Gen Eds P10: Philosophy of History

Today we look at the philosophy of history. The last post tried to cover the gamut of perspectives on social and political philosophy, including economics.

This is the ninth philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first nine philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person
• Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy

1. Story is a fundamental category of human thinking. Whether it be ancient old men sitting at the city gates, "Homer," or the medieval bard, we tell each other stories to amuse each other and, more importantly, to capture our values and philosophy of life. Families tell stories that capture the eccentricities of our personalities, along with our strengths, weaknesses, and values.

In short, we use stories from our history to define who we are, what we believe, what we hope, and how we should live.

Mind you, these stories are more short vignettes than they are long over-arching, uber-narratives. There has been a movement to say that we interpret reality from within a certain narrative--a version of the older idea that we interpret reality from within a certain worldview. But the stories and paradigms that inform our understandings of the world are far more granular and atomistic than they are grand and large. [1] They are more like short stories that have affinities with each other than some long grand ecrit.

It was Jean-François Lyotard (1924-90) who first described the "post" modern situation as a resistance to such "grand narratives," by which he referred to the attempt to reduce reality to simplified stories that claim to explain everything. These simplifications help us process an extremely complex world by reducing it to something you can tell a child, but they inevitably skew and spin it. As a colleague of mine once said, all "taxonomies" are inherently skewed, where a taxonomy is an attempt to reduce the truth to a list.

2. Perhaps a primary goal of the liberal arts with regard to history is to catch a glimpse of "your people's" "myths" from the outside and to catch a glimpse of other people's "myths" from the inside. A myth is a story that expresses a mystery or some fundamental perspective on life. When we tell the story of the founding of America, that story is meant to capture our values and to reinforce certain perspectives on the present.

When the "Tea Party" adopted that name, they were taking an image from America's past that they valued and applying it to our current situation. Russians tell stories from Russia's past. The Chinese tell stories from their past. All these stories are no doubt skewed in comparison with any videotape or critical examination a critical historian might give. The point of the story is something slightly different than "telling it just as it really happened."

In the "Western world," Herodotus (ca. 484-25BC) is often called the father of history, because he told the story of the Persian Wars not just from the Greek perspective, but from the perspective of other players as well. He also told the story without reference to gods causing events--he focused on human causes and effects. Finally, he drew on some historical evidence rather than hearsay alone.

Plutarch (46-120) called him the "father of lies" rather than the father of history. Why? Because Plutarch didn't like equal time for non-Greek perspectives. Plutarch represents the default human tendency to privilege the perspective of your group and not to consider fairly the perspective of other groups.

3. So there are twin problems here. On the one hand, you cannot escape your own perspective to achieve something like a God's eye or bird's eye view. The modernist goal of achieving objectivity is a "myth" of objectivity that can never be attained. Indeed, the Western "myth of progress" is itself a skewed view of history, another "grand narrative" that skews the story.

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) suggested that the goal of the historian was to tell history "as it really happened." The historian was to base all conclusions on evidence. He or she was to question their sources rather than assume the correctness of certain ones just because you liked their perspective or trusted the source. You should focus on concrete realia rather than abstract ideological constructs.

These are indeed good goals that should steer the ship of the historian. The problem is that they are unattainable. You cannot tell history "as it really happened" because all history telling involves the selection and deselection of data. All history telling requires us to prioritize and arrange. Historical events tend to be complex, and we cannot look inside another person's head to know what they are thinking. We never totally know what we ourselves are even thinking.

As Michel Foucault (1926-1984) said, "knowledge is violence." Reality is complex, and every act of knowing it skews and does a certain violence to it.

So the myth of objectivity is a star to steer by, but one we will never arrive at. Ernest Troelstch (1865-1923) expanded on the criteria of good historical formulations. All historical conclusions should be open to revision. We should presume the laws of cause and effect. And we should interpret the past on analogy with how things happen now.

There was a clear "anti-supernaturalist" bent to Troeltsch's philosophy of history. The analogy principle, for example, would mean that we cannot infer a resurrection in the past if we do not see resurrections happening now. But you cannot prove such a thing. By what proof would we suggest that there could not have been unique events in the past?

4. More on some key historical "myths" in a moment. So if the one problem is that we aim at objectivity but cannot attain it, the other problem is that while we must acknowledge our inevitable "tribalism" we should not use it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I use the word "myth," I am not using it as something that is false or necessarily bad. Our myths shape who we are and how we engage the world. They are not only important; they are inevitable.

Our myths are often based in facts and real events. But they are storied interpretations of those facts and events. But the world is arguably not a better place when "storied tribalism" is allowed to reign supreme. We can't talk to each other because you have your version and I have my version of the story, and never the twain will meet. Washington DC right now is a tale of two tribal narratives that cannot speak to each other.

So we must acknowledge our subjectivity but not acquiesce to it. We cannot transcend it but we must aim to do so. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) indeed suggested that we ground our being in the subjectivity of the other--being subject to the other--rather than in our own subjectivity.

The "multicultural" approach suggests that when we pretend that there is only one, objective perspective--the one we have--we simply empower the perspective of our group. And as a society as a whole, we empower the dominant culture or group without it even knowing it has a perspective. When a "white" person speaks of a color blind society, there will inevitably be a tendency to be blind to the situations and perspectives of non-whites. [2]

A multicultural approach suggests that we acknowledge our differing situations and perspectives and then work to transcend them. We do not acknowledge them to stay in them but to move toward "intersubjectivity." We move to find common ground and thus to create one story out of two.

These are the twin poles of historical investigation--objectivity and situatedness. We are situated and we must fully acknowledge that we are situated in a particular tribe and culture. We are situated in certain myths and constructs. But our goal is to understand the other from their storied perspective as well and to help them understand me within my story. Our goal is to unite our stories and transcend them, to create a larger story that includes the both of us.

In the meantime, the star of objectivity, the "myth of objectivity" remains valuable, even though we will not reach it. The star of objectivity insists that we root our interpretations of history in the events of history. It insists we favor the concrete over the abstract and ideological. We favor primary sources over secondary ones because the further we get away from the events themselves, the more layers of interpretation we have to work through. It insists that we work within the framework of cause and effect.

5. As an example, let us briefly consider the myth of Western progress. First, what is "Western" in the first place. What does Greek history really have to do with me? I am not Greek (although I married a quarter-Greek). There is no essential connection between what people like Plato or Aristotle thought and who a guy like me is who's a hodgepodge of English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, German, and Welsh.

The only reason the Greeks are important to my story is because someone connected to my past made them so. When the European story was being assembled at the beginning of the "Renaissance," they formulated it as a rebirth of the Greeks and Romans. Of course, it was a selective "rebirth." The majority of ancient Greeks--the ones that did most of the living and dying--probably had little idea who Socrates or Plato were.

Indeed, think of the term, "Renaissance," "rebirth." It implies that culture was more or less dead for a thousand years. Think of the term "Middle Ages." Middle between what? The very term, as Foucault might say, did violence to the people who lived for a thousand years by imagining them to be in the middle between good and the rebirth of good.

In short, the very idea of Western history is an imposition on history. It ignores the equally considerable--indeed in many cases superior achievements of other cultures such as the Chinese and the Indian. Egypt is pulled into the story because it is on "our side" of the globe and it is present in the biblical texts, which were important and part of the "Western story."

6. We will have recourse to consider the American story as it is currently told when we dive into history in three weeks. The American story is also told from within varying mythical frameworks. The progressive "myth" sees America as a series of improvements, with the best yet to come. The Civil War improved us in relation to slavery. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were improvements made in regard to unbridled capitalism. The twentieth century improved us with regard to women's rights and civil rights. Our current task is to keep that trajectory of progress going.

The conservative "myth" is quite different. It looks back to the founding of America as a Golden Age when everyone believed in God and the greatest principles of society were captured in a sacred document, the Constitution. When the world is in trouble, it calls on us for help because we are the best and the strongest. We saved Europe's butt in WW1, then again in WW2. But we are in danger. We need to get back to the days when America honored God. We need to elect leaders like Ronald Reagan, who captured the ideals of conservative values. We are on a spiraling downward trajectory that will lead to our destruction if we don't take America back.

Of course both of these narratives are "myths" in the sense that they both oversimplify an incredibly complex reality. They are tribal narratives. We will get nowhere unless we can supercede our own stories and begin to understand the story of the other.

6. There are of course other stories that are of historical significance because they impact us. Nationalism is the tendency of a particular nation to privilege its story and destiny over all others. [3] "American exceptionalism" is a form of nationalism. It says, "Americans are better than every one else" or perhaps, "God likes America more than he likes everyone else." The American story is told accordingly.

Karl Marx (1818-83) had a philosophy of history. His perspective was that history was the story of class struggle. It began with kings and slaves, a thesis and antithesis that conflicted until they resolved in a synthesis with lords and serfs. [4] That thesis-antithesis pair lead to a synthesis of aristocrats and merchants, which lead to a synthesis of the bourgeoisie and proletariat (worker). He believed that he was living in the final thesis-antithesis pair, and that it would lead to bloody revolution and finally a classless society.

That communist "myth" had immense influence in the twentieth century. It influenced the formation of the Soviet Union and countless other revolutions. "Ideas are dangerous," G. K. Chesterton said. But they are only dangerous in the hands of dangerous people. And they are only powerful in the hands of those who can use them to light a fire. "Ideas have consequences," not because of the ideas themselves but because of the power they can wield in the hands of charismatic figures.

7. There is some truth in the parable that says, "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" (George Santayana). There are cause and effect patterns that stand outside my apprehension of them (critical realism). There is a "history itself" even though I only know history as it appears to me.

Certain actions tend to lead to certain effects. If we completely reject any truth to history outside of our own perspective on it, we are lost in a whirlpool of solipsism.

So what of the Christian story of history? There are those who have suggested it is an existential myth that has no need for historical foundation. [5] But if there is no historical reality to the Christian story, then it would seem to lose its power. Christians do not want to believe that the Christian story is a mere story that we tell to ground who we are and how we live. We want to believe it has some basis in objective fact.

So if you had been at Jesus' tomb two thousand years ago, might you have witnessed him coming from the grave? This is not a question of subjective perspective. It is a question of historical event. Either his body was there and then it was not or the story is not historically accurate.

Will there be a point in the future when Jesus returns again in a visible way? Either he will or he won't. It isn't a question of intersubjectivity. It either will happen or it won't.

So history is either linear (headed on a trajectory) or it isn't. The other option is the cyclical view, that history more or less repeats itself, over and over again.

Of course "historic" Christianity views these core events as historical events rather than subjective perspectives. God exists as a Being distinct from our existence or belief in him. God as real being interacts with history in a way that is like the cause and effect of humans interacting with history. Jesus was a real person who really died on a cross and really became alive again such that his human body was no longer dead in a grave but is in continuity with the body he has now.

Objectivity and situatedness capture the twin poles of critical realism when it comes to historical investigation. There is such a thing as history itself. God knows it because he knows all the events of history in all their interrelationships with each other. No human has the capacity, the access, or the intelligence to have a God's eye view. We are stuck in our tribal perspectives. But we must aim to supersede them.

Next Week: philosophy of art

Classic reading

• Augustine, The City of God
• G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
• Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
• Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

[1] We might expect that our paradigms would have certain commonalities and affinities, family resemblances. We can loosely speak of collections of similar paradigms that constitute a worldview. But these should be balanced with our formative stories, along with our key practices and symbols.

[2] The very terms "whites" and "blacks" arguably reflect the kinds of historical shifts that Michel Foucault wrote about so forcefully in some of his writings. Before the slave trade, there was no such thing as a "black" race. There were only individual tribes. When the differentness of African slaves was pitted en masse against their captors and "owners," black became a descriptor for a collection of people who before would have distinguished their "races" from each other.

So "white" is created in counter-position to "black." Black is created by a new paradigm, and white is created in consequence. But in America, "white" was not a title given simply because of skin color. When Italians first immigrated to America, they were not immediately considered "white." All this is to say that these perspectives have a history, and it is not the "story" we tell ourselves today.

[3] The very idea of the nation-state is arguably a modern development. In older times, ethnicity was more the basis for societies. Empires, by contrast, involved the subjection of other groups by a dominant group ruling the other groups, rather than a singular identity for the whole.

[4] This philosophy of "dialectical materialism" was loosely based on G. W. F. Hegel's (1770-1831) sense of history as the story of the conflict of opposing ideals moving toward absolute spirit. The language of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, however, came more from a simplification of Hegel than from Hegel himself.

[5] Rudolph Bultmann did not believe Jesus historically rose from the dead but considered the myth very meaningful as a metaphor for creating meaning in a meaningless world.

Is America in Decline?

I think, you'll be glad to know, this series is at an end. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America
• Exceptional America

1. In the previous post I suggested that what was initially exceptional about the US is that it was the first fully implemented representational democracy, whose structure had the potential to embody best for the first time in history:

• the love of God toward all the people of a nation equally...
• God's manner of giving individuals the freedom to accept or reject him while...
• protecting all individuals against harm while...
• considering all the individuals of a society equal in value...
• and protecting the minority against the potential oppression of the majority.

A representational democracy is not biblical by structure--such things just didn't exist in the ancient world, and the brief democratic experiment in Greece had no protection for individual rights. It is rather that the results of this structure had the potential to result in a place that embodied Christian values better than any other structure in history.

And of course the US was only the first. There are now representational democracies all over the world.

2. Again, another claim of this series is that the percentage of true Christians at any one time or place is much smaller than those who are Christians in name. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the initial migrations of Europeans to America, there was a higher percentage of fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. After all, so many of the first immigrants were fleeing religious persecution.

But by the time of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the US, I wonder if the percentage had leveled out to about what it is now--about 20%.

Similarly, although the structure of America's representational democracy seems ideal, its ideals are still being worked out:

• Slavery persisted till 1865 (interestingly, Thomas Jefferson's originally proposed Declaration condemned the slave trade, but the Continental Congress rejected those parts of his version). 
• Reconstruction after the Civil War was so botched that we had to have the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Race conflict even this past year illustrates that the structures of society are still out of whack in some way.
• Women were not included in America's social contract until 1920 when women had the right to vote. Even in the 1950s their presence in the work place was resisted.

3. There is a sense in which America's laws are more loving than ever. I imagine the wild west to have been a place of vast injustice, where there was scarcely any true rule of law. Imagine how murderers, pedophiles, and wife beaters must have thrived on the old frontier in Kentucky and Indiana in the year 1800.

Spousal and child abuse is less tolerated than ever. Without altering my position on homosexual sex, I still can't imagine that a country where homosexuals are not forced to undergo chemical castration, imprisonment, or death is a more Christian place than one where they are.

4. So in what respects, then, might America be in decline, if the percentage of true Christians remains about the same and the value of all individuals is higher than ever? Even abortion is at its lowest in over forty years.

I suppose there are two parts to this question in my mind: 1) Is the average individual less "moral" than before? A person can behave morally because it is cultural without any real investment in morality or Christ. 2) Is the structure of the US less loving than before?

5. With regard to the first question, the crime rate has fluctuated a little in the last couple of years, but in general is still lower than the 1970s. It thoroughly declined in the 1990s. It was down in 2013.

Divorce rates shot up forty years ago when it became a serious option but are not clearly on the rise now. Despite often quoted statistics about Christian divorce, those statistics relate to all declared Christians and thus include the nominals who are now becoming nones. The divorce rates among the more serious 20% are not as high.

From what I believe is a more thoroughly Christian viewpoint, we must reckon that while divorce is never the ideal, it is not always better for the children for couples to stay together. In cases of abuse, staying together imprints a son or daughter to become an abuser. I also wonder if divorce rates will actually go down in the emerging context where most gay individuals will no longer marry to hide their sexuality ("bearding").

Clearly options like living together and premarital sex are more prevalent than ever. This is deeply saddening. Nevertheless, teenage pregnancy is actually on the decline overall. I don't have any statistics, but I actually doubt that homosexuality is on the rise, although experimentation may be. My hunch is, though, that the percentage of gay individuals is more or less the same as it always has been. We just didn't notice.

So the facts seem to suggest that, at least in these areas, individual morality is not really on the decline among nominals and non-believers.

6. That leads me to the structures, are the structures of America in decline? Here are the things that are worrying me the most:

a. economic disparity
The difference between the wealthy and the everyday person is starker than ever. This strikes at the foundations of a democracy. Capitalism, again, is not an end in itself. The genius of the American system is not that it rewards a few. The most Christian aspect of the American system is the fact that it values all and potentially empowers all.

When the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum has healthy sources of livelihood and healthy living conditions, society as a whole benefits, is healthier, and more embodies the core values of a nation that is truly Christian in values. When the lower end lacks resources, crime increases, violence increases, and history is also replete with tales of revolution. If you don't account for your poor, they will eventually account for you.

b. the welfare class
Although well intentioned--even intentioned with Christian values--too much of America depends for its livelihood on others who do the work. It's not just about unfairness to those who actually do the work. That's the legalistic way to think of it. It's ultimately bad for those on the receiving end and it undermines the capacity of the society as a whole.

Again, I don't have statistics, but one wonders if a sense of entitlement and a laziness with regard to work has become part of all layers of society. The child of a rich or middle class person can be unproductive and non-contributing to society as well. The welfare just comes from within the family rather than from the government. Has America as a whole become less work brittle? I don't know.

This does get at a moral question? Are Americans more oriented to self-gratification and pleasure than ever? I don't know. It might be that, as with the issues I mentioned in the last section, it only feels that way and that the percentages are more or less the same as always.

But when you think of what signifies the decline of a great people, a decline in the impulse to do, to create, to work has to be a major element. If a people are not competing, if they are not ready to defend themselves, if they only receive or take in for themselves as individuals rather than contributing to a greater good, that is an eventual death warrant for a society, it seems to me.

c. lack of education
Education is a crucial element in a successful democracy. An uneducated majority will vote for the wrong people and the wrong outcomes. Here again, while it feels to me like America is less educated than ever, it may very well be that social media and cable news has only given a greater microphone to a certain set of people. This is an insight that I am slowly coming to, the most vocal and alarming voices are often not the voice of the majority. The majority usually, over time, moves in the right direction, it seems to me.

But certainly there are voices with power that are anti-science in America right now. It doesn't seem to matter to many Americans that the majority of experts in a particular field are solidly convinced of something. My uneducated opinion seems to count as much as someone who can actually do the math.

But maybe it has always been this way. It just seems that now the anti-evidence voices control the textbooks.

d. postmodernism
Anyone who knows me well knows that I believe there are important insights to be gained from postmodernism. But even to say that puts it in a framework of truth.

Postmodernism has--it at least feels to me--eroded the scholarly pursuit of objective truth and encouraged a certain kind of ideological tribalism in America. From my earlier posts, you can tell that I believe the Enlightenment quest for truth and objectivity was a core basis for the prosperity and egalitarianism of Western culture. Everyone stands equally before the court of truth and the court of law.

Sure, postmodernism has made it abundantly clear that this goal is ultimately a dream. But it is a dream we must continue to pursue!

Unfortunately, Christians have sometimes, without realizing it, jumped on this bandwagon. If all positions are really animals in a circus, then we can be in the circus too. But ideological tribalism is inherently deconstructive to the framework of Western society.

The values of equality can sometimes blur into this deconstructive arena. So we value women equally to men so we give them equal voice. Absolutely. But in any instance where feminism begins to say, "You cannot communicate with us because you are a man. Your truth is a different truth than our truth," at that point feminism has become the enemy of democracy. A democracy can only thrive if there is a core, common truth shared by all.

And so when "presuppositionalism" makes it such that the different parts of society cannot communicate with each other on some common playing field, it has become deconstructive of democracy.

Those are some thoughts. Hopefully there are some insights in there. If not, I welcome your critique, for I believe in a truth that is common to all and, most importantly, common to God.

Exceptional America

I continue my musings over the trail of Christianity in Western culture, now contemplating in what ways America is a Christian nation and whether we are in a decline of some sort at present. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America

1. I am quite proud of the United States. I want to remention a couple things I have said in my musings thus far. I believe that Wesleyan-Arminian theology is the best translation of biblical theology into the modern world. I believe that the Enlightenment was, in several key respects, a good thing in the history of humanity. I believe the two fit well together, the best of Christianity wed to the best of human thinking at a particular time in a particular respect.

I can imagine that those comments might make some uncomfortable. On the one hand, I'm affirming the "right things." I'm affirming Wesleyanism. I'm affirming America. But I'm not affirming them in the way people normally affirm them, namely, as some straightforward implementation of a biblical worldview. Still more dangerous, am I suggesting that Western civilization in the Enlightenment actually was superior in some way to other civilizations at that particular point in time?!

2. First, let me affirm strongly that all people are of equal value (a tenet of the New Testament and Western civilization). Let me also quote a line from Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals." The point of the quote is that there are plenty of smart individuals out there. But at any given time, the bulk of humanity is basically herd animal.

So there are equally smart people of any race, gender, or status. Always have been. The intellectual capacity of the smartest ancient Egyptian was no wit less than Einstein. To say that there might have been something exceptional about Western civilization in the Enlightenment is not to say that individuals in the Western world were/are smarter or better than individuals elsewhere in space and time. It is not to say that Enlightenment Europe was exceptional in all respects. It is not even to say that Western civilization has continued to be exceptional in these areas...

As an aside, I saw a silly slogan the other day poking fun at the metric system. It basically pointed out that the one country that doesn't use the metric system is the only one that has been to the moon. What is ironic about this quote is that it is some American taking credit for the achievements of scientists, all of whom used the metric system in their calculations to get us to the moon!

In other words, the person who created this meme is not exceptional as an individual (at least not in science) and has no business taking any credit for going to the moon. Being American doesn't make you exceptional even if there would turn out to be something exceptional about America. Indeed, I consider prevalent attitudes like this one more a possible sign of America's decline.

... What I am, gulp, wondering is whether the Enlightenment that took place in Europe in many respects represented a high mark in history up to that point in terms of human rationality. As a consequence, I am suggesting that the Western democracies that issued from that thinking might represent the best form of human government yet in human history. The world has followed suit, of course, to where representational democracies exist all around the world today.

And, yes, I am pondering whether this approach to government, as as a structure for society, is most "Christian" and "biblical," not in that the model comes from Scripture, but that it results most in the kind of society that most loves its neighbor as itself and best models the character of God as love.

3. First, the character of God. The best explanation for the existence of evil that I have heard, while affirming that God is love, is that God enables us to be free to choose between good and evil (see here, here, and here). It is the affirmation that a world in which we are able to choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we are forced to choose the good. But if God gives us the freedom to choose, some will make the wrong choice, and there will be evil.

This is not only a quintessentially Wesleyan explanation for evil in the light of God's character. It also fits extremely well with the Enlightenment values of freedom and moral responsibility. I believe it fits with the Bible, but it is not precisely an explicit biblical teaching (the other side errs, IMO, by confusing the "that time" of the Bible with the "all time"). It grows out of the biblical affirmation that God is love and that God is sovereign and yet that evil continues to exist.

It does not fit, however, with the Puritan way of viewing the world. The Puritans believed it was beholden on them to make everyone in New England live the right way. Freedom of religious viewpoint was not part of their worldview. The founding fathers rejected this aspect of early America and strongly opposed a state church.

But it was part of the essential DNA of the founding of the United States, and it has become part of the essence of the democracies of the world today. In that sense, those forces in America today that would insist on forcing the culture to be Christian in ways that do not involve the concrete harm of others are actually "unamerican" and, I would argue, based on a mistaken understanding of God.

4. Next, the ethical command to love our neighbor. While we are still working out the kinks, the Constitution was structured to 1) favor the benefit of the majority while 2) considering all individuals to have equal rights under the law. What is this but the optimal working out of the love of neighbor in society?

To be sure, these claims were, in reality, a farce as long as slavery existed. They were a farce for as long as women were not given a voice. Unfortunately, they remain to some extent still aspirational today to the extent that there is so much unfairness. As long as the rich can break the law in ways that the poor cannot, this vision is still unattained. As long as the color of one's skin results in unequal treatment under the law, then the ideal of the Constitution is not yet fully achieved.

The Bill of Rights, in this respect, is incredibly important. It keeps a majority from oppressing a minority. In Egypt, the majority Muslim brotherhood tried to vote out the rights of the minority. The same has been happening in Turkey. The Bill of Rights say that a Christian majority in America would not be allowed to vote America to have Christian laws that are based on specific Christian understandings that are not translatable to universal rights and laws (i.e., that cannot be formulated in terms of concrete harm to others).

This wisdom resulted from the struggles of Europe in the days after the Reformation. The fathers would have no state church in the US. There would be neither Henry VIII or Bloody Mary. There would be no Oliver Cromwell either. There would be no Cotton Mather even. It would be a place where the Quakers and Pilgrims could be different from the Puritans without fear of persecution.

The South got upset in the 1960s when the federal government forced it to allow African-Americans to have the same rights as "whites." But this is the genius of America. The majority cannot abuse the minority. It is not just about majority rule. It is also about minority rights. This is, when it works right, the best structural embodiment of the love of neighbor in history, now adopted by nations all over the world. And the US was the first to implement it structurally. That was exceptional.

5. What is exceptional about this structure, now the structure of governments all over the world, is the goal of the neutrality of government in arbitrating the rights of individuals and groups. What is exceptional in this structure is the goal of the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people--a value set forth by Jeremy Bentham in the 1700s. This goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--stood at the base of Adam Smith's capitalism (also set forth in the 1700s). To the extent that capitalism departs from this goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--it becomes unamerican and has deviated from its founding purpose.

These are ideas from the Enlightenment. They embody the core absolutes of Scripture, IMO, but these specific structures for society were not developed with such force until the 1700s in England in the flow of the Enlightenment.

All these structures assumed the rule of reason. Of course the Enlightenment overestimated the rationality of people. But the goal was there. Voters and representatives would follow the rules of logic and the inference of evidence in all their conduct.

It was this insistence on objectivity, rationality, and empiricism that drove the scientific revolution. The Industrial Revolution had much about it that was not ideal or Christian, but the blessings of scientific discovery have followed from these twin stars of logic and empiricism.

Because even rational people disagree, the founding fathers implemented Montesquieu's balance of powers. An executive branch would capture the benefits of a monarchy without the unlimited power. A legislative branch would capture the voice of the people--one house would be more populist, the other would represent regions. A judiciary, elected for life, would arbitrate, so that the pressures of culture at moments in history could not overrun the structural rights.

What an ingenious system! It has taken over 200 years to see this structure work out many of the prejudices of the founding fathers themselves. A slave is not 3/5 of a person. A woman can think as well as a man. But what an exceptional experiment America has been, and the best of the world has followed suit.

Perhaps my next post will finally get to the point. In what respects might America then potentially be in decline?

The Christian Foundations of America

For several posts, I've been processing the Christian trajectory of Europe, culminating in America.

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America

You often hear that America was founded as a Christian nation and on Judeo-Christian values. I'm not a master of this discussion so I'll just give my hunches on this issue.

1. Many of those who first came to America from England came for religious reasons, to escape the religious pressures of Europe. The Pilgrims were Separatists who just wanted to be left alone. The Puritans were Anglican Calvinists who wanted the power to make their community observe Christianity their way. The Quakers came to be left alone.

Of course these weren't the only ones who came to America. No doubt there were also criminals who came, trying to escape the eye of society. de Tocqueville, coming to America a few decades before the Civil War, had nothing good to say about the south: "No noble views, no spiritual thoughts presided over the foundation of these new settlements" (41). Writing in 1835, no doubt the institution of slavery heavily filtered his assessment.

Many of the colonies were officially Anglican, including the upper crust and the "power layer" in America. George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe were officially Anglican in the Episcopal church, although perhaps more deist in reality. They were generally dubious of organized religion and saw Jesus more as a great moral example than as anything like the second person of the Trinity. John Adams was more or less a unitarian, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine strongly deist. Thomas Jefferson was also more deist than theist.

2. So while the Declaration of Independence references God, it does not reference the Bible. And the only place where the Constitution mentions God is in the phrase, "the year of our Lord," a conventional way of referencing the date. These documents are most directly based on Enlightenment philosophy, especially John Locke and Montesquieu. The inalienable rights of "life and liberty" come from Locke. The three branches of government comes from Montesquieu.

The Puritans of a century earlier did not design a system of government like the US Constitution, especially after the Bill of Rights was added. Puritan New England was more like when the majority in Egypt tried to use democracy to vote in Islamic law as the law of the land. It's a democracy in the sense that the majority are voting on things, but if you are Roger Williams or Anne Hutchinson, it's not a particularly pleasant place to live. It's not who we were when the US was actually born, thankfully so.

3. So was America founded as a Christian nation? Clearly its population overwhelmingly identified as Christian and, given the unique situation of its origins, it probably had a significantly higher percentage of devout believers than Europe in general, at least at the beginning. I hesitate to say that its philosophical foundations were deist, because that might have a negative connotation, so let me put it this way.

America was founded on the notion that God had created the world with a certain moral structure to it. Most of the founders and the philosophers on which they drew did not think much about God's regular action or involvement in the world. But, like Newton, they believe God had infused the world with a certain natural law that had implications for how society might best be structured.

What were these features of natural law?

a. "All men are created equal."
I would argue that the Western world--and America first--has played out a system of government that embodies the Christian sense that all people are created in the image of God better than all of history previous. Indeed, biblical Israel did not play out this value as well as the United States. The Roman Empire of New Testament times absolutely did not play out this value.

We have not played out this principle perfectly, to be sure. There remains great disparity in America. Slavery was not abolished until 1865, and the premature death of Lincoln resulted in the complete race mess that we are still struggling with 150 years later. His vice-president, Andrew Johnson, to me the worst president in American history, let the south mangle the integration of slaves into society.

b. "inalienable rights"
The real genius of American democracy, in my opinion, is that it goes beyond mere democracy to the protection of individuals within that democracy. (Someone always reminds me at this point that we are technically a republic. Yes, yes, I know.) The Bill of Rights is an incredibly important addition to the Constitution because it prevents the majority from voting out the rights of a minority. It can be said to be biblical in the sense that all people deserve to be treated with love because all people are created in the image of God.

The Puritan was not interested, however, in giving freedoms of this sort. Their ideal world was one where the Christian majority forces everyone to follow Christian laws. As an Arminian, I prefer a land where the laws have a basic moral character (don't kill, don't steal), but on specific issues individuals are "given up" to choose whether to be moral or not, as long as they do not harm others.

Of course I could come up with some passages (Romans 1, 14). Freedom of religion, though, is not something all Christians would agree with, especially those of a Puritan stripe. As a Wesleyan, however, I have more admired Roger Williams in his early days.

c. human freedom
I'm not sure how I would argue that human freedom is a primary biblical value, even though it is an essential element in my theology. As an Arminian, I believe that God has given it to us. I believe God lets us choose. This is a long-standing Christian interpretation, of course. Augustine's explanation for the problem of evil starts with Adam's freedom.

IMO, these discussions go beyond what the Bible explicitly says. It is Christian processing of the Bible, especially the notion that God is love. The Enlightenment, with its American and French revolutions, took the notion of freedom to the next level. In my theology, it reflects to some extent the character of God as I understand him. But there is a lot of Enlightenment in my understanding too.

d. centrality of truth and reason
I'm not sure how I would argue that a commitment to reason and objective truth or a commitment to an empirical view of the world is biblical. Certainly there are many presuppositionalists today who would more or less argue to the contrary. I personally don't think it is unbiblical. I think it is unavoidable if we wish to perpetuate the great successes of the West.

But this is a key aspect of America's philosophical founding and, perhaps more than anything, it is one of the key aspects of America that I fear may be decline. The majority of Americans of course have never been Enlightenment thinkers. But the best thinkers and leaders of America have been. Although I have learned from postmodernism, this is its greatest potential casualty--it has threatened to erode the rational foundations of society and empowered the presuppositionalists.

4. I don't know if I will keep posting on this subject, but I do have a line of thinking here. Christians have been saying that America was in moral decline since it started, it seems to me. Didn't they say that in the Great Awakening? Weren't the Princeton Fundamentals saying that in the 1920s? Didn't Richard Weaver say that in 1948, at what some consider the height of Christian America? Wasn't Francis Schaeffer saying that in the 1970s? James Dobson in the 1980s? Any Republican candidate today?

Could it be that each Christian generation has a tendency to idealize the American Christianity of the past and that we're all alarmed to find that, in our generation, it's only about 20% of America that is really Christian in any meaningful sense? Could it be that even my sense of "Enlightenment decline" is really just a slightly different version of the same?

So is America now finally, for real this time, losing its moral foundations?

Judeo-Christian Values of America

More in my series on whether American Christianity is in decline:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment

So we arrive at America. Was America founded with Christian values? Was the foundation of America "Judeo-Christian"?

1. First, to collect some thoughts from the previous posts above. One thesis is that, as far as real Christians go, people with the Holy Spirit within who are serving God with their whole heart, this is always a minority of people. So Europe may have been Christian for a millennium, but we should only expect to see a fraction of them in the coming kingdom of God, maybe as small a number as 20% of all those who have called themselves Christians throughout the ages (somewhat arbitrarily using contemporary statistics).

2. So in what sense was Europe Christian in form, having a form of godliness? It was mostly orthodox Christian in belief. To be sure, the diminishment of Catholic power made deviations like Socinianism (which didn't believe in the Trinity) or the pantheism of Spinoza possible to be held more openly. Deism was quite popular in intellectual circles in the 1600s and 1700s.

Was it Christian in its outward actions? Certainly the Spanish conquest of the new world had nothing of any substance to do with Christianity. I doubt we will see Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, or any of these gold-thirsty murderers in the kingdom of God.

If the kings of England are any indication, adultery may have been frowned on but was apparently all too common fare in the everyday life of the English male.

Disparity reigned supreme until the 1600s. The Parliament of England astoundingly executed Charles I in 1649, a clear mark in the movement toward democracy and the shift of power from kings to people. Americans would not include the divine right of kings in what is meant by Judeo-Christian values although the idea of kings is clearly biblical.

The point here is that we are unaware of the influence of American culture on us if we think of democracy (or a Republic) as obviously biblical. For most of Christian history, monarchies were the name of the game, with at least a more straightforward claim to being biblical.

3. It seems that the phrase "Judeo-Christian" itself wasn't really used in the way we use it today until the twentieth century, especially in the 1940s. President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the phrase in reference to the concept that "all men are created equal" in 1952. It was under his presidency, in response to the rise of communism, that the phrase, "one nation under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954.

I would of course agree that the equal value of all humanity is a biblical principle, but we also have to reckon that this notion was not used to advocate for democracy until the Enlightenment in the 1700s. It must therefore be a valid "translation" of the Bible into the modern era.

But the expression has been used extensively since the 1950s. It played a significant role in the anti-communist rhetoric of the 1980s, for example. "Judeo-Christian" could thus imply capitalism, an economic system that really didn't develop again until the late 1700s and the Enlightenment. It is, again, a translation of certain biblical themes into the Enlightenment era.

Again, the fact that capitalism did not really exist until two hundred years ago suggests that it has less a claim to be straightforwardly biblical or Judeo-Christian than an agrarian or bartering society. For me this fact does not undermine capitalism as an economic form. It just reminds us that we are wearing cultural glasses if we think it is somehow straightforwardly biblical.

In recent times, the phrase Judeo-Christian has been linked to the Ten Commandments. Don't kill. Don't steal. But these are of course well nigh universal human values. Keeping the sabbath in American history has a decidedly cultural dimension (since the biblical sabbath was on Saturday). Not swearing is a cultural version of a commandment that was originally about keeping vows. Not lying is a cultural version of a commandment that was originally about bearing false witness in a legal context.

4. So we have to refocus the question again. Christian religion did seem to play a fairly unique and distinctive role in the founding matrix of American identity. However, the probes of this conversation, just getting to this point, already hint that the religious matrix was a "translation" of the Bible into the cultural world of Europe and Britian in particular in the 1600s and 1700s.

I think it was a brilliant translation. But it is important to say that the Christian values, the Judeo-Christian values, the biblical values on which America was founded were values heavily filtered by the Enlightenment and by the English culture of the 1600s and 1700s. To suggest a more direct basis in the Bible we would have to say that everyone up until that point and elsewhere was biblically illiterate.

Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment

Continuing my series on whether American Christianity is in decline:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view

1. I'm sure that there is a body of research arguing that Wesleyan-Arminian thought reflects some Enlightenment influence... and so probably also some literature denying it. I'd be glad for references.

For me, I think there were positives to the Enlightenment, so I have no problem with the suggestion. The Enlightenment was, at its foundation, about the legitimate role that logic (reason) and observation (experience) should play in human knowing.

Indeed, I would say that we cannot escape reason and experience in our thought processes, even when it comes to matters of God and the Bible. Religion cannot escape them. Even van Til used reason--he just started with huge presuppositions. When we process the content of the Bible, we inevitably use reason. When we assume the theology of the creeds, we are assuming a theology that was reasoned out and debated in the flow of history 1600-1700 years ago.

The importance of will and freedom for Arminian and Wesleyan theology is surely related to Enlightenment individualism. Wesleyans like to think of it as biblical, but the Calvinists and Lutherans are just as convinced. Calvinism and Lutheranism too have shifted the playing field to the individual making an individual decision--just for them it is God leading you to make the individual decision you make.

The hint in this direction does indeed have its roots in Paul and was more extensively taken up by Augustine. Whenever external membership in a parent body (Judaism, Roman Catholic Church) becomes an inadequate indication of true membership, some element of individual decision inevitably comes into play.

2. Among some Wesleyan post-liberals (e.g, Billie Abraham), there is a tendency to want to downplay the idea of a Wesleyan "quadrilateral." Even Albert Outler regreted the term because of what was done with it in his circles. But for Wesleyan post-fundamentalists like me, the quadrilateral is a key sign out of a certain pre-modernism. The post-liberals are seeking a way back. The post-conservatives are seeking a way forward.

Wesley's comfort with reason and experience directly reflected his context, situated as he was in between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These have to be balanced with Scripture as the starting point, and the tradition as the Spirit's working out of the basic principles of Scripture. But they are unavoidable elements that we do best to acknowledge openly rather than pretend aren't there.

5. Is Wesleyan theology biblical? Or more to the point, are the Enlightenment elements in Wesleyan theology biblical? I would say that Wesleyan theology is the optimal translation of the Bible into the categories of modern world. Remember in my last post that I think it is not only foolish but impossible to return to the time before modernism. It is only possible if you have never really entered the modern era in the first place.

In the same way, could it be that what we think of as the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western society are to a large part the translation of Christianity into the modern world that took place in Europe in the Enlightenment? In that sense, the loss of modernism could entail some loss of what we think of as Judeo-Christian foundations. It would be one thing if that loss of modernism was a return to Platonic Christianity or a mindless drift back into a form of premodern Christianity. But could it be rather than we are simply drifting back into "barbarism"?

What were those Enlightenment filtered Judeo-Christian foundations?

• The importance of individual rights--the ends don't justify the means
• The drive to egalitarianism--king is no better than servant
• The existence of truth, under which all people stand equally, available to all equally
• The order of the universe--created by God and inherent in all things
• The centrality of human freedom and human will--morality is a matter of choice rather than act, and humans are responsible because they are free (or should be free)
• An optimism about history--things will get better, over time; history is headed to a good destination
• Emotions need to be kept in control--they are a basic source of irrationality; passions need to be controlled.

Can you think of any others?

The Dialectic of Western Development

Following up today on a post from Saturday on theories of Western decline.

I remain unsure about the word, "decline." There are aspects of American culture right now that I consider in decline. I thus wouldn't at all want to say that we are on some trajectory of progress. On the one hand it feels like we are declining or on the verge of decline. But, on the other hand, there are some areas where it seems like we are better than seventy or eighty years ago.

So let me do a little back and forth. Then next I may post on the extent to which America was founded with Judeo-Christian values.

1. The Christian philosopher of history that I find most profoud in this area is Charles Taylor. Taylor is attractive because he clearly believes that the West has lost much of its sense of the world as an "enchanted" place, a place where there is an interplay of more than the material in the world we see around us. He is a firm believer in God. Yet he is not like those who seem to think we can go back to pre-Reformation, pre-modern times in our thinking.

2. I do have a hunch that Aquinas does represent some sort of a turning point in Western thinking. Perhaps he does reflect some kind of "medieval synthesis" between faith and reason. But if so, it was a tremendously good thing, contrary to Francis Schaeffer. Could it be that it is here that we find the seeds of the scientific revolution, in this rise of a version of Christianity that was open to observation of the world around us?

Aquinas was not the first Christian to interact again with Aristotle. Indeed, he began to engage Aristotle because there were those in his day who were engaging Aristotle in an extreme form. Aquinas entered the discussion to steer the discussion in a more positive direction.

The subtlety that Aristotle brings into Christian thought is the sense that we can observe universals in the world. The Platonists are all about truths of thought to which our clearest access is the mind. The world around us is only a shadowy reflection of those truths. The various escapist tactics of modern theology all have this Platonic dimension to them:

• We are asked to believe Barth's theology on the basis of certain presuppositions he just expects us to buy without any clear sense of why we should buy them other than some neo-orthodox sentimentality. His theology pretends to stand on nothing.
• The Reformed and post-liberal presuppositionalists again expect us just to believe without any reason to do so. It is impossible to talk to a disciple of Kuyper or van Til unless you share their fideist assumptions. Otherwise you are clearly just predestined to be damned and can't see the starting points of the truth without which no discussion can be had.

These versions of faith are very popular right now because they seem to provide an escape to the modernist crisis by disallowing a faith that integrates strongly with observation. By contrast, Aristotle opened the door to observation as a path to truth, and this is the ultimate foundation of the modern world with all its discoveries and material blessings.

3. I do not think the nominalists are not the fathers of modern thinking, whatever Weaver might have argued. They merely represent an important element in the epistemological equation. They are a balance to the recurring Platonists of history who can't tell the difference between the world and their ideas of the world.

4. When we get to the scientific revolution, it is important to recognize that the key ingredient was the sense that there are truths about the world that are inherent in the world. This is the key Aristotelian ingredient that facilitates knowledge.

Certainly Newton believed in God and believed that God had created the world with a certain order inherent in it. But it is this last point that facilitated his discoveries. Augustine and the Platonists of the early Middle Ages believed in God and discovered nothing of this sort. Nor would we have any scientific discovery if it were up to the Barthians or van Tillians.

It is only the slight shift of Aquinas--that the truth exists in things apart from the direct action of God that facilitates the scientific revolution. Thus, while Newton's faith in God fit completely with his discoveries, it was not the driving force behind them. Indeed, Newton himself was a Deist or almost a Deist.

5. I believe that God has created order in the world that can be discovered. This belief is as compatible with Christianity as the perspective of any fideist. However, the belief that there is an order intrinsic to the world also opens the door to Deism, the belief that God created the world but is no longer involved with it.

And if the world appears to run largely on its own, then it is inevitable that some would suggest we do not need to posit a creator in the first place--thus naturalism. But if there is no God, then eventually we will sense the meaninglessness of it all. Why shouldn't I kill you, if I can get away with it? Thus nihilism.

Then existentialism is a clever thought--why be sad that everything is meaningless? That's glass is half empty thinking. Think of it the other way. We can invent any meaning to the world we want!

6. So it seems to me that there is a great deal of truth to Sire's sense of this progression. From a Christian perspective, we have to see this as a decline. But, in my opinion, it would be wrong to go back and suggest that the drive to observation and natural law was wrong in the first place. The abuse of a truth does not negate the truth. All truths can be twisted.

Sire may also be right that many people intuitively sense that something spiritual is missing, a loss of what Taylor calls "enchantment." The new age movement, the drive to a kind of impersonal spirituality--these may indeed reflect an intution by many that the world is something more than material.

In their own way, the rise of Heidegger and European phenomenologists like Gadamer are a philosophical expression of this sense that the modernist world itself is a pretend world to some extent. The observer can never become disentangled from the world that he or she is observing.

7. But do they truly undo modernism? If so, then our cell phones and satellites are pretend too. These phenomenologists are rather a clear warning that modernism has boasted too much and gone too far. Observation is never objective. It never can be fully outside the things it is observing. All our explanations and interpretations are ultimately laced with self-expression. They are all ultimately "myths"--stories that express mysteries.

But again, it is silly to think that this poetic footnote, no matter how profoundly it is expressed, undoes the juggernaut that is the developments of the last four hundred years. Poetry, art, and music are far more human than science, but they do not negate science any more than biology undermines physics or chemistry. They are just truth on a different level.

So science is myth in its most detailed sense, and poetry is science in its broadest sense.

8. Synthesis is indeed the word. Presupposition and observation. Faith and reason. You can't put the modernist genie in the bottle. Observation wins over fideism every time except in those rare cases where massive brainwashing has steeled a person against the onslaught of what is in front of them.

Nor can one put historical consciousness back in the bottle once a person has truly been bitten by history. One can only ignore history as unimportant, as the post-liberals do. But that is just a stall tactic that only endures for the lifetime of the individual thinker.

I believe there is room for enchantment amid observation. The world is full of wonder beyond Newton. The quantum and relativistic worlds are indeed full of wonder.

I therefore reject the notion that we must try get back to before Aquinas or Descartes. Indeed, we cannot get back before Kant or Gadamer once we have understood them. Each represents a truth we cannot avoid. For Aquinas, it was the power of observation. Descartes gave us the goal of objectivity in its starkest form ever. Kant inevitably dashed that dream, although it took some time for history to realize it. Gadamer put an exclamation mark on this situation when it comes to interpretation.

So I do think we are in a better situation to talk about the world than ever. Have the last two centuries provided us with some extremes to which the trajectory can go? Certainly. But the fundamental trajectory is one of progress in understanding, not deterioriation.

9. What then of Protestantism and Catholicism? Could it be that a synthesis is also called for here? I certainly think so. Both extremes deconstruct. The authority of the temporal church cannot stand as self-sufficient any more than truth is merely some fideist content we must simply force ourselves to believe. On the other hand, we are not sufficient as individual interpreters to use the biblical texts in themselves as objects of our understanding.

True Christianity will always be a subset of whatever group to which we happen to belong.

Theories of Western Decline

I've been exploring what happened when Rome became Christian and asked when Europe became Christian. Today I want to begin exploring several theories of Western decline.

1. The Story of Progress
Before I mention several stories of decline, I might mention the story of progress. There are many who view the last five hundred years as something like a non-stop evolution to a better and better understanding. They would view the Middle Ages as something like the "dark" ages and the Renaissance as a rebirth of culture.

The Enlightenment was thus truly about becoming more reasonable, about shedding religious superstition, and so forth. The rise of science is seen as parallel to this trajectory toward reason and truth. We expect science to make the world a better and better place. At one point, we thought humanity would become more and more virtuous.

2. The Modernist Dead End
I don't know how many people still really subscribe to any strong form of the story of progress I just mentioned. Star Trek in the 80s still looked to a future where humanity was more civilized, more evolved than it is now. But the movies of the last 25 years have been much more apocalyptic. There are more zombies, more world-ending catastrophes, more post-apocalyptic reversions.

Nietzsche in the late 1800s was a herald of where modernism ended, namely, with no basis for morality other than the creation of ingenious Superman who could convince the rest of the world. Alistair MacIntyre depicted a moral world where we had fragments of a picture from the past that we could not remember. Louis Pojman's ethics text deliberately mimicked J. L. Mackie with the subtitle Discovering Right and Wrong rather than Mackie's, "inventing" right and wrong.

In Nietzsche's theory of Western decline, Socrates himself was the culprit. It was he who taught the West to ask questions, that the "unexamined life is not worth living." While Nietzsche agreed with the end of that train of thought in his own writings, he warned that it would not be good for most people to play out the train of thought. They might think that it was good for God to be dead, but it would not turn out as well as they thought. In that sense, Nietzsche is sometimes considered a prophet of the twentieth century.

3. The Story of the Protestant Principle
According to Paul Tillich, it was inevitable that Protestantism would splinter into tens of thousands of little groups once it made a text the center of authority. Texts are polyvalent. They are susceptible to multiple interpretations. So each little group, reading the Bible "alone," becomes confident that it knows exactly what God thinks... and it splinters off from its parent body. And it then goes on to hereticize everyone who disagrees... until the next group splits from it.

Brad Gregory, in Unintended Reformation, more or less sees the turn away from the external authority of the Church as the culprit. Left without some third party to arbitrate the meaning of Scripture, each interprets as is right in his own eyes. Most crucially, secular authority becomes the highest authority rather than religious authority. Completely unintended, Christianity hands its ultimate authority over to worldly powers. Gregory is, of course, Roman Catholic.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of almost Catholics around. There are plenty of people in Wesleyan circles who are on some version of the Canterbury Trail, although many of them stop at Episcopalian. You often get the feeling, though, that they think the Reformation was at least in part a mistake, certainly that modernism was a mistake. All we need to do is go back to some version of catholicism, even if it is the catholicism of the 400s.

In another scenario, Protestant Liberalism was a predictable trajectory for a "Bible only" approach. For once the historical consciousness of modernism comes into play, the premodern, unified text suddenly falls apart into 66 distinct books with distinct contexts addressing distinct audiences. Thus, even most evangelical biblical theologies are not divided up by theological topic, but by Paul, Matthew, and so forth.

4. Nominalist Ideas Have Consequences.
Richard Weaver, in 1948, argued that America was in a state of degradation because of a trajectory first set by the nominalists just before the Reformation. In rhetoric now very familiar, he blamed a turn to relativism and away from absolutes. I've recently written on how fallacy-ridden most of this rhetoric is. Weaver's ideal world was the Roman Catholic society of the Middle Ages (even though he was a "nominal" Protestant).

Nominalism was a rejection of the reality of universals in the late Middle Ages. It is, in my opinion, an extension of Aquinas' version of absolutes, where absolutes are not distinct from the things in which they occur. The nominalists took this concept one step further, namely, that there are just individual things. Weaver, unsurprisingly, was somewhat Platonic in orientation.

Luther's theology is often thought to have been influenced by nominalism. God deems a person righteous without a person being righteous.

5. Aquinas and the triumph of reason
Francis Schaeffer taught that Aquinas had started the decline of the West by rejecting that the human mind was fallen. No serious scholar of history or Aquinas agrees. Schaeffer was a presuppositionalist thinker who more or less held that unless God gave you the right presuppositions out of thin air, you couldn't possibly arrive at the truth.

So the introduction of reason into the equation, in his view, inevitably resulted in humanity thinking it was the authority on what was true, with a resultant decline in the West climaxing with the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.

6. James Sire and declining worldviews
In The Universe Next Door, James Sire describes the changing worldviews since the Reformation as a logical unraveling from theism to deism to naturalism to nihilism to existentialism to neo-spiritualism. In the 1500s, God was thought to exist and to be active in the world. In the 1600s and 1700s, we saw the rise of deism, which sees the world more or less as a machine that doesn't require God's intervention.

In the 1800s with evolution, we see the rise of naturalism, where God is not even thought to be needed as creator. This inevitably results in a Nietzschean nihilism. In the 1950s, existentialism rose to try to reintroduce meaning into the universe. But as it is ultimately unsatisfying, an attempt to recapture a spiritual dimension to life is seen in the new age movement and neo-spiritualism.

On Monday, I may try to evaluate these in some sort of synthetic way. What seems true about these somewhat conflicting theories?

Philosophies of History and Art

My Philosophy in Bullet Points continues, in celebration of my new philosophy textbook (also see my theology bullet points). Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, these posts give my philosophical quippage.

1. Epistemology and Metaphysics.
2. Philosophies of God and Science

Philosophy of History

• Proper historical method is very similar to scientific method. You take a given amount of data. You formulate hypotheses in relation to the data. Historians offer their competing hypotheses to see which best account for the most data in the simplest and most elegant way possible.
• The difference between historical method and scientific method consists in the limitations of the amount of data and the difficulty of "repeating the experiment."
• However, there is a sense in which you can test a historical hypothesis driven by one portion of the data in another. There is also a sense in which the fundamental patterns of cause and effect are repeated every day of history.
• The fundamental assumption of reconstructing history is that of cause and effect. Troeltsch does not exhaust historical method for a Christian, but his principles are the default mode: 1) assume normal operations of cause and effect, 2) with explanations similar to how we would explain similar events today, and 3) with the sense that conclusions are always potentially revisable.
• The key difference for a Christian reconstructing history is the assumption that the supernatural can happen, although this should not be the default explanation for past events.
• All historical reconstruction requires selection, emphasis, and interpretation. There is no such thing as telling history "exactly as it happened" (von Ranke). No "exegesis" is  presuppositionless (Bultmann).
• Primary sources should be more central to historical investigation than secondary ones. The historian must ask what the interpretive angle of every source is.
• The books of the Bible that interact with history also approach history from a perspective. Some are more theological in presentation than others (e.g., John). We should not assume that the model of history writing today is the same as the models of yesterday.
• Historical reconstruction should aim at a "thick" description (Geertz), one that takes into account socio-cultural paradigms.
• The one who controls the past, controls the present, and the one who controls the present, controls the future. (Orwell) History is told by the winners. The vast majority of ideological artifacts that have survived from the past come from the literary elite, who were the smallest subset of the past and not representative.
• Grands recits of history tend to skew history fundamentally. The most accurate reconstructions of the past usually relate to small sets of data.
• The default mode of human historical interpretation is cyclical. Apocalyptic Judaism is fairly unusual in its linear sense of history, and one could argue that it only shifted to linear in times of intense social pressure. Christianity inherited this intensely linear sense of history.
• Most of history is neither getting better and better or worse and worse. Each generation tends to involve multiple paths of deterioration and improvement.
• Christ will come again and reset history in a fundamental way, eliminating evil and restoring the intended glory of creation.

Philosophy of Art

• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are probably some common human intuitions in this regard, but they are overwhelmed by the cultural and individual. 
• The only thing that has intrinsic value is God. Art is any metaphor that expresses something of personal significance to a person. It is thus something that stands for something to someone.
• Creation is the artwork of God.
• Art can represent reality as seen through the eyes of an artist or "surrogate" and can aim to be representational. (Aristotle)
• Art can embody the emotion of an individual artist or surrogate. (Romantics)
• Art can embody universal feeling or religious value. (Tolstoy)
• Art can express repressed emotion. (Marcuse)

Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God: Introduction

I do not know how widely Bart Ehrman's new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, will be read. There is a good evangelical response in a fine collection of chapters edited by Michael Bird, a book appropriately called, How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature--A Response to Bart Ehrman. There has also been some fine blog engagement with these books.

I've decided to walk through Ehrman's book as well. I'm also working through Bird's response book, but I don't want to compare the two books. I want to read through Ehrman's book as if I were a "none" who is not particularly interested in religion or as if I were a Christian who has never encountered ideas like Ehrman's before. My goal is thus not to write an apologetics piece like Bird but more to play the role of a consultant of sorts, thinking through it with the person for whom these are pretty much new ideas.

Introduction
"I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesus' divine status," Ehrman says (3). In that sense, Ehrman at least suggests that his study might allow for faith in Jesus' divinity. At the same time, he is quite clear that he is "no longer a believer" (2). His professed point of view is rather that of a "historian."

On the one hand, there is a significant thing to consider here. Ehrman fully accepts that Christians came to believe that Jesus was God and that Christians have believed it from the earliest centuries of Christianity. You can thus, at least in theory, be a believer whether you prefer Ehrman's or Bird's sense of how that belief unfolded. You can take the path of Bird and conclude that Christians had this understanding from Christianity's earliest days. Or you can take perhaps a slightly modified version of Ehrman and believe that God turned on the lights of understanding about Jesus over the course of several decades.

On the other hand, the idea that Ehrman is just a "historian" is probably slightly misleading. While I reject as naive and ideologically promiscuous the idea that worldviews are large, total packages, I do accept that there are key presuppositions and operating rules that any so called historian inevitably assumes. When Ehrman does history, he inevitably would reject any supernatural explanation for an event. In that sense, if there is a God who is involved in the world, Ehrman's reconstruction of events can never be correct, because he specifically forbids any interpretation of events in which God is a factor.

By contrast, a historical approach that does not eliminate the possibility of the supernatural out of hand might try to interpret events in terms of normal cause and effect explanations as a default but be open to supernatural explanations if cause-effect seems lacking in some regard and especially if supernatural explanations are already in play.

Next week: Chapter 1: Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

Progress or Decline?

I had a moment's glimpse last night of a great philosophy class for our time. The danger for me and people like me is that I love the truth. I love the truth whether it has any obvious immediate benefit or not. There are students who want that and I hope there continue to be places where those students can get it, dreamy places where thinkers and students can sit together by the river Cam and think deeply.

But what most people need in a philosophy course at a Christian university are the tools to think truly and coherently about the life most of them are going to live. Philosophy in the majority of the academy should be about learning how to think logically and learning how to engage the issues of the day in a helpful and profound way. For a Christian college or university, it should help them consider Christian ways of thinking about the world, recognizing that there is often more than one way even a Christian can process things.

Last night, after a mid-term, until the thunderstorm warning went off, we pondered a little the philosophy of history. It struck me how relevant this topic was, because there is a narrative of decline assumed among most American conservative Christians. Maybe it is true but it is an interpretation.

I immediately felt guilty. I had put this topic in a backwater of the course, the mindless time in the second half of an evening class after the mid-term. But this was one of the most important topics of the course. What skills are needed to be discerning about interpretations of history?

We interpret history all the time. I'm not so interested as a philosophy teacher that a student adopt my interpretation but I want them to know that they have inherited an interpretation. Are the things you hear about Thomas Jefferson in the public school lies, as David Barton says? Has the Western world been on a decline since Aquinas?  Since the Reformation? Since the Enlightenment? Since they took prayer out of the public schools?  Or is it all up, up, and away, until there will be no cats in America and the streets will be paved with cheese?

For just a moment, I had a vision of the philosophy course the American Christian college needs...

Philosophy of History Video

Here's a 34 minute video on the philosophy of history for a class. It's both too long and yet too hurried. But it at least mentions a lot of key issues.

An Insight on what "Evangelicalism" Is

Before I go back to sleep, I thought I'd share an insight I just had on defining evangelicalism today. I'm a Biblehead by trade and so I've only become engaged in definitions of fundamentalism and evangelicalism because of my social location. I have a hard enough time reading the books I'm interested in let alone books like Marsden's, Fundamentalism, or Bebbington's, The Dominance of Evangelicalism.

However, this can be an advantage too. Because of my interests as a Biblehead, I know a few things both about hermeneutics and history.  So I have come into conflict from time to time with the Marsden-Noll paradigm concerning fundamentalism, as well as with my sense that evangelicalism is a movement that arose in the 1940s. I haven't had the time to engage these pillars on a scholarly level but as I have encountered their paradigm I have tried to map it to my own.

The insight I just had is that a key difference in my way of looking at such things is that I believe (i.e., it is my impression that) the Noll-Bebbington series focuses overly on continuity in what it calls evangelicalism. Bebbington thus helpfully identifies four features: 1) focus on the Bible, 2) focus on the cross, 3) focus on conversion, and 4) focus on activism. The problem is that the ideological challenges of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in my opinion, make the neo-evangelicalism of the 1940s something that should be treated more as a new entity than one in continuity with Edwards.

This is, I believe, a persistent problem with historical perspective.  What, for example, is the real impact of pre-revolutionary America on us today?  It is interesting to be sure.  It may have great local significance in some places. But the impact of so much pre-US history is a mediated impact. It impacts us indirectly because it impacted something else that has impacted us more directly.

We can find inspiration from Jefferson or Madison. We can make them directly relevant to us if we want. But that is us making them relevant.  Their real relevance is in the institutions they established that have continued to today.

So evangelicalism today must be defined not in terms of Edwards or its history--this is the etymological fallacy, the fallacy that mistakenly thinks that what something has meant in the past somehow affects directly its meaning in the present.  This is a clear fallacy of meaning.  The meaning of words and actions is a function of their use and significance today, plain and simple. The past has led up to that use and so can provide insight. But it cannot control or dictate what words or actions mean today.

So the evangelical movement that arose in the 1940s was a unique cocktail in the history of the world. It must be defined socio-culturally as much as ideologically. It was, as all such movements are, a response to the circumstances of its day. It no doubt involved continuity with some language and identity from the past.  But it must be understood primarily as a reaction to both modernism and fundamentalism in the post-WW2 era, not as the heir to Edwards or Spurgeon.

Is the world getting better and better?

I think Chris Bounds twice has corrected me on Augustine here... hopefully I've got it right the third time ;-)  Thanks, Chris!
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The first individual we know to formulate an extensive, linear philosophy of history was St. Augustine (354-430).  His work called, The City of God, addressed accusations that the gods had allowed Rome to be sacked by the Goths in AD410 because Rome had become an exclusively Christian nation. [1] Rather, Augustine claimed, what society was witnessing was the ongoing conflict between two cities that existed side by side in the world.  The one was the “city of God,” a city of heaven made up of the righteous angels as well as the “elect,” those whom God has chosen to be saved.  While the city of God has a special connection to the “visible church” (the people who gather together and call themselves “Christians”) you cannot see clearly who is truly a citizen of the city of God and who is not.  The visible church is like the Parable of the Weeds in Matthew 13—the wheat and the weeds are mixed together in this world, and we cannot know definitively which is which until the judgment.

The other city mixed together with the “city of God” is thus the “city of humanity,” a city of earth made up of fallen angels and the majority of condemned humanity.  Those who ultimately belong to this city are oriented around themselves and their own pleasure, rather than God.  These two cities are in constant conflict in this age until Christ finally returns, but the trajectory of history is toward the definitive separation of the two at the final judgment.  A significant portion of Augustine’s work goes through biblical and secular history to demonstrate the progress of the two cities throughout history.   The implication is that we should not be surprised when earthly cities like Rome fall, especially when they are associated with the city of earth.

Augustine’s approach to history is sometimes called amillennial, because he does not associate the thousand year period in Revelation 20:4 with a literal thousand year period.  For him the number is symbolic and refers to the entire period between Christ and the final judgment.  Augustine thus has a linear view of history—he sees it headed toward a particular destination.  But he does not have a clear sense that things will develop in a certain way in the intervening time.  He does not clearly indicate that the city of God will increasingly overcome the city of earth or the contrary.

Two other Christian perspectives do.  Premillennialism is a Christian perspective on history that tends to take the thousand year period of Revelation 20 literally and believes that this millennium has not yet taken place.  Christ will reign on earth for a thousand years after he returns to earth in the future.  Generally, premillennialists tend to have a pessimistic view of the trajectory of history.  They tend to expect the forces of evil to fight harder and harder against God up until the time of the end.  Passages like Mark 13:19 are sometimes invoked: “in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be” (NRSV).

By contrast, postmillennialism agrees with Augustine that the millennial age has begun, but tends to see the city of God taking over the city of earth, as it were, as time progresses.  Christ will thus return after the millennium is over.  Since it has been over a thousand years since Christ, postmillennialists may not take the thousand year period literally either.  The main point that distinguishes them from Augustine is thus the sense that things will improve more and more leading up to Christ’s return.

It is perhaps not surprising to find that Christians in different periods of time have tended to lean in one direction or the other.  Prior to Augustine, many though not all Christians were “chiliasts,” individuals who looked for a literal thousand year reign of Christ after his return.  From Augustine to recent times, postmillennial and amillennial approaches tended to dominate.  It is perhaps not surprising to find that the same optimistic spirit of human progress in the days after the Renaissance and Reformation would find a postmillennial perspective attractive.

At the same time, we should not be surprised to find that premillennialism would rise again in popular circles in the uncertain times of the Industrial Revolution.  John Darby (1800-82) was an British evangelist who almost singlehandedly gave birth to dispensationalism, a Christian perspective that sees history divided up into a series of periods in which God had a unique relationship and expectations of his people.  The culmination is usually a seven year “tribulation” leading up to Christ’s return and judgment, followed by a literal thousand year reign of Christ on earth.

We thus cannot say that there is a distinctive Christian perspective on the direction history will take leading up to Christ’s return.  Each position has favorite passages in the Bible, and each position has explanations for the favorite passages of the other positions.  If we are good philosophers, we will be aware of the forces that have influenced us in the past and are influencing us in the present.  We will be aware of our own biases and do our best to be reflective about them. 

Perhaps most importantly, we will try not to let our biases become self-fulfilling prophecies.  A self-fulfilling prophecy is when our expectations come true not because they were inevitable, but because our own actions, perhaps inadvertently, made them come true.  If you expect things to get worse and worse, there is a fair chance you will do things that will make them get worse.  And if you expect things to get better and better, you probably will do things that move them in that direction.  Let God watch over history.  Let us work for good in the world.

[1] By decree of the Roman emperor Theodosius I in AD380.  Constantine had only made Christianity a legal religion in AD313.