Three Types of Critiques - What Christianity is Really About
With due respect to the scholarly effort at reconciling faith and reason, and the very desirable proposal of combatting anti-intellectualism in certain approaches to the Christian Faith, I think the era of grand rational critiques of the Faith has already passed in Western Europe, has hardly arrived in the US, and probably will never come in HK. I speak in very broad terms; but let me try to explain my thesis in two parts.
In the first part I shall deal with two major types of rational critiques, to answer which it has been the central enterprise of the faith versus reason discourse. In the second part I shall outline a third type of critique, also prominent in the past, but much less so in HK, and whose force I think truly addresses the question, What Christianity is really about. I shall conclude with some general remarks.
(1) Two types of grand rational critiques
When we look back at the modern history of Western Europe - starting say in the early 17th century - we tend to identify two broad types of rational critiques of Christianity: the philosophical, and the natural-scientific. This is not the place to discourse on the subtle varieties of the two types, but by the first I mean attempts like Kant's to show the futility of proving God's existence by human reason, and by the second I mean general recognitions that advances in the natural sciences - iconized by such names as Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Wallace - seem to contradict and disprove certain assertions in the Bible. Other rational critiques might take a hibrid form: Bacon's proposal to explain the physical world as if it were a self-sufficient machine essentially made God redundant in his epistemology.
The philosophical critique and the natural-scientific critique flourished in their days because the rise of critical philosophy and the rise of the natural sciences - which nourished each other in many different ways - represented the central challenge to ecclesiatical power. Epistemological questions were consequential because in a time when the legitimacy of (old and new) knowledge was increasingly called into question, whoever could prevail over an epistemological claim would prevail in something much more significant, namely, social power. The social setting of early modern Western Europe made epistemology the central domain - to use Schmitt's term.
In the present-day US, there are no doubt hints pointing to the rise of conservative evangelicalism which fiercely denies evolutionary theories, etc. At the same time, however, US society has basically accepted the terms of modern science (however reluctantly in some areas); the sheer inertia of this modernity must strongly distinguish its social setting from that of early modern Western Europe.
If the situation in the US is still debatable, that in HK, I would say, suggests clearly a society in which neither Christians nor non-Christians would (mostly) see any great import in philosophical and natural-scientific critiques beyond the personal level. Some might be bothered by this question or that argument; but in a way, and seen from afar, these questions and arguments are largely repetitions of a certain well-established mode of discourse on the Christian Faith. Free-will versus determinism; evolution versus creationism; etc., etc. This mode is very much a remnant of the early modern Western European experience, but not at all rooted in the local historical experience of HK. No historical imprints of religious wars; no historical imprints of fierce Enlightenment epistemological battles; no historical imprints of the grand disillusion of God's nullity after the First World War, the rational critiques of the Christian Faith in HK have some strangeness to it. Standard questions with standard answers - sometimes made more sophisticated by further references to Western literature - but in most cases they carry little import in themselves. I would imagine that a student growing up in Germany cannot avoid some talk of Kant or Hegel in his or her education and social intercourse(taking the normal case here); for the struggle between reason and faith, or state and church, or what not, is a real part of his or her country's history. A student growing up in HK reads of these things as a far away observer. In such a setting, the rational critiques are in a serious sense avoidable - and evangelicalism in HK has very much promoted the avoiding of them in many quarters. The social setting is, I stress, not dispositive of the triumph of anti-intellectualism; though I think a sociology of this sort might shed some happy light on the character of Christian discourse in the region.
(2) A third type of critique
The character of the Christian discourse in HK also reflects, in a deeper manner, the way the Faith is presented to the HK people via the many churches and sects (given the multiplicity, I can again only speak in broad terms). In brief, the Faith appears as an individual spiritual experience which stands, sometimes, in subtle antagonism to "philosophy" and "science."
Please do not mistake me as suggesting that those preaching the Faith are themselves anti-philosophy or anti-science. Quite the contrary. Those who preach - or share - the Faith often embrace philosophical and scientific challenges, and try to answer them, responsibly and bravely. In the process, in their interaction with both believers and non-believers, however, they have subtly introduced a discursive GRID to the audience, which limits challenges to the Faith to these two domains: philosophy and science. Even many non-believers, I should say, have accepted this grid unconsciously; to their mind, the Faith faces constantly two - and only two - kinds of challenges, and in these two domains they are supposed to think, to argue, and to proceed. Hence the many attempts by non-believers to raise "questions about evil" or "critiques from evolutionism", and the many answers from the other quarter. Tons of essays have been devoted to explaining arguments from design, or how a non-literal interpretation of Genesis might reconcile it with Darwin-Wallace. These are all fine. But there is the grid.
The grid shapes the character of the Faith deeply. For both critiques - the philosophical and the scientific - invite a sort of speculative response; the exercise becomes one of trying to think through the various terms and symbols, abstract propositions and idiosyncratic preferences, so that the Bible might appear not in opposition to these challenges. This is the classic enterprise of resolving tension between faith and reason.
But the Christian Faith is not simply a rationalizable faith. The central claim of it, if we may put it bluntly, is HISTORICAL. It claims that certain things happened in human history, which have been faithfully recorded by certain books, and which represent an epoch-making - if not the - truth.
No Christian, I think, can deny this broad characterization of the Faith. The Bible - whether it be inspired by God or not - is first and foremost a set of historical documents, of historical value, for they record historically important events, and can and should be adjudged as such. No Christian, well-informed, can, further, deny that the New Testament was not dropped from Heaven, but was selected and canonized, authoritatively, by church councils at least two centuries after the death of Jesus. The New Testament - itself a set of books selected out of a much larger set then in common circulation - can be viewed to present some great claims about Jesus, his life and death, and the significance of him in relation to the Hebrew Bible. If the relationship holds true, then the Christian Faith is FULLY vindicated - regardless of any critique from philosophy or natural science. But how can this relationship - the great claims themselves - be vindicated?
It cannot be vindicated by personal experience, nor philosophy, nor natural science, nor anything except HISTORY and HISTORICAL HERMENEUTICS. I single out personal experience in particular because many evangelicals urge believers and non-believers alike to base their faith upon their experience of God. This is not only WRONG, but goes in fact against the very nature of the Christian Faith itself.
For if the Faith is vindicated by appealing to personal experience, there is in fact no need to record the historical events in the first place. Second, a person living in a different religious environment would have attributed that experience to another God, or God by another name, and so forth. The Gospels themselves, in setting forth the historical events, are meant to convince the reader of the credibility of the Faith as a claim to HISTORICAL TRUTH. History was so and so, and you should believe. The claim is no different from those made in any other historical account - like the madness of the Roman Emperor Caligula, or the cruelty of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilatus. Otherwise, why need the Gospels be seen as testimonies, and the authors themselves as witnesses?
Like as a judge at a court of law need to base his judgment solely on the account - and credibility - of the witnesses available, so should a believer or non-believer base his judgment on the historical credibility of the New Testament in light of all historical materials available.
One might at this point object that, the New Testament being authoritative, why then added I the qualifying clause in the last claim. My reply: because what the Christian should - as he or she would proclaim to - be following is the historical Jesus and his teachings and the God that he proclaimed, but not an image thereof decided upon by groups of men whose authority was, as a matter of historical fact, self-declared. For, how can the Christian be certain whether those men had not distorted Jesus and his teachings out of some political and self-interested concerns? (This query, we submit, is unorthodox; but in a strong sense it is but a natural extension of the Lutheran critique of Roman authority. For if Luther, taking the Faith seriously, asked whether what the Roman Church said to be the Tradition really represented God and not Man, likewise we should ask whether the canonical New Testament really represents the decision of God and not Man. The incompleteness of the Luteran Revolution was, we know, picked up in his Fatherland three centuries later.)
To vindicate the Christian Faith, in light of its very nature, is to vindicate a historical claim. Namely, the claim that Jesus was the Messiah and that he fulfilled the prophecy of the Hebrew Bible. But since the claim is based on notions from the Hebrew Bible, one must start with an hermeneutic enterprise: to read the Hebrew Bible and to determine, to the best he can, what that meant (to Jesus and his generation).
To take seriously the historical nature of the Christian claim, which confesses to the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, it is also to reassess the centrality of another claim to the Christian Faith, namely, that Jesus was resurrected.
The Messiahship of Jesus can only be shown by reference to its criteria as set forth in the Hebrew Bible. If - arguendo - Hebrew Messiahship did not contain the notion that the Messiah must be resurrected, then whether Jesus was really raised the third day would become immaterial. Even if - arguendo - he were resurrected, failing to satisfy all the criteria for Messiahship, he would still be just some very powerful entity or spirit, but not a fulfilment of the Hebrew prophesies; and failing such, any attempt at upholding his Messiahship must entail a denial of the veracity of God's proclamation via the mouth of the Hebrew prophets - a consequence disastrous for the Faith.
The thesis that resurrection is not central to the Christian Faith may look heretical to many believers. But if one takes the nature of the Christian claim seriously - and not start with the centrality of the resurrection itself - one must accept the true centrality of Messiahship, and, given its logical independence from the resurrection (which is to be shown from a careful reading of the Hebrew Bible as well as other relevant documents, and not from speculation), that one must start with that rather than what might have happened on the third day.
Exclusive focus on the resurrection has generally distorted the true claim of the Christian Faith, a claim upon which, we remember, the credibility of the Faith was seen to hinge by many contempories of Jesus. This is how the early Jewish-Christians looked at the Faith, even though the centrality of the resurrection assumed prominence starting with Paul.
(3) Some concluding remarks
The two parts of this thread must seem unconnected. In a way they are. But perhaps one can regard the first as an attempt to historicize the two types of rational critiques that have come to dominate the imagination of Christians in HK (if not elsewhere), whereas the second as an attempt to retrieve the historical nature of the Christian claim. The observant reader must have spotted that what I called the third type of critique is nothing other than the grand tradition of High Textual Criticism beginning with Spinoza, flowering later in 19th century Germany, and spreading its torch in many corners in the 20th.
The mainstream discourse on the Christian faith in HK, largely existing within the grid of the two types of rational critiques, has very much not been introduced, let alone receptive, to the perspective of the third. The many discussions after the viewing of the Passion of the Christ - both for and against - should testify to the situation. But if social setting has some force in shaping the discourse, I should also acknowledge that the third perspective would not flourish in HK either. Whether this is pessimism or not, I leave it to the judgment of the reader.
Y.T.