Edgework

We have already identified the Modern Era as roughly encompassing the 17th to the 20th centuries. Before this period, most European theologians were content to base their thinking and writing on the religious authority that had held sway through the Roman Catholic Church for well over a millennium.

But the Protestant Reformation, initiated by Martin Luther and expanded by John Calvin in the early 16th century, cast serious doubt on the validity of this authority and it began developing some of its own foundational ideas about truth.

By the beginning of the 17th century these competing authorities were embroiled in open and devastating conflict. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), largely a battle between the various religious factions, was particularly brutal. It was in this chaotic context that the French philosopher René Descarte (1596-1650) spearheaded a search for new and better foundations upon which to build society. According to Rodney Clapp in A Peculiar People: the Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (1996), “Ðescarte sought a secular, or nonecclesial, foundation of knowledge that rested on ground beyond time and place. This turned out to be his famous cogito ergo sum- ‘I think, therefore I am.’…Without recourse to the now discredited church, a singular and compelling authority was thereby gained” (142). Doubt became the gateway to discerning truth.

At the same time, in England Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was developing the scientific method as a foundation for discovering truth. Based on this method, researchers proposed hypotheses to explain various phenomena and then developed experimental studies to test them. After repeated successful testing, a new foundational truth could be proclaimed.

Eventually some of these new methods of discovering foundations began to filter down into the world of religious inquiry. Many within the church were troubled as well by the chaotic world in which they lived and also began casting about for new foundations. In their book, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (2001), Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke summarize what happened as follows: “Liberals constructed theology on the foundation of an unassailable religious experience, whereas conservatives looked to an error-free Bible as the incontrovertible foundation of their theology” (23).

It was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) who championed the liberal cause. As others joined him, they began to speak of the Bible as a historical record of the progressive religious experiences of human beings. So for liberals the biblical text was less concerned with doctrine than with connecting us with experiences behind the text. Liberals felt that modern people could and should connect with such foundational experiences.

On the conservative side, it was Charles Hodge (1797-1878) who set the tone for what would become the basis for evangelical thinking for most of the 20th century. He simply declared an error-free Bible to be the foundation upon which all truth rests. For him the goal of theology was to amass all true biblical statements which were understood as factual propositions. Then, using the scientific method developed in earlier centuries, compile “…one, complete, timeless body of right doctrines…each of which is true in its own right” (Grenz, 37).  So the biblical text was used to get behind it to discover foundational truths which offer guidance to modern readers. Thus it was considered possible to determine what the whole Bible teaches about any given topic – a systematic theology, if you wish. Undergirding this conservative fundamentalism was the understanding that since we are created in the image of God we are capable of thinking God’s thoughts after him by the use of enlightenment-style logic. So in that way it was possible, according to conservatives, to establish universal, foundational truths that were ultimately rooted in the mind and nature of the Creator.

The results were remarkable. In different ways, both liberals and conservatives were able to respond to the challenges of secular thought that wanted to dismiss Christian faith because of what skeptics thought to be its shaky foundation.  “Although the liberals and conservatives routinely dismiss each other’s work, they share the single agenda of seeking to maintain the credibility of Christianity within a culture that glorifies reason and deifies science” (Grenz, 37).

So where did these movements leave the Bible?  The liberals saw the biblical text as a human record containing both truth and error. But they were convinced that the Spirit would help them discern the experiential truth that lay behind the text.  In that sense the Bible came to be read not so much as text, but as an inspiring chronicle of human religious experiences. But just as this project was finding its stride it adopted another agenda – that of determining by way of the historical-critical method which of the texts were historically valid and which were illegitimate accretions. This way they could piece together what in fact was the true history of the ancient faith communities. And so, along the way, the biblical text as it stands, received less and less attention. This was, perhaps, an unintended outcome but one that would be hard to reverse.

On the conservative side, to the surprise of many, the biblical text eventually came to be less and less important in the life of individual Christians and the gathered church community as well.  In their attempts to extract all the teachings of the Bible, conservatives diligently crisscrossed the biblical text looking for bits of information to use to assemble a true systematic theology which they assumed constituted “…all the counsel of God” (Acts. 20:27). Once this project had been more or less completed by theological heavy-weights, what point was there to reading a text to find meaning, when that meaning had already been harvested by other more qualified individuals. Why not just consult their works to see what conclusions they had come to.  And so, despite a valiant attempt to make the biblical text a solid foundation, the conservative approach also contributed to the silencing of the text in the church.