistakes: (1) it imputes a modern view of history to biblical writers and (2) it takes quasihistorical material as a basis for strong religious belief. In terms of our discussion of Swinburne in Chapter Two, knowledge based on ancient scripture will be among the “weakest” of all beliefs.
Evangelical Stephen Neil correctly observes that “history deals with the unique, the unpredictable, the unrepeatable, the unalterable, and the irreversible.”3 Historical process is of course contingent and mutable, but these qualities are dramati¬cally compromised by a traditional theological view of history. If Neil is correct that history is basically unpredictable, then he cannot hold divine prescience at the same time. Indeed, omnipre¬science–especially if it is connected with divine time as the simultaneity of past, present, and future–destroys our ordinary concept of the future as something not yet actualized. Such a view also threatens the freedom of the will. If future history is already fixed by virtue of God’s plan for it, then human agents can do nothing except follow history’s predetermined course. His¬tory’s contin¬gent flow of events (i.e., the all-present possibil¬ity that the events could have been otherwise) becomes a theologi¬cally necessary flow of events.
History is a sound enough science so that we are probably certain that Jesus and Gautama Buddha were historical men. But there is no mode of reasoning, deductive or inductive, that can support the claims that these men were also God. The deity of both Jesus and Gautama is based on a religious confession of faith and could never be formulated as a belief, strong or weak. Let us consider another example that clearly shows the limits of the his¬torical method in supporting traditional Christian claims. Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Resurrection of Jesus has been established as a historical fact as certain as the fall of Richard Nixon. Given this hypothetical historicity of the Resurrection, we now ask whether there is any logically neces¬sary connection between this fact and the Christian doctrine of the satisfaction of Jesus’ work; that is, that his death and resurrec¬tion were satisfaction for all human sin. It should be immediately clear that there is no logical connection between the two: the gap between a historical fact and such a theological claim can be bridged by faith only. In a similar vein, I find it significant that Stephen Neil admits that there is no necessary connection between the Resurrection and the deity of Jesus.4 Neil is correct: one must always keep separate the logic of necessity and the logic of contingency.
In his excellent book Christian Faith and Historical Under¬standing Ronald Nash agrees with Norman Perrin’s concept of “faith knowledge,” a type of knowledge which is interpersonal, transhis¬torical, and soteriological. Nash agrees with Perrin and evangel¬ical I. H. Marshall that it is possible to conceive of some faith knowledge as independent of or incorrectly connected with histori¬cal facts. An example of the former is the Mithraists’ faith in their savior, and pious adherence to myths about George Washington is an instance of the latter. Nash’s rejoinder is that these are ob¬viously examples of pseudofaith, or at least faith that cannot possibly redeem us. Nash tells a story of a son who has idolized his deceased father all of his life but then finds incontrover¬tible evidence that all the ennobling stories he has heard about him are false. Nash concludes: “Dare we hold in this case, as theologians like Bultmann appear to suggest in the case of Jesus, that the historical truth is irrelevant to the son’s faith in his father? In the case of any normal and reasonable person, we would expect that the correction of the man’s false historical knowledge about his father would destroy his faith knowledge in his father.”5
In Chapter Two I essentially agreed with evangelicals like Nash who insist that the trust dimension of faith is inseparable from cognitive content. The major difference between us lies in the general evangelical claim that the Bible’s history is reliable enough for the evangelicals’ “historical” theology. This chapter is an attempt to demonstrate that it is not. I shall concentrate on four areas: (1) Old Testament history, particularly the fall of Jericho; (2) the reliability of Old Testament prophecies, with an emphasis on Ezekiel; (3) the claims of Luke as historian, with a focus on the Christmas census; and (4) inconsistencies in the ac-counts of Jesus’ life and ministry.
JERICHO’S WALLS TOO OLD
Evangelicals admit that their history-based theology is a risky enterprise. It is especially fragile in that it sets itself up to be de¬stroyed by any number of archaeological and historical studies which challenge the accuracy of the Bible. But critics have to be careful not to be as dogmatic in their denial as some evangelicals are in their af¬firmation. As we have noted, history and archaeology are “soft” sciences and their con¬clusions are provisional and always open to alteration. I have there¬fore chosen only examples where the evidence is especially strong.
There are many historical puzzles in the Old Testament which could be chosen to show that the claim of complete accuracy is unfounded or open to question. For example, it appears that the date implied for the Exodus in 1 Kings 6:1 (1437 B.C.E.) is prob¬ably a century and a half too early. There has been a long-standing consensus–established by great scholars like William F. Albright–that the Exodus must have happened in the early 13th Century.6 Most of the evidence is circumstantial, but the strong¬est support comes from 13th Century archaeological data attesting to violent destruction of some Canaanite cities.
There is an even stronger consensus that the invasion ac¬counts recorded in Joshua are seriously out of line with what histori¬cally hap¬pened. The best evidence comes from the archaeo¬logical digs at Jericho and Ai. Kathleen Kenyon has done the most defini¬tive work on the excava¬tions at Jericho. Her conclusions are that at one time at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, Jericho was de¬fended by a high wall, but it was de¬stroyed violently by fire ca. 1560 B.C.E. Later a town, without a wall, was rebuilt during the 14th Century but was then abandoned ca. l325 B.C.E. The implica¬tions are quite obvious. Even with the biblical date for the Exodus, there might have been a town for Joshua to attack, but no high wall to “come tumbling down”; indeed, there is no evidence that the Late Bronze Age city experienced any sudden demise.7 With the scholarly consensus date of 1200 for the inva¬sion, there would not even have been a town to capture.
The evidence from Ai, the next town taken by Joshua, is even more embarrassing. Excavations here reveal that Ai was destroyed in 2200 B.C.E., a full millennium before the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Some have speculated that the writer(s) of Joshua could have confused Ai with Bethel, a town which was violently de¬stroyed during the time of the conquest. Part of this speculation in¬cludes the suggestion that Bethel’s warriors set up forward positions in the ruins of Ai, which literally means “heap of stones.”
An author for The New Bible Dictionary proposes a hypothesis in support of the biblical account of Jericho’s walls. It accepts the dating of the fall of the original walls, but suggests that another wall was built which then completely eroded away.8 This theory must meet the challenge of Kathleen Kenyon’s own conclu¬sions: “It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age,…not a trace remains”; and “it is therefore not nec¬essary to try to reconcile the course of events de¬scribed in the Old Testa¬ment with the archaeological evidence, and it is in fact very difficult to do so.”9 Two outstanding Old Testament scholars, Martin Noth and J. A. Soggin, are even more emphatic about the unhistorical nature of the biblical account. In his Westminster Commen¬tary on Joshua, Soggin points out general prob¬lems with the story of Jer¬icho (e.g., the anachronistic use of the ark), and then declares that the archaeological data is “totally incompatible” with the biblical record. There are adequate remains of the l6th Century wall; one would think that a l3th Century wall would have been better preserved. As Soggin states: “There is no example in the history of archaeology of a stratum which has completely disappeared.”10
THE PROPHETIC MISCALCULATIONS OF EZEKIEL
There is much to be said about the systematic misuse of the Old Testament, not only by modern evangelicals but by historical Christianity as well. The author of Matthew set the precedent for the detailed christologizing of texts that were totally alien to the idea of an incarnate triune God. Conservative commentators still want to discern the Trinity in the “Let us make…” of Genesis 1:26 or insist that Christ is the “angel of the Lord.” Much is made of the prophets not only foretelling Jesus’ life but also predicting future events in general.
Of all the evangelical writers it is Clark Pinnock who has the most re-freshing view of this problem. Like Bruce, Pinnock accepts many of the conclusions of historical-critical scholar¬ship, in particu¬lar the hypothesis that many biblical books have multiple authors and were written later than the major figures involved. Pinnock contends that in order to protect the freedom of God we must consider the prophets to be fallible witnesses. “The prophets did not have so divine a viewpoint as to make their words absolute”; furthermore, as they were preachers and not writers, verbal inspir¬ation should apply only to their oracles and not the writings added to them at a later time.11
The prophecies of Ezekiel are favorites among conservatives, but as I shall demonstrate, Ezekiel has an incredibly poor record for accuracy. Yehezkel Kaufmann, a scholar highly respected by some evangelicals, lists a number of Ezekiel’s prophetic miscalcu¬lations: the Judean exile lasted more than forty years (4:6); the exiles of 586 B.C.E. did not die by the sword (5:2, 12); and Zede¬kiah was condemned in Riblah, not Babylon (17:20). Ezekiel also was incorrect about the following: Nebuchadnezzar did not destroy Egypt, nor were the Egyptians ex¬iled and restored after 40 years (29:8ff); the “horns of the house of Is¬rael” did not sprout either at the time of Egypt’s conquest (29:2l) or at any other occasion in Egypt’s history; the twelve tribes never re¬turned, and those which did, did not settle according to the prescrip¬tions of Eze¬kiel. Kaufmann’s conclusions are devastating: “As a source of history Ezekiel’s oracles are worthless; to maintain their his¬toricity, one must reject all of the rest of the bib¬lical record.”12
Ezekiel’s most famous prophecy concerns the fall of Tyre. Chris¬tians who call this an amazing confirmation of God’s fore-knowledge and the Bible’s inerrancy do not seem to realize that Ezekiel himself admits that Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign against Tyre was a failure and that “nei¬ther he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against it” (29: l8). Extrabiblical evidence also confirms that the Babylonian siege of Tyre (585-572 B.C.E.) was a failure, even though the Tyrians did finally pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar. Old Testament Scholar Moshe Greenberg summarizes: “Ezekiel himself lived to see the failure of his prophecy that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre and amended it (29:17ff.); but his amendment also proved wrong.”13
If Ezekiel’s words are to count as prophecy at all, we must first determine with certainty whether Chapters 26-28 were written before 572 B.C.E. Even though conservatives glibly assume that Ezekiel wrote down every oracle when he received it, good Bible scholars have other opinions. The Talmud indicates that the “men of the Great Synagogue” wrote the book, not Ezekiel himself.14 Modern scholars have various opinions. C. C. Torrey and Millard Burrows hold, mainly because of internal linguistic evidence, that the book is a Pales¬tinian forgery written ca. 230 B.C.E. (perhaps by “men of the Great Syna¬gogue”?). More recent scholarship gener¬ally supports authorship by Eze¬kiel, but with considerable addi-tions and editing.
William Neil states that “the original oracles of Ezekiel have been revised, augmented, and otherwise edited to such an ex¬tent that it be¬comes difficult, if not impossible, to secure even some measure of agree¬ment among the experts as to the actual con¬tribution of the prophet him¬self.”15 As to the famous chapter 26, which contains the oracles about Tyre, scholars generally agree that they are not from Ezekiel’s hand, and therefore come long af¬ter the Babylonian siege, perhaps even after Alex¬ander’s victory.
Even if we grant Ezekiel’s authorship, it is very unlikely that Gleason Archer is correct in claiming that “the predictions of chapter 26…were duly fulfilled to the letter….”16 How Archer can speak so confidently about confusing oracles preserved in a corrupt text is puzzling. Using the distinction between a mainland and island Tyre, Archer claims that verses 3-11 report a mainland Babylonian campaign which failed and verses 12ff. deal with Alexander’s final destruction of the island city. There are a host of problems with this interpretation. First, the phrases “she shall be in the midst of the sea” (v. 5) and “her daughters on the mainland” (v. 6) seem to refer to the island city. Second, the Babylonian siege is described in terms of victory not defeat. Third, the mention again of the slaughter of “your daughters on the mainland” (v. 8) as a prelude to the siege and the city’s “mighty pillars” indicates that it was the island city that was conquered. Fourth, although it seems that “make her a bare rock” (v. 4) is poetically repeated at verse 14, Archer’s strict divi¬sion of the oracles would imply that the mainland Tyre was com¬pletely destroyed, which Archer himself denies. Fifth, Archer continues his two-Tyre theory to the present day, even though they were joined permanently by Alexander’s causeway. Archer’s hypoth-esis that the island city was completely engulfed by a geological subsidence finds no support in the source books I consulted. In¬deed, an evangelical book called Science Speaks proudly prints a picture which shows portions of the island city as a huge, weedy field.17
Ezekiel’s dramatic account of the complete destruction of Tyre is literary and theological hyperbole (“descend into the Pit” v. 19), and even he may not have intended a factual account. In any case Tyre recovered rapidly and reasserted its maritime domi¬nance in the area. Eighteen years after Alexander’s conquest, Tyre was again re¬built only to be destroyed by Antigonus in 314 B.C.E. By 125 B.C.E. it was thriving again, strong enough to be granted autonomy by the Seleucid ru¬lers. Tyre prospered under Roman rule, especially in the time of Pompey. Even Jesus traveled there (Matt. 15:21-28), and one finds no account of him telling Tyre’s inhabitants: “Don’t worry, Ezekiel’s prophecy will yet be fulfilled.” A Chris¬tian com¬munity established itself there (Acts 21:3-6), and the great church father Origen was buried there.
Tyre fell to Moslem invaders in 636 C.E. In 1124 it was captured by the Crusaders, but the Arabs destroyed it again in 1291. Contrary to Ezekiel’s predic-tion, the ruins of ancient Tyre are clearly visible and right next to the modern town whose popu¬lation now is 60,000. (The population at the time of Alexander was only 30,000.) In the most recent Israeli in¬vasion of Lebanon, Tyre fell once again, but contrary to Ezekiel’s harsh judgment, it will most surely be built again. One must conclude that neither Ezekiel nor the editors who stitched his oracles together had any firm historical sense about the materials with which they worked.
SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH LUKE’S CENSUS
Much has been said about Luke’s excellence as an historian. Luke did indeed emulate the models of historical narrative which were current in his day. But to claim that Luke is a consummate historian by modern standards–as many evangelicals do–is a position which cannot be maintained. In a letter to me, F. F. Bruce concedes that conservative apologists have been too eager to declare Luke’s inerrancy. So eager was W. M. Ramsey to prove Luke correct about the enrollment in Bethlehem that he, according to Bruce, “unwisely dam¬aged his well-founded reputation as a very considerable scholar.” In his Anchor Bible commentary Catholic scholar J. A. Fitzmyer lists other historical mistakes in Luke’s writing and of¬fers the most definitive argument against Ramsey’s claims about the famous Christmas census.
There is no record of Caesar Augustus’ decree that “all the world should be enrolled” (Lk. 2:1). The Romans kept extremely detailed records of such events. Not only is Luke’s census not in these records, it goes against all that we know of Roman economic history. Roman documents show that taxation was done by the various governors at the provincial level. As we shall see later, the property tax was collected on site by travelling assessors, thus making unnecessary Joseph’s journey away from what little property he must have owned. Glea¬son Archer quotes a census expert who claims, without documenta¬tion, that “every five years the Romans enumerated citizens and their property to determine their liabilities. This practice was extended to include the entire Roman Empire in 5 B.C.E.”18 This goes against the four¬teen-year cycle which Archer himself uses to argue that Quirinius was pulled from his busy duties in Asia Minor to do a Syrian census in 7 B.C.E., fourteen years earlier than the one recorded in Josephus and Acts 5:37.
Many have joined Archer in the hypothesis that Quirinius had an unrecorded term as Syria’s governor during the time of Jesus’ birth. Some misuse the “Tivoli” inscription which they say proves that some Roman official served twice in Syria and Phoenicia. First, the name is missing, so this is no proof that Quirinius is involved. Second, the inscription has been mistranslated. It should read: “legate of Augustus for a second time” not a second legate in Syria as the harmonizers insist. Archer does not refer to the Tivoli inscription directly; but still argues that since Luke knew of the census of 6 C.E., he correctly called this one Quirinius’ “first” (prote). But Fitzmyer shows conclusively that the grammar clearly indicates that this was the first census in Judea, not Quirinius’ first enrollment.19
It has long been known that Tertullian held that S. Sentius Saturninus, not Quirinius, was governor at the time of Jesus’ birth. Saturninus ruled from 9-6 B.C.E., the period most likely to be Jesus’ birth time. P. Quintilius Varus was governor during the next most likely period of 6-4 B.C.E. M. Titius was in Syria ca. 10 B.C.E. Quirinius himself was very much occupied during this time, having been assigned to the campaign in Cilicia in Asia Minor from ca. 11-3 B.C.E. Archer’s theory is that Quirinius was given a special assignment to do the census in the interval between Saturninus’ and Varus’ terms. There is of course no extant evidence for this, but this does not seem to be necessary for the harmonizing that takes place in evangelical “historical” theology. In fact, there is much to say against it. Fitzmyer paraphrases one authority: “…It was unheard of that a proconsul would become a legate…twice in the same province.”20
F. M. Heichelheim speculated that Herod himself took the census to which Luke refers.21 Realizing the problematic nature of his solution, Heichelheim takes great pains to qualify his pro-Luke interpretation. He describes Luke 2:1-5 as “an extremely difficult passage,” and then proceeds to give it an interpretation that has no basis in the text. Heichelheim uses the 4th Century church historian Eusebius to support Joseph’s presence in Bethle¬hem at the census. Eusebius speculated that Joseph’s family “most probably had a small holding near Bethlehem up to the reign of Domitian.” Heichelheim interprets the idios in “each to his own (idios) city” as meaning the private possessions of the Jewish royal family, who would collect the poll and land taxes and send them to Rome. This rendering of idios is supportable, but it is not compatible with Jesus’ own use of the word. In each of the places where we find the famous saying “a prophet has no honor in his own country (en ten idia patridi)” (Jn. 4:44; Matt. 13:57; Mk. 6:4; 4:24), the adjective idios is used in a way quite differ¬ent from Heichelheim’s proposal. And from the context it is also clear that Jesus claimed the country of his father to be Galilee and the town to be Nazareth.
Heichelheim’s thesis is highly speculative and open to the following general objections. (1) Given the conflicting geneal¬ogies of Matthew and Luke (which cannot be gratuitously solved by giving one to Mary), the descent of Joseph from David is highly problema¬tic. (2) The idea of Joseph owning property in Bethlehem stands in stark contrast to his destitute status and Jesus’ birth in a strange stable. Matthew does have Mary and Joseph living in a house in Bethlehem (2:11), and only after the flight to Egypt do they settle in Naza¬reth. (3) It would not have been necessary for Mary, nine-months pregnant, to make the arduous three-day journey. (4) Not all descendants of David would have owned property in Bethlehem, and yet Luke would still require them to return from distances far greater than from Galilee. (5) E. W. Barnes states that “any such census under Herod is highly improbable, inasmuch as it would be made for purposes of taxation; and Herod managed, and showed great skill in managing, his own finances.”22 Finally (6), even if there had been a Herodian census, Luke would still have been wrong about Augustus’ universal census and wrong about Quirinius administering it.
In Josephus’ account of the census in 6 C.E., he explicitly states that those people taxed were assessed of their possessions, including lands and livestock. In other words, the census takers were also the tax assessors. In Egypt these tax assessors went from house to house in order to perform their duties. With this in mind, let us look at a crucial error in Luke’s account. Luke has Joseph and Mary making a three-day journey away from their home in Nazareth to register in his alleged ancestral home Bethle¬hem. But an Egyptian papyrus recording a census in 104 C.E. ex¬plicitly states that “since registration by household is imminent, it is necessary to notify all who for any reason are absent from their districts to return to their own homes that they may carry out the ordinary business of registration….”23 Unlike Matthew, who does not mention a census nor Nazareth as Mary and Joseph’s home, Luke describes Nazareth as “their own city” (Lk.2:39). If the rules of this Egyptian census applied to Palestine, then Joseph and Mary should have stayed in Nazareth to be enrolled.
Imagine a system of taxation based on people returning to their ancestral homes, going back a thousand years in the case of Joseph. By this time the Jews were spread out all over the known world. Can we seriously believe that the Romans would have re¬quired them to come back to Palestine, carrying everything they owned? How would the tax officials have assessed their land? In The Rise of Christianity the former Bishop E. W. Barnes remarks: “The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of govern¬ment. It is incredible that they should have taken a census according to such a fantastic system. If any such census had been taken, the dislocation to which it would have led would have been world-wide. Roman historians would not have failed to record it.”24
In his famous book entitled Jesus, Charles Guignebert states: “It is all outside the plane of reality….It is incredible that such an unusual and disturbing proceeding, as the census spoken of by Luke must necessarily have been, should have escaped all notice in Josephus….” Guignebert continues:
We will not unduly stress the peculiarity of the mode of census taking implied in our text, but it is to be noted that it is a very strange proceeding. The moving about of men and families which this reckless decree must have caused throughout the whole of the Empire is almost beyond imagination, and one cannot help wondering what advantage there could be for the Roman state in this return, for a single day, of so many scattered individuals, not to the places of their birth, but to the original homes of their ancestors. For it is to be remembered that those of royal descent were not the only ones affected by this fantastic ordinance, and many a poor man must have been hard put to it to discover the cradle of his race. The suspicion, or rather, the conviction, is borne in upon us at first sight that the editor of Luke has simply been looking for some means of bringing Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, in order to have Jesus born there. A hagiographer of his type never bothers much about common sense in inventing the circumstances he requires.25
We can now understand why Jesus never mentions his birth in Bethlehem; and that, except for the birth stories, Jesus is always connected with Nazareth. The writer of John apparently does not know of Jesus’ alleged birth in Bethlehem. Nathanael does not know it (7:46) and no one answers the crowd when they say “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scriptures said that the Christ…comes from Bethlehem?…” (7:42). In Evidence That De¬mands a Verdict evangelical Josh McDowell challenges skeptics to assess the evidence for the Christian faith. McDowell uses the mistranslated Vatican inscription and ascribes it to Quirinius without good scholarly reasons. He even cites the Egyptian papy-rus above, but astonishingly enough implies that it required peo¬ple to return to their ancestral homes.26 Concerning the birth stories of Jesus, the evidence demands this verdict: most of the details are legendary and Jesus was in all probability born in the Galilean town of Nazareth.
DISCREPANCIES IN THE GOSPEL RECORD
In Table I there is a detailed list of inconsistencies in the accounts of the Resurrection, the most important event in the Christian religion. Another general problem is the conflict about where Jesus would first appear in resurrected form. In Mark the angel tells the women that Jesus will appear in Galilee, but by Mark’s own account, Jesus appears to the disciples the same day in Jerusalem and ascends (from indoors!) out of Jerusalem that same evening. Only Matthew and John have resurrection appearances in Galilee, but Mark and Luke preclude any Galilean appearances by having Jesus’ ascension on Easter evening. In Luke and Acts Jesus tells his disciples not to depart from Jerusalem, again precluding any Galilean appearances. Most Christians would attribute this confusion to human error in recollection and transmission, but these inconsistencies are devastating to the claims of detailed inerrancy.
The most substantial discrepancy is found in the Ascension ac¬counts, especially the prima facie contradiction in Luke’s own writings–first in Luke 24:50-51 and then in Acts 1:9. The RSV does not actually indicate a heavenly departure but that “he parted from them.” Fitzmyer, however, argues that “he was carried up into heav¬en” (close to Mk. 16:19 and listed as an alternative in the RSV) should be “regarded as part of the original text of the Lucan Gos¬pel.”27 He suggests that it was omitted either in transmission or because of outright harmonizing by the early church. I have heard some evangelicals, who also reconcile John and the Synoptics by saying that Jesus stormed the temple twice, propose that there were two ascensions. Just as unsatisfactory is the suggestion that Luke meant for there to be a forty-day break between verses 49 and 50. But Fitzmyer answers that the “temporal adverbs and prepositional phrases in the course of chapter 24 leave no doubt that they (Res¬urrection and Ascension) took place on Easter Sunday.”28 Fitzmyer also cites passages from extra-canonical texts that demonstrate that an Easter Sunday Ascension was a tradition in the early church.
The genealogies given by Luke and Matthew do not agree, not even on the father of Joseph. It has been argued that the early church split on the question of the use of genealogies. Adoption¬ists and Jewish Christians who denied the deity of Jesus favored the use of genealogies, while those who stressed Jesus’ heavenly origin and virgin birth found the use of genealogies misleading or even blasphemous. Mark and John do not have genealogies for Jesus, and the widely used Syrian harmony of the gospels (written by Tatian) left out the genealogies. Perhaps the author of 1 Timothy is on the side of the antigenealogists when he warns that people should not “occupy themselves with myths and endless gene-alogies…”(1:4).
Some commentators have attempted to give one of the genealogies to Mary, but there seems to be no agreement about which one to give to her.
Tertullian thought that Matthew’s was Mary’s, but some modern commentators have decided that it is Luke’s. Even the conservatives cannot decide on a solution. There are solid objec¬tions to the giving of Luke’s genealogy to Mary. If the latter is so, then Luke is still incorrect, because he explicitly states that Joseph was the son of Heli, not the son-in-law. More signi¬ficant, however, is that Mary’s name is not mentioned at all in Luke’s genealogy. As F. F. Bruce puts it: “In any case, it is strange that, if the Lucan list intended to trace the genealogy through Mary, this was not stated expressly. More probably both lists intend to trace the genealogy through Joseph.”29 Further¬more, we know that Mary was a Levite and therefore could not have descended from David. Mary was a kinswomen of Elizabeth (Lk. 1: 38), a daughter of Aaron, and the mother of John the Baptist. There is no evidence that John descended from David; indeed, if he had, we certainly would have heard about it from the gospel writers.
In the Synoptics the Last Supper is a passover meal on the eve of the day before the Sabbath (Mk. 14:12). Jesus dies on the eve of the Sabbath, probably April 2, 33 C.E. Jesus explicitly asks the disciples to prepare a passover supper, but during the meal there is no paschal lamb and the wrong bread is eaten. In John, on the other hand, Passover and the Sabbath coincide, the Last Supper is not a passover meal, and Jesus dies simultaneously with the slaughtering of the paschal lambs (13:1; 18:28; 18;39; 19:14; 19:31), probably April 7, 30 C.E. Talmudic sources defi¬nitely support John’s account: “Jesus was hanged as a false teach¬er and beguiler on the eve of the passover which was also a Sab¬bath.” Apologists go to amazing lengths to harmonize the passion chronologies of John and the Synoptics. For example, the word “Passover” in the phrase “day of Preparation of the Passover” is reinterpreted as a seven-day festival, thereby avoiding the ob¬vious conclusion that it was really passover eve. C. C. Torrey intro¬duced this thesis back in the 1930s, and although quickly dismissed by scholars,31 it is still used by some evangelicals.
The passage which secures the disjunction of the two accounts is one in which “day of Preparation” is used together with “that sabbath was a high day” (19:31). Brown and others have shown that “high day” meant “double holy holiday”–i.e., a day in which the Sabbath and Passover coincide.32 We have already cited Sanhedrin sources above which confirm this chronological coincidence with direct reference to Jesus’ death. The most convincing evidence is the fact that the early church celebrated 14th Nisan as the day on which Jesus died. (The Synoptics had him dying on 15th Nisan.) This tradition lasted until 164 C.E. at which point a major con¬tro¬versy broke out about when to celebrate Easter. Around 200 C.E. Hippolytus of Rome condemned an unnamed Christian for daring to suggest Jesus ate a passover meal before his cruci¬fixion.33 Hip-polytus insisted Jesus could not have eaten the rit¬ual meal because he himself was the sacrifice. Paul implicitly confirms this view in his declara¬tion that “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacri¬ficed” (1 Cor. 5:7). In this section we have demonstrated that there are basic problems with accounts of the Crucifixion, the Res¬urrection, and the Ascension, the crucial events in the Christian religion. Christians should therefore be wary of any theology which over¬emphasizes the role of exact his¬torical truth in its doctrinal formulations.
Endnotes: Chapter 7
1. Rogers, Jack B., and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row: 1979).
2. Schaeffer, Francis, The God Who is There (Downer Grove, Intervarsity Press, 1975).
3. Neil, Stephen, “Jesus and History”. The Truth of God Incarnate, pp. 71-88.
4. Ibid, p. 69.
5. Nash, Ronald H., Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984).
6. Albright, William F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1957). Gleason Archer’s theory that some earlier pharaoh, not Ramses II, was the pharaoh of the Exodus is an attempt to solve this problem; but it seems that not even conservative scholars are willing to join Archer in revising ancient chronology to this extent. Archer’s earlier date does not help the Jericho dilemma at all. See Archer’s Encyclo¬pedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: MI, Zondervan, 1982).
7. “A note on the miraculous elements in the old traditions: the archaeological evidence does not provide us with any indica¬tions that the end of the Late Bronze Age town of Jericho was brought about by unusual agents” (Franken, H.J., and C. A. Franken-Battershill, A Primer of Old Testament Archaeology, p. 80.) Using Kenyon’s evidence these authors also state that “there is no archaeological evidence that there was a walled town in the Late Bronze Age at Jericho… In fact, nothing suggests the strong city, pictured in the books of Joshua” (pp. 77, 79). To the contrary, all the evi-dence indicates a very modest settlement over a span of less than 75 years. The editors of Biblical Archeology Review (March-April, 1979, p. 6) also support this interpretation.
8. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (Dowers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1962, 1982).
9. Kenyon, Kathleen, Digging up Jericho (New York, NY: Praeger, 1957).
10. Soggin, J.A., Joshua: A Commentary (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Pres, 1971). See also Robert G. Boling’s The Anchor Joshua.
11. Pinnock, Clark, The Scriptural Principle (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984).
12. Kaufmann, Yehezkel, The Religion of Israel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
13. Greenberg, Moshe, The Anchor Bible: Ezekiel 1-20 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983). Greenberg adds more mistakes to Kaufmann’s list above.
14. The Cambridge History of the Bible, eds. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans (Cambridge: The University Press, 1960).
15. William Neil, Harper’s Bible Commentary, p. 264.
16. Archer, Gleason An Encyclopedia of Biblical Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982).
17. Stone, Peter W. and Robert C. Newman, Science Speaks (Chicago, IL: The Moody Press, 1968).
18. Archer, Gleason, An Encyclopedia of Biblical Differences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982). Such an empire-wide census, if it did indeed happen, would still have been too late for Ar¬cher’s 7 B.C.E. date.
19. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to Luke. Two Volumes. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
20. Ibid., p. 403. Fitzmyer also counters Archer’s attempt to demote Quirinius to something less than an official legate. Fitzmyer shows that the use of hegemon as real legate is found also in Josephus (p. 402).
21. Frank, Tenney, ed., An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1938).
22. Barnes, E.W., The Rise of Christianity (London: Longmans, Green, 1947).
23. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., The Anchor Bible: The Bible According to Luke. Two Volumes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
24. Barnes, E.W. The Rise of Christianity (London, Longmans, Green, 1947).
25. Guignebert, Charles, Jesus (London, Kegan Paul, 1935).
26. McDowell, Josh, Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernadino, CA: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1972).
27. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Anchor Bible: The Bible According to Luke. Two Volumes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
28. Ibid., p. 194.
29. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J.D. Douglas (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1962, 1982). Bruce Vawter states: “We have no way of reconciling the two genealogies complete¬ly, but there is no particular reason why we should try. To a considerable extent both are artificial” (The Four Gos¬pels, vol. 1, p. 94). Fitzmyer observes that Luke and Mat¬thew have “two strikingly different genealogies of Jesus, which resist all harmonization” (op. cit., p. 496). Marshall D. Johnson has done a thorough study of the problem and has dismissed all the historical solutions as unsuccessful. He does mention one significant fact about the Jewish Midrashic use of geneal¬ogies: their function was to “comfort, exhort, and to edify” (The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies, p. 145). Again, we are worlds away from the detailed inerrancy of modern evangel¬icalism.
30. Kee, Howard C., Jesus in History (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 2nd ed., 1977). Michael Arnheim shows that John is probably also correct about the details of Jesus’ trial (Is Christianity True?, p. 88).
31. Brown, Raymond E. The Anchor Bible, The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
32. Ibid., p. 934.
33. Richardson, Cyril C. “A New Solution to the Quartodeciman Riddle”, Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973).
Chapter Eight: Jesus: Gospel Evidence and Jewish Expectations
Jesus practiced sorcery and beguiled and led Israel astray.
–Sanhedrin records
His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Strength-Hero….
–Isaiah 9:6 (Luther’s translation)
The apocalyptic Son of Man, through sometimes pictured as pre-existent
by late Judaism, was never considered in Jewish texts to descend to earth.
–Dennis C. Duling
In the Gospels there is insufficient evidence that Jesus claimed the
title Messiah or that he fully accepted it when it was of¬fered to him.
–Raymond E. Brown
There is no Jewish tradition of a divine-human Messiah.
–J. M. Ford
Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
–Jesus (Mark 10:18)
Jesus is never called God in the Synoptic Gospels, and a passage like Mk. 10:18
would seem to preclude the possibility that Jesus used the title of himself.
–R. E. Brown
Any theory which holds that from the very beginning
Jesus was called God…is a theory that does not explain the facts.
–Brown
Church Christology is not the result of a consistent evolution out of the Hebraic
understanding of the Messiah, but it represents a repudiation of key elements of Jewish
messianic hope and their replacement by ideas that Judaism continues to reject as idola¬trous.
–Rosemary R. Reuther
There is an old revivalist saying that goes something like: “Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or what he really claimed to be, the living Son of God.” (Another version of this is that Jesus was “mad, bad, or God.”) Evangelists who use this quip are presuming that what the New Testament says about Jesus must be what Jesus thought himself to be. Like the Buddha, Socrates, and Krishna, Jesus did not leave any of his own writings, so we do not have a direct account of his self-understanding. Plato scholars are convinced that Plato’s account of Socrates is biased and does not give us the genuine historical Socrates. (The same is true with the accounts of the Buddha and Krishna.) In fact, other Greek literature and history portrays Socrates as a buffoon, a down-and-outer, and an eccentric pest. Similarly, external evidence, like the legal records of the Sanhedrin, record that Jesus “practiced sorcery and beguiled and led Israel astray.”1
In his book Jesus the Magician Morton Smith has shown that Jesus was not unique as a miracle worker, and that there were other healers who were called “sorcerers” and “magicians.” Smith does a thorough study of Near Eastern magic at the time of Jesus and draws significant parallels. Drawing on the internal evidence of the gospels themselves, Smith maintains that Jesus gained his following primarily because of his cures, which according to Smith, are similar to those reported in extant magical texts. In an earlier book, The Secret Gospel, Smith presents an even more controversial thesis. Using a lost section of Mark (14:51ff.) which he found in a Greek Orthodox monastery, Smith proposes that Jesus initiated his disciples in night-long rituals that included sexual contact of some sort. My mention of Smith’s work is not to be taken as an endorsement of his views, but simply as an example of the spectrum of views in contemporary scholarship.
Not only were there other charismatic healers but there is now evidence to show that there was nothing especially radical about Jesus’ religious teachings. Jewish scholar Geza Vermes cautiously declares that Jesus was “an amateur in the field” of the Torah.2 Furthermore, as there was no strong Pharisaic presence in Galilee during that time, some scholars have suspected that the debates with the Pharisees actually reflect later polemics between the early church and Jewish teachers. Other research has shown that the Judaism of Jesus’ time was far more flexible than the New Testament leads us to believe. Many exceptions to the Sabbath were recognized, and it was assumed that human well-being was more important than strict adherence to the Law. It is Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s thesis that compared to contemporary religious leaders, Jesus was a fairly conservative Jew.3
Evangelical scholars like F. F. Bruce and the contributors to evangelical dictionaries are well aware of information like this, but it is seldom brought into evangelical theology proper. In fact the use of scripture is generally very loose and unscientific. For example, both Carl Henry and Stuart Hackett use traditional biblical interpretations (especially with regard to messianic titles) which no longer have any scholarly support. John Stott’s Basic Christianity is also typical. Stott blithely assumes that the books of the New Testament were written by the authors traditionally attributed to them; and he makes no attempt to distinguish between the genuine sayings of Jesus and those which may have been imputed to him by his disciples and the early church. Stott himself concedes twice that the disciples might have been deceived.4 How can we be sure of their account, given the virtual dearth of non-Christian witnesses? How would we feel, for example, about an account of the history of communism written only by Communists themselves? Testimony about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon ranges widely from positive devotee testimonials to very negative anticult accounts which claim that the “Moonies” have been deceived by a clever Oriental shaman.
Summing up the research on the historical Jesus, Norman Perrin concludes that most scholars agree on the following minimum: that Jesus proclaimed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God and that the parables, most of the proverbial sayings, and the Lord’s prayer are genuine.5 There is still much controversy about the historicity of the Resurrection and whether Jesus actually accepted any of the christological titles attributed to him, such as Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man. We have already seen that many Christian liberals have explicitly given up the divinity of Jesus, and even the Catholic Church, on the basis of critical research, admits that the disciples “clearly perceived” Jesus as God only after his Resurrection.6 Although Wolfhart Pannenberg’s positive pronouncements on the historicity of the Resurrection have been displayed prominently, especially in evangelical circles, less well known is his adoptionistic Christology. Using the strongly subordinationist passage of Mark 10:18, Pannenberg claims that Jesus was not equal to God but was “‘the Son’ only in obedience to the Father.”7 The focus of this chapter will be the biblical meaning of “Son of God” and other christological titles.
JESUS AS MESSIAH
In Hebrew messiah means “anointed one” and it was translated as christos by the writers of the Greek New Testament. In the Old Testament not only kings, but high priests, were “messiahs”; even a pagan like Cyrus the Great was God’s “anointed one” (Is. 45:1). Messiahship is a sign that God’s authority has been invested in these persons. After the end of the monarchy the Hebrews looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, a great political leader who would destroy Israel’s enemies and set up God’s kingdom on earth. The Hebrew Messiah was seen strictly in terms of a political king and military conqueror until just before the Christian era. Only in the apocalyptic books, like the noncanonical 2 Esdras and 1 and 2 Enoch, do we find the idea of a cosmic, divine (but not incarnate) messiah. At the time of Jesus, most Jews still saw the Messiah in terms of the traditional view of conquering political king. The meek and crucified Jesus did not at all fulfill their expectations. As we shall see in the section on the Suffering Servant, the Jews did not connect the Messiah with suffering and defeat, but with their opposites. Evangelical Michael Green concedes the point: “The title Messiah was inadequate and possessed political implications which had nothing to do with Jesus’ mission.”8
Not all Old Testament books are consistently strong in messianic expectation. Indeed, many of the prophets emphasize the nonmessianic concept that only Yahweh can be the king of Israel. Jeremiah, for example, removes all superlative characteristics from the Messiah, declares that Yahweh is king (10:10), and refers to the Messiah as simply a just and wise king. Ezekiel’s messianism is probably the weakest: the Messiah will have no universal reign, and his stature is reduced to that of a prince, for only Yahweh can be king. For Second Isaiah (chapters 40 ff.) Cyrus is already Yahweh’s “anointed one” and again Yahweh himself is king. Yahweh himself declares: “I am God, and there is no other” (45:2). As we shall see subsequently, the Suffering Servant in
Isaiah 52-53 cannot be the Messiah and was not taken as messianic by later prophets.
The messianic passage in Micah 5 is consistently misinterpreted. A Davidic ruler will simply rise from Ephrathah; there is no direct statement that he will be born there. The woman in labor is probably symbolic of Israel, and definitely not the Virgin Mary. Finally, the phrase “from ancient days” refers to the time of the original monarchy and not to any metaphysical preexistence.
As one Bible scholar phrases it: “Neither the Old Testament nor later Judaism seems to hold that the Messiah really existed before his actual appearance.” Like Micah 5, Isaiah 7:14 still receives
exaggerated attention from those who refuse to see the prophecy in context. The future child will come in the prophet’s own time; and Isaiah predicts that before the child is weaned, the enemies
of Israel will be defeated. Even though some evangelicals hold out doggedly for the traditional interpretation, the “young woman” is not a virgin and definitely not the Mary of the New Testament.
One might reply that the reason for the apparent confusion between Messiah as king and Yahweh as king is that the Messiah is in fact Yahweh incarnate. There are, however, many problems with this view. First, this interpretation is paganistic through and through. Jewish messianism in its highest form stayed clear of the Canaanite idea of divine kings and of their being sired by gods through miraculous conceptions. Such an idea would have been a clear violation of what I have called the Hebraic principle. Second, there is no explicit reference in the Old Testament which supports the divinity of the Messiah. Evangelicals point to some of the Psalms for support, but close scrutiny of them reveals a very weak hypothesis indeed.
In Psalm 45:6 the Messiah’s throne is a “divine” throne; but this means only that it is established by God, not that the Messiah himself is divine. As in the rest of the Old Testament, there is a clear distinction between the Messiah and God: “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you” (v. 7); or the Anchor Bible makes it even clearer: “The eternal, everlasting God has enthroned you.” The same is true for Psalm 110 which is also frequently cited. There is nothing which indicates that the Israelite king mentioned is a divine being; indeed, the two figures “The Lord” and “my lord” are two distinct entities. It is also God who performs the messianic action not the king, which is again support for the view that only Yahweh could be the true Messiah. Furthermore, the scene is not in heaven at all: during Israelite coronations the king was seated at the right hand of a present, but invisible Lord. As the Anchor Bible translator Mitchell Dahood concludes: “In biblical literature…no claims are made for the king’s divinity.”11
There is one famous passage which appears to directly impute divinity to the Messiah: “His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God…” (Is. 9:6). But even Luther knew Hebrew grammar well enough to avoid deifying the Messiah and translated ‘el gibbor as “strength hero” (Kraft–Held). In many places in the Old Testament the divine word ‘el is used to make a superlative. The harere ‘el of the psalms (36:3; 50:10; 68:16) are definitely not divine mountains, but “towering mountains”; the ‘arze ‘el are certainly not divine cedars, but “towering cedars.” Therefore, ‘el gibbor of Isaiah 9:6 is not “Mighty God” but “divine in might,” matching the other superlative yet human characteristics of the Messiah. The New English Bible is more correct: And he shall be called in purpose wonderful, in battle Godlike, Father for all time, Prince of peace.” following the tradition that only Yahweh could be Messiah, Michael Arnheim translates it this way:
“A wonderful counselor is mighty God, an eternal father is the prince of peace.”12
Finally, there is the question whether Jesus himself claimed the title of Messiah. There is no doubt that the early church believed this: the infancy narratives and other claims of alleged messianic prophecy fulfilled are proof of this. But Jesus’ own words indicate a real hesitancy about the title–e.g., his order of silence in response to Peter’s confession (Mk. 8:29; Lk. 9:20) and his indirect answer to the high priest (Mt. 26:64). One of the main hypotheses of Michael Arnheim’s Is Christianity True? is that Jesus’ hesitation about the title clearly shows that he knew that his ministry did not fulfill Jewish expectations. Perhaps Luke sensed this when he seems to imply that Jesus will not be proclaimed Messiah until his return to earth (Acts 3:20-21). (Indeed, the idea of the Second Coming is obviously based on the fact that Jesus did not “get it right” the first time.) There is also the idea, expressed again by Luke (Acts 2:36; cf. 5:31), that Jesus was not made Messiah until his Resurrection. Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown summarizes the textual-critical problem: “We have seen that in the Gospels there is insufficient evidence that Jesus claimed the title Messiah or that he fully accepted it when it was offered him.”13
JESUS AS SON OF GOD
It is truly ironic that the title “Son of God,” which Jesus was most willing to share with all who were saved, should be taken by orthodox Christians as a unique title for Jesus. Because Jesus uses the term in this way, he cannot mean “sons of God” in the sense of bene ‘elohim, i.e., the subordinate deities in Yahweh’s divine council.14 He must mean it in the adoptive sense in which it is used in the Old Testament. This meaning of “son of God” found in Exodus 4:22 and Hosea 1:10 where the people of Israel are all “sons of the living God.” David, Saul, and even Adam (Lk. 3:38) are “sons of God”; even the peacemakers “shall be sons of God” (Matt. 5:9; cf. Jn. 1:12). It is not surprising then to learn that “there is no published, pre-Christian evidence for ‘Son of God’ as a title for the Davidic Messiah.”15
It is held that one of the reasons that Jesus can be called the unique Son of God is that he called God abba (“daddy”). This appears in passages that are all considered to be authentic sayings of Jesus. But Raymond Brown has answered that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray to Abba in the Lord’s prayer, an equally well-attested text.16 In Mark Jesus does not refer to “my Father” at all, and the phrase occurs only four times in Luke. It appears frequently in Matthew, but Jesus adds “your Father” four times (5:15, 45, 48; 18:14). Even John, who speaks of Jesus as God’s only Son, has the saying “I am ascending to my Father and your Father” (20:17). Brown puts the point bluntly: “What right has the Synoptic exegete to assume that ‘my Father’ implies a more intimate relationship to God than ‘your Father’ implies?”17 There is no question that the early church did indeed believe that Jesus was the unique Son of God, but again we cannot be sure if Jesus really held this of himself.
An early alternative to divine sonship was the idea that, in contrast to all other sons of God, only Jesus fulfilled the filial obligation of perfect obedience, an obedience “even unto death.”
This is the fundamental insight of the so-called “adoptionistic” Christology which many early Christians held. “Adoptionists” believed that Jesus was a man who was adopted by God at his baptism and who then fulfilled his filial relationship perfectly by his suffering and death. Luke is the best scriptural source for an adoptionistic Christology. Christians who used the “Western” text of Luke were particularly inclined to adoptionism. This text uses the exact wording of the adoptionism of Psalm 2:7.18 Luke speaks of Jesus as a prophet, a man approved by God (Acts 2:22) and as definitely subordinate to God. God raises Jesus from the dead and God “has made him both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36). Note that God is active and the subordinate Jesus is passive.
The Book of Hebrews is another solid source for a subordinate Jesus, who rises in stature as he fulfills his mission. Jesus “was made lower than the angels” (2:9), but after “he had made purification for sins,” he became “much superior to angels” (1:3-4). Jesus had to be made like us “in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful priest in the service of God…”(2:17). This passage clinches our subordinationist interpretation: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be a high priest, just like Melchizadek” (5:18-20, NIV).
Commenting on Hebrews 2:10, evangelical G. R. Lewis cannot help but confirm this developmental view of Christ: “The divine-human author of our salvation…was made perfect or complete through suffering….”19 The orthodox creeds declare of course that Jesus was fully God and therefore perfect from eternity. The textual-critical challenge is even more pointed in the Anchor Bible Hebrews, where G. W. Buchanan concludes that the MSS. which imply that the Son is purified of his sins are to be preferred. (After all, he was made like us “in every respect.”) The doctrine of Christ’s sinlessness was not yet in place, so the author “described the Son as a king who would be purified…before he ascended his throne….Once purified, he was without sin (4:5).”20
Here again we see the unorthodox, developmental view of Jesus as the adopted Son of God.
As there is only one verse in Paul’s writings which might indicate Jesus’ divinity (Ro. 9:5), an adoptionistic Pauline Christology is not inconceivable. Such a view has been best expressed by Frances Young in The Myth of God Incarnate. (It is ironic that Young is the only author whom Michael Green praises in The Truth of God Incarnate; but it is she who devastates the biblical argument for a literal Incarnation.) Young contends that the orthodox incarnation is read into, not out of, the genuine Pauline epistles. If there is a doctrine of incarnation, it is of Christ in us rather than God literally in Christ. Arguing that a real son is not necessary to produce adopted sons, Young proposes that Paul saw Christ as the truly obedient son, the Second Adam as the true image of God, the perfect “man from heaven,” to whom the “dust” men conform and in whom they find their true sonship. As Young states: “…his Sonship to God is not expressed in terms of ‘divine nature,’ …but his own perfect obedience in doing God’s work and obeying God’s will.”21
Young concedes that Paul does speak of Christ’s preexistence, but this does not necessarily mean that Jesus was God. Keeping what I have called the Hebraic principle in mind, it would be natural for Jewish Christians to think of the pre-existent Christ as an angel, a “man of heaven.” Such an “angel” Christology is found in Justin Martyr and the Shepherd of Hermas and it culminated in Arianism, the most famous subordinationist Christology in church history.22
JESUS AS GOD
It is certainly true that there are passages in the New Testament which seem to support the view that Jesus was the divine Son of God. It is significant, however, that none of these are found in the Synoptic Gospels and only one, even that disputed, is found in the genuine Pauline epistles. Brown lists three “clear instances” (in which Jesus is called theos) and five other instances of “probable certainty.”23 One of these is Hebrews 1:8 in which the author appears to identify Jesus with God in Psalm 45:7. We have already seen that Christian writers have been mistaken in seeing a divine messiah here; and G. W. Buchanan believes that the author of Hebrews, Oscar Cullman and Raymond Brown notwithstanding, did not make this mistake. Buchanan’s case is especially strong if he can persuade other scholars that Hebrews does not support Christ’s sinlessness; but the book’s incontrovertible subordinationist and developmentalist elements would at least make it an inconsistent witness to a divine Son. Furthermore, if Hebrews was inspired by Philo and Alexandrian Judaism, then the author, even though he argues that Jesus is superior to the angels, would have most likely carried over the Wisdom tradition’s idea of Sophia as a separate and subordinate mediator.
Assuming that scholars can agree on Brown’s “clear instances,” of divinity, such a Christology is not necessarily the one of Nicea or Chalcedon. Even the author(s) of John, who
appears to identify Jesus and God as the same being in the first verse, still preserves a difference between God and Jesus. At the end of the famous first chapter, the author states that “no man
has ever seen God,” an expression of the Hebraic principle that is repeated frequently (5:37, 6:46; 1 Jn. 4:12; 1 Tim. 6:16). The clear implication here is that Jesus is not identical in substance with God. Furthermore, Jesus’ answer to Pilate definitely indicates that he sees himself as separate from the divine power above (Jn. 19:11). Brown’s conclusion is that the New Testament does refer to Jesus as a divine being three times, but it does not explicitly make him identical to God: “Jn. 1:1 is bordering on the usage of ‘God’ for the Son, but by omitting the article it avoids any suggestion of personal identification of the Word with the Father.”24
Of all the evangelicals I have read, it is Stuart Hackett who faces the challenge of subordinationism head-on. He concedes that we cannot ignore these passages, especially as they appear in those books like John where Jesus’ deity is best attested. Using his principle of rational coherence, which includes the assumption that the New Testament writers would not knowingly contradict themselves, Hackett proposes that all subordinationist or developmentalist passages must refer to Christ’s “office” and not his “essence.”25 I believe that this solution demands too much of texts we know have been worked over by editors. Hackett must also face the problem of the absence of any high Christology in the Synoptic Gospels.
A more plausible alternative is that the subordinationism of John is “essential”; and it is due to earlier materials (which we have seen to be more accurate than the Synoptics) being joined with later material like the advanced theology of the Prologue. Even with their commitment to critical-historical methods, evangelicals like Hackett choose rationalist harmonizing rather than a more scientific reading of their scripture. Finally, Hackett claims that Christians would have found it blasphemous to worship a subordinate deity. If early Christians were indeed worshiping Jesus as a literal man-God, then they had already lost any scruples about violating the Hebraic principle.
JESUS AS SON OF MAN
Scholars have gone back and forth about whether Jesus meant the christological title “Son of Man” to be a self-designation; for in places Jesus speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, e.g., “…you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. 10:23). Liberal scholars have traditionally concluded that the early church made the title selfdesignating as part of their general deification and exaltation of the human prophet of the Kingdom of God. Morna Hooker, however, has done a full-length study of the topic and she sides with conservatives in concluding that Jesus himself meant the term as a self-designation.26 If this is the case, then it would be an embarrassing truth: Son of Man is not a title of any kind in the Old Testament.
In most instances the term “son of Man” is simply another way of saying “man” or “O man.” Only in late Judaism does this phrase take on soteriological meaning, and then only on the basis of a misreading of the main text: Daniel 7:13ff. In Daniel’s vision of the four beasts, there finally comes “one like a son of man” who is presented before God in heaven. The first mistake of later
Jews and Christians (including Jesus himself) is that they made a poetic phrase, a simile, into a messianic title. The Anchor Bible translation as “one in human likeness” removes the possibility that it is to be taken as a title. As the translators state: “In Daniel 7 the symbolic manlike figure has no messianic meaning, except perhaps as connected with messianism in the broad sense i.e., saving the people of Israel.”27
The second mistake, related to the first, is that the symbolic figure really represents the saints of Israel (v. 18ff.) and it is God who saves, not the so-called “Son of Man.” Furthermore, all the saints are being exalted, not just one person. Finally, these saints are going up to heaven; the “Son of Man” is not coming to earth to judge as Jesus predicts in the New Testament. As T. W. Manson states: “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that what Daniel portrays is not a divine, semi-divine, or angelic figure coming down from heaven to bring deliverance, but a human figure corporately as saints going up to heaven to receive it.”28 Even in the noncanonical Enoch, where the term is a christological title, the Son of Man stays with God after coming up and being exalted.
Evangelical R. G. Gruenler is correct in observing that the figure in vv. 13-14 appears to be an individual. He therefore proposes that Jesus used Daniel 7 to show that his salvation would be both individual and corporate, the latter being most evident in passages which identify the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God. This is an interesting solution but it takes many liberties with both Daniel and the New Testament. The visionary figure of “one in human likeness” appears as an individual but this is explicitly interpreted as a corporate body of saints. Gruenler’s final words about his interpretation reveal that it is more fideistic and dialectical than scientific: “Hence the irony and mystery of Jesus’ favorite title, Son of Man, which both reveals and conceals and is penetrated only by the eyes of faith and obedient response.”29
JESUS AS SUFFERING SERVANT
The identity of the Servant in Second Isaiah has occupied scores of scholars for many decades. The proposed candidates are legion: the Servant is Israel as a whole, a saintly remnant, an ideal nation of the future, a past historical figure (Moses, Cyrus, Isaiah himself), a future historical figure (Jesus favored here of course), and finally, an ideal figure. Again we find ourselves in the precarious position of drawing theological implications from ancient and obscure poetry. In his Anchor Bible commentary John L. McKenzie summarily rejects the Christian
interpretation of the Servant Songs and favors the ideal figure with a corporate personality. Such a view would include the ideas of individual and group as well as past, present, and future events. McKenzie admits that his theory does not explain the references to the vicarious atonement and resurrection of the Servant; but as far as I know, no other theory does this either, not even the Christian view.
If one reads Isaiah 52-53 in context, the first conclusion one must draw is that the Suffering Servant is not the Messiah. The author has already declared that Cyrus is the Lord’s “anointed” (45:1). (Nowhere do we read that the Servant is “anointed.”) Even though this messiahship is different in crucial respects–Cyrus is a non-Israelite and he does not “know” Yahweh–it would seem strange for Deutero-Isaiah to have proclaimed two messiahs. Later Jewish prophets and the tradition as a whole did not link the Servant with the Messiah. Indeed, later prophets without exception ignored the Servant. As John McKenzie states: “The Servant is clearly not the King-Messiah; his mission is not conceived in this way, and the images are not the same. Whether
Isaiah meant to replace the King-Messiah by the Servant is not explicit, but it is hinted.”30
There is one Jewish commentary on Isaiah which does link the Servant and the Messiah. This is the Targum of Jonathan, which, although the MS. dates from the 5th Century C.E., may reflect a much earlier tradition. The Targum does identify the Servant with the Messiah, but imputes all suffering to either Israel or the Gentiles:
Then shall the glory of all the kingdoms be despised
and come to an end; they shall be infirm and sick
even as a man of sorrows and as one destined for
sicknesses…they shall be despised and of no account.
Then he shall pray on behalf of our transgressions
and our iniquities shall be pardoned for his sake,
though we were accounted smitten, stricken
before the Lord, and afflicted.31
It is clear that it is the people as a whole who suffer–they are the Suffering Servant–not the Messiah.
Close scrutiny of the Servant passages reveals that the Servant cannot be Jesus, if we are to read scripture as the evangelicals want us to. Jesus was not disfigured beyond human recognition (52:14). Jesus was not “one from whom men hide their faces” (53:3). Jesus was not “stricken, smitten by God” (53:4), unless we accept Green’s untraditional notion that God was crushed in the Crucifixion. Jesus did open his mouth; the servant does not (53:7). Jesus answered, albeit briefly, questions at his trial. During his passion he spoke to the “daughters of Jerusalem” (Lk. 23:28), to the good robber, to his mother, to John, and the people in general. Jesus was not buried in a felon’s grave (53:9), but allegedly in a rich man’s tomb.32 The Servant’s days are prolonged (53:10), but Jesus’ days are not. If this means earthly days, as the phrase is commonly taken, then it cannot apply to Jesus.
In her book Jesus and the Servant Morna Hooker has shown that vicarious atonement by a single individual for all people was alien to the Hebrew mind. The idea of the corporate personality was embedded in the Hebrew mentality. The Old Testament writers switch from the singular to the plural and vice versa with the greatest of ease, even within the space of two verses (e.g., Hos. 11:1-2). Hooker’s comparative study of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah shows similar themes and a theology that tends to support the corporate understanding of redemption. The suffering appears to be in the past and therefore represents the suffering of Israel, not some future suffering figure. Within the context of Isaiah’s universalism (the nations are speaking at the beginning of Is. 53), Hooker identifies the Servant as suffering Israel, atoning for the sins of all. (The Targum of Jonathan mentioned above confirms that this was a general Jewish belief.)
Like most biblical interpretations, there are certain weaknesses in both Hooker’s and McKenzie’s accounts. The principal one is that the people of Israel could not serve as a literal
sacrifice (‘asham). First, the ‘asham had to be spotless and without blemish; and second, the ‘asham, at least according to Hebrew practices, could not be a human being or group of human beings. This is a serious hermeneutical problem, but it also poses a challenge, at least on the point of human sacrifice, to the orthodox interpretation of the Servant. Conservative commentators do have grounds to speak of the resurrection of the Servant (cf. 53:9*10), but this again might be seen as the revival of Israel itself.
In this section I have shown that the traditional interpretation that the Suffering Servant foreshadows Jesus, let alone the Messiah, is not supported. As we look back at the entire discussion of christological titles, we find that none of them are compatible with Old Testament understanding or expectation, except perhaps the adoptionistic reading of “Son of God.” Evangelical D. H. Wallace honestly recognizes that messianic expectations were “diffuse”; that there were no clear connections between Messiah, Suffering Servant, and Son of Man; and that Jesus avoided the title Messiah because of its political implications.33 The traditional connections between the Old and New Testaments are therefore considerably jeopardized.
I have shown that orthodox Christology not only has shaky New Testament foundations but that there is a significant theological gap between Jewish and Christian understanding of salvation.
(Only the tenuous ad hoc axiom of “progressive” revelation can begin to bridge this gap.) The Jews, then, had every reason to reject Jesus as the Messiah, and if Jesus indeed claimed to be the
divine son of God, then the Jews were justified in their charges of blasphemy (Jn. 10:34). As J. M. Ford states: “There is no Jewish tradition of a divine-human Messiah.”34 Early Christians joined world paganism, and betrayed traditional Judaism, by making a preexistent man-God the center of their religion.
ENDNOTES
1. Kee, Howard C., Jesus in History (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 2nd ed., 1977).
2. Vermes, Geza, “The Gospels without Christology,” God Incarnate: Story and Belief, ed. A.E. Harvey (London, SPCK, 1981).
3. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Jesus and the Law.” Paper presented at “Jesus in History and Myth” (University of Michigan, April, 1985).
4. Stott, John R.W., Basic Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972).
5. Perrin, Norman, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1974).
6. Pontifical Biblical Commission (April 21, 1964), quoted in Raymond E. Brown, Jesus: God and Man (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1967).
7. Pannenberg, Wolfhart, “A Liberal Logos Christology,” John Cobb’s Theology in Process, eds. Altizer and Griffin. He clearly rejects “the old dogmatic view of an immediate divine presence in [Jesus]” (p. 143).
8. Green, Michael, The Truth of God Incarnate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977).
9. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G.A. Buttrick, vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1962).
10. Isaiah uses the Hebrew word for virgin (betulah) five times but chooses ‘almah, meaning a young woman of marriageable age, for this verse. Marvin H. Pope refers to a privately printed paper by W. S. La Sor which makes it “abundantly clear that the term ‘almah does not mean ‘virgin'” (The Anchor Bible: Job, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973). Evangelical Michael Green again concedes the point: “Virgin births did not figure in the religious concept of a Jew. He knew that the word translated ‘virgin’ in that Isaiah passage, ‘almah, meant merely ‘young woman'” (The Truth of God Incarnate, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977).
11. Dahood, Mitchell, The Anchor Psalms, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1966).
12. Arnheim, Michael, Is Christianity True? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984). Even conservatives Keil and Delitzsch have to admit that their own traditional interpretation of this passage “appears to go beyond the bounds of the Old Testament horizon” (Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 7, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976).
13. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
14. Curiously enough, Jesus does refer to Psalm 82 in answering the charges of the Jewish mob which attempts to stone him for blasphemy (Jn. 10:34). Jesus, like all Jews who knew the scripture well, should have interpreted the ‘elohim in Psalm 82 as men, but then, oddly enough, used the phrase “You are gods” (v. 6) as a way of proving that men can also be gods. Modern scholarship has confirmed that the ‘elohim are deities whom Yahweh has dethroned for misadministration of their nations (see Dt. 32:8) and has punished by making them into men. See Gerald Cooke, “The Sons of (the) God(s)”, Zeitschrift fur Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 76 (1964); The Anchor Judges, p. 27f.; Julian Morgenstern, “The Mythological Background of Ps. 82”, (Hebrew Union College Annual 14, 1939); and The Anchor Psalms, vol. 2, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1968). For more on Hebrew henotheism see www.class.uidaho.edu/ ngier/henotheism.htm
15. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
16. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
17. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). Brown supports Jeremiahs’ theory that the famous “No one knows the Son except the Father…” (Mt. 11:27; Lk. 10:22) was originally a parable, so it cannot be confidently taken as an instance of self-designation unless Jesus meant it as an allegory about himself.
18. See Frederick C. Grant, The Gospels: Their Origin and Growth (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1957) for a reconstruction of Luke’s original baptism story. Brown believes that an adoptionistic Christology based on obedience and some special revelation at Jesus’ baptism has, at least in the Gospels, insufficient and unconvincing support.
19. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984).
20. Buchanan, G.W., The Anchor Bible: To the Hebrews (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Co., 1972).
21. Young, Francis, “A Cloud of Witness,” The Myth of God Incarnate.
22. See Robert C. Grant, Early Christian Doctrine of God (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1966). John Cobb gives this rationale for the angel Christology: “In the context of the two-story view the angel Christology was conceptually quite clear. First, the existence of heavenly created beings among whom one was superior to the others was perfectly acceptable. Second, it was understandable that these beings could take human form and appear on earth and then subsequently return to their heavenly place. The language used, of God’s sending his Son into the world and then exalting him, expresses this understanding” (Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1975).
23. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). “Jesus is never called God in the Synoptic Gospels, and a passage like Mk. 10:18 would seem to preclude the possibility that Jesus used the title of himself” (p. 30).
24. Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). Brown assumes that the earliest Christians remained committed to the strict separation of God and humans: “The New Testament does not predicate ‘God’ of Jesus with any frequency…For the Jews ‘God’ meant the heavenly Father; and until a wider understanding of the term was reached it could not be readily applied to Jesus” (ibid.). Bruce Vawter agrees: “Here ‘God’ is used predicatively, without the article: the Word, whom he has just distinguished from the Person of God, is nevertheless a divine being in his own right” (The Four Gospels: An Introduction, vol. 1, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). Protestant Howard Kee also agrees that there is no identity between the Johannine logos and God (op. cit., p. 244). Brown argues that Moffatt’s translation “the Word was divine” is too weak. If the author intended this, then the word theios would have been used instead (Jesus: God and Man, p. 26).
25. Hackett, Stuart, The Reconstruction of Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984).
26. Hooker, Morna, The Son of Man in Mark (Montreal, Canada: McGill University Press, 1971). Hooker is another example of admirable scholarly integrity. In this book she goes against her liberal colleagues, but in her Jesus and the Servant she follows the historical-grammatical method to a very radical conclusion.
27. Hartman, Louis F. and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Anchor Bible: The Book of Daniel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1978). Evangelical Dewey Beegle is quite correct in concluding that this prediction, like all other Old Testament prophecies, was “short-range” in its intent (Scripture, Authority, and Infallibility [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 1973]).
28. T. W. Manson, “Son of Man in Daniel, Enoch, and the Gospels,” p. 174. Hartman and Di Lella observe that “the Son of Man did not descend or come from God…but rather he ascended or came to God and was brought into his presence” (op. cit., p. 102). Dennis C. Duling concurs: “The apocalyptic son of man, though sometimes pictured as preexistent by late Judaism, was never considered in Jewish texts to descend to earth” (Jesus Christ Through History, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1979). Incidentally, Norman Geisler’s view that God and the Son of Man are identified in v. 22 has no exegetical basis whatever (Christian Apologetics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1976).
29. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984).
30. McKenzie, John L, The Anchor Bible: Second Isaiah (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). J. B. Payne’s attempt to prove that the Jewish Messiah was connected with suffering and humiliation is an unfortunate display of rationalist harmonizing. I simply do not understand his use of Is. 7:15; the “anointed one…cut off” in Dan. 9:26 “refers almost certainly to the murder of high priest Onias III in 171 B.C.E.” (The Anchor Daniel, p. 252); and the “triumphant and victorious” Messiah of Zech. 9:9 is “humble” not humiliated. See Payne’s entry in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, p. 1007, first column.
31. Quoted in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3, ed. G.A. Buttrick (Nashville. TN: Abingdon, 1962). Evangelical D. H. Wallace concedes that because of the late date of the Targums one cannot assume that the Servant was made Messiah in the intertestamental period. (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984]).
32. The RSV has an ambiguous “grave with the wicked and with a rich man…,” which Payne of course exploits; but McKenzie believes that “rich man” was a conjectural emendation (op. cit., p. 130).
33. See Wallace’s entry in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, p. 711, first column.
34. Ford, J. Massynberde, The Anchor Bible: Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975).