It is my belief that one of the biggest problem facing North America and especially the Church in Western society is the intrusion of an unhealthy scepticism. Below are some of my thoughts, and more importantly, the thoughts of some others on the topic. I encourage you to spend some time on the quote below, as it is worth your time, even if you have to come back to it. I realize that people do not like to spend their time on long blog entries. We like it compact. As I mentioned, this is a topic of great concern, worthy of much consideration.I had noticed myself, over the last number of years, becoming more and more sceptical. Always questioning. Always making sure to point out the bad with the good, emphasizing the bad. I became less encouraging, and more of something that I call "cold" or "hard-hearted". As a Christian, I became increasingly unable to pray or sing songs of praise to God with any meaning. When someone talked about God working in their life I really questioned it. These were the symptoms.
Something was wrong. Something had changed. It began to bother me that I had trouble connecting with the God that I claimed to have faith in. What was the matter?
It turns out that I had bought in to a philosophy that is incongruent with the gospel. Scepticism's priests, such as David Hume, have claimed that there is no God, that there can be no such thing as a miracle, and that everything must be called into question. Little did I know, but I was buying in to these very principles, without even knowing the philosophy. (I still know little about it. What I do know is from my own personal experience with it, and from some books.)
Of course, I am not saying that we shouldn't call things into question, for that is what I am doing right now. More on this later.
This mistrust of everything leads to a lack of hope and general cheer in life. Once again, I am not calling for an unrealistic approach.
Perhaps it would be good at this point to let someone smarter to jump in. I am looking forward to reading a book called
A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor, that will hopefully clarify my thoughts on the "enlightenment project."
As for books I have read, Alisdair MacIntyre's
After Virtue has become somewhat of a classic when it comes to understanding the failures of the Enlightenment "project", including the thought of sceptics, such as Hume (also see Bertrand Russell's
The Problems of Philosophy as another book of the sceptic's cannon). MacIntyre's book is phenomenal in its displaying of scepticism as unfounded, leading to nihilism (which seems to be a strange theme for this blog), which is expressed in Nietzsche's work. Niezsche, it must be said, carried the conversation to its logical conclusions... either live under God or be a nihilist, or, as expressed in MacIntyre's book: either be an ethical realist (there is goodness and rationality in the universe without man's having created it; man has not constructed nature, but must discover it) or be an ethical constructivist (there is no creator above man, and so there is no one above man who has given absolute truth, or goodness). Nietzsche sides on the ethical constructivist side.
As stated in an earlier entry, Fyodor Dostoyevsky also speaks of these themes, most notably in his
The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan becomes a sort of Enlightenment figure. It takes the cunning of Smerdyakov, the half-brother, to really take to heart the thoughts of Ivan and bring them to their logical conclusion: nihilism.
Along with MacIntyre, Nietzsche, and many others, I have to thank my wife for clearing my head of this muddle, for she has never bought into such cold scepticism. Praise be to God for his mercies.
But the inspiration for this whole blog has been a passage in a book that I have recently been re-reading. I will almost certainly do a review on the book in a later entry. The book is highly recommended.
The following extended quote comes from Lesslie Newbigin's book,
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 227-229. This comes in a section where J.E. Lesslie Newbigin is describing the six characteristics that the church needs in order influence society in a proper, Christ-like way (both as servant to society and uncompromising in it's character). The first and second of Newbigin's points are bellow, with some of my comments in square parenthesis.
1. It [the church] will be a community of praise. that is, perhaps, its most distinctive character. Praise is an activity which is almost totally absent from "modern" society. Here two distinct points can be made.
a. The dominant notes in the development of the specifically "modern" view of things has been (as we noted earlier) the note of scepticism, of doubt. The "hermeneutic of suspicion" is only the most recent manifestation of the belief that one could be saved from error by the systematic exercise of doubt. It has followed that when any person, institution, or tradition has been held up as an object worthy of reverence, it has immediately attracted the attention of those who undertook to demonstrate that there was another side to the picture, that the golden image has feet of clay. I suppose that this is one manifestation of that "disenchantment" which Weber regarded as a key element in the development of "modern" society. Reverence, the attitude which looks up in admiration and love to one who is greater and better than oneself, is generally regarded as something unworthy of those who have "come of age" and who claim that equality is essential to human dignity. With such presuppositions, of course, the very idea of God is ruled out. The Christian congregation, by contrast, is a place where people find their true freedom, their true dignity, and their true equality in reverence to One who is worthy of all the praise that we can offer.
b. Then, too, the Church's praise includes thanksgiving. The Christian congregation meets as a community that acknowledges that it lives by the amazing grace of a boundless kindness. contemporary society speaks much about "human rights." It is uncomfortable with "charity" as something which falls short of "justice," and connects the giving of thanks with an unacceptable subservience. In Christian worship the language of rights is out of place except when it serves to remind us of the rights of others. For ourselves we confes that we cannot speak of rights, for we have been given everythingand forgiven everything and promised everything, so that (as Luther said) we lack nothing except faith to believe it. In Christian worship we acknowledge that if we had received justice instead of charity we would be on our way to perdition. A Christian congregation is thus a body of people with gratitude to spare, a gratitude that can spill over into care for the neighbour. And it is of the essence of the matter that this concern for the neighbour is the overflow of a great gift of grace and not, primarily, the expression of commitment to a morale crusade [This has been the goal of the Enlightenment project, according to MacIntyre in
After Virtue. It is the goodness of God, especially seen in Jesus Christ's removing our sins that is the cause of Christian joy; those who do not believe in miracles, such as the resurrection, cannot have this same view of goodness and are stuck either constructing moral rules (as Hume and Kant did) or denying that all such man-made rules are arbitrary and thus denying them (as Nietzsche did). It is of the essence that Christians discover more and more the deep goodness of God, for it is the antidote to the cold heart that many hate to have, but feel there is no other option.]
2. Second, [the Christian congregation] will be a community of truth. This may seem an obvious point, but it needs to be stressed. As I have tried to show in these chapters, it is essential to recognize that all human thinking takes place within a "plausibility structure" which determinds what beliefs are reasonable and what are not. The reigning plausibility structure can only be effectively challenged by people who are fully integrated inhabitants of the another [meaning that the "modern" structure that
a priori denies miracles, God, etc. must be challenged by another type of thinking, which for Newbigin, is found in the gospel]. Every person living in a "modern" society is subject to an almost continuous bombardment of ideas, images, slogans, and stories which presuppose a plausibility structure radically different from that which is controlled by the Christian understanding of human nature and destiny. The power of contemporary media to shape thought and imagination is very great. Even the most alert critical powers are easily overwhelmed. A Christian congregation is a community in which, through constant remembering and rehearsing of the true story of human nature and destiny [found in the gospel], an attitude of healthy scepticism can be sustained, a scepticism which enables one to take part in the life of society without being bemused and deluded by its own beliefs about itself. And, if the congregation is to function effectively as a community of truth, its manner of speaking the truth must not be aligned to techniques of modern propaganda, but must have the modesty, the sobriety, and the realism which are proper to a disciple of Jesus.
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