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Duped by secular rationalism

By Peter Sellick - posted Monday, 15 May 2006


It has become common for the great questions of faith to be boiled down to two questions, one objective and the other subjective. The first is the question that asks if there is a God or not. The second is whether one is religious or not. There may be a connection between believing that there is a God and being religious or there may not. One can believe that there is a God on the basis that there is something and not nothing or that the cosmos seems planned. But this does not mean that you are religious, i.e. go to church. Being religious does not always mean church attendance and is treated more like a personality trait than a conviction of belief.

It is incredible that the rich tradition that is the source of Western culture could be reduced to two rather silly questions, the one referring to the existence or non-existence of a supernatural being that could not be called Christian, and the other concerning individual spiritual proclivities.

What has happened to popular debate about the Christian faith that it can be reduced to two questions that do not lead anywhere? How did it come about that theological debate has been debarred from the public forum out of embarrassment or the fear that we might offend someone? Why is our theological language so impoverished?

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Many would begin an explanation of this phenomenon by pointing to the clash between science and religion and the subsequent triumph of science. While this became prominent as a reason for the rejection of religion in the later Enlightenment, particularly on the continent after about 1750, there was a previous cause that was expressed in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. In this peace, that ended the 30 Years War, toleration was secured for the three great religious communities of the empire - Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist. This was the first emergence of religious relativism. As Karl Barth states:

The great crisis of Christian faith, as well as of Christian theology, that arose in the 17th century did not have its primary basis in the rise of modern science, for instance, or of the absolute state which later also became religiously indifferent. According to the illuminating hypothesis of Emmanuel Hirsch, this crisis arose prior to all such shocks, simply in the painfully confusing fact of the stable juxtaposition and opposition of three different churches. Sealed officially and demonstratively in the Peace of Westphalia, these three different confessions each represented exclusive claims to revelation which relativised the claims of each. Subsequent acquaintance with the great non-Christian religions of the Near and Far East underlined this relativity still more painfully.

Although there had been theological crisis earlier in the history of the church, these were thrashed out to arrive at a theological consensus. The Peace of Westphalia, in a move towards toleration, which we moderns are bound to admire, gave secular assent to the schism in Christianity produced by the Reformation.

The strife that such schism is bound to produce was stifled for political reasons. The unity of the church, established in the unity of the person of Jesus was destroyed, leaving a heritage of relativism in religious matters. Belief was now no longer directed by extra personal truth established for all time, but was now subjective. What you believed was now determined by what brand of Christianity you gave assent to. Truth became a matter of choice or geography or social circumstance. Before this break there was no need of such a concept as “religion”, there was only “the faith”, the one story of the world which accounted for all things.

The effect of the science-religion debate was minor compared to this demotion of theological thought to the choice of the individual. This was how liberalism in theology took hold in the 19th century, by refusing to acknowledge that Christians are addressed by a single reality outside of themselves.

Instead, taking the late Enlightenment’s critique of religion to heart, that if God existed we could have no knowledge of him, we invented the category “Religion” to refer to that system of belief to which individuals gave assent. So religion became a species of private belief cut off from the real. The invention of human rights was cut from the same cloth with its emphasis on that which adhered to the individual, to the exclusion of the knowledge gained by the community over large periods of time.

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How could theology be taken seriously after such a move? It could no longer point to a single reality but only deal with religious experience. It is no wonder that William James could write of the “Varieties of Religious Experience” as though this was the foundation of what had now become religion. Thus theology became the proper study of psychologists.

It is now impossible to assert the most orthodox theological opinion without hearing the rejoinder, “Well, that is just your opinion”. We live in an age in which we feel free to choose the religious options that suit us in complete isolation from the church’s long conversation with heresy. Theological relativism has subverted all theological discussion.

The antidote to this situation may be called theological realism. That is, that theological formulations do not float in midair, unconnected to the reality that exists around us, but that they describe that reality in deeper and more accurate ways than we can experience. What is revealed in revelation is the grain of the universe and our place in it and we ignore this to our peril. If an engineer gets his sums wrong the bridge will fall down, similarly if we get our theology wrong we see only a distortion of reality, the consequences of which will blight our lives.

The consequences of getting the theology wrong have been played out in the history of the world. In the West there have been the unfortunate experiments of National Socialism in Germany and of Communism in the West and in Asia, where it still holds fast in China and North Korea.

Although Capitalism has seemed to be the victor in this war of theologies, it too is a distortion of the one theology that exists at the centre of Christianity. While we may boast of the material success of liberal democracy and even describe it as the end of history, we are beginning to observe its nihilistic heart as the pursuit of material security is attained for many only to leave a vacuum of purpose and meaning. The success of the West looks less and less like success as we begin to run out of the spiritual capital provided by Christianity’s truthful understanding of the nature of the world.

Theological relativism has its cousin in cultural relativism that found its origins not in a 17th century peace treaty but in modern academic anthropology. In an article entitled “The Culture Club” by Lawrence E. Harrison published in The National Interest, we find the following words:

Cultural relativism - the doctrine that cultures can be assessed only within their own value framework - was the brainchild of anthropologist Franz Boas. It has permeated the social sciences, and largely because of it a widespread presumption today exists that all cultures and all religions must be regarded as of equal worth and are not to be the object of comparative value judgments. However, when it comes to the relationship between culture and human progress, I find compelling evidence that some cultures and some religions do better than others in promoting the goals of democratic politics, social justice and prosperity.

Just as the Peace of Westphalia was cobbled together out of political necessity, cultural relativism arose out of the understandable need to observe other cultures free of ones own cultural blinkers. However, the upshot has been, for both movements, the denial that a real world exists and that we exist under the auspices of its necessity. Subjectivity has overrun objectivity. It is no wonder that the complaint from natural scientists about religion is that it is entirely subjective. Cultures do differ in their grasp of the real, and those with a more accurate grasp will interact with it in more successful ways.

By assuming that all culture is of equal value, especially religious culture, we have blinded ourselves to their obvious consequences. Weber pointed out that the Reformation countries in Europe did better than Counter Reformation countries and this difference persists to this day.

It is obvious that a culture that places so much emphasis on life after death will tend not to take this world seriously. Likewise, in Buddhism, detachment will produce a similar result. The concept of karma in Hinduism, that one’s fate is determined no matter how one acts, will cripple the will. A cyclic understanding of life and death will trap men in endlessly reliving the present. Pantheists will never deal with the world scientifically because that world is the habitat of the spiritual.

In the absence of a theology that confirms egalitarianism, society will be structured according to family and tribe and these will always subvert open and fair government based on merit. In the absence of a theology that emphasises service, public institutions will founder on the avarice of the individual. In the absence of a theology that emphasises justice for all, especially for those who cannot protect themselves or provide for themselves, human beings will be sacrificed to what are made out to be religious necessity but which serves baser purposes.

We in the West continue to hear the command to love our neighbour and we turn to impoverished countries in an attempt to help. However, because of the blindness caused by cultural relativism we may offer only material aid. We can in no way address the theological roots of a society’s ills. This is because missionary activity among indigenous populations has been blamed for the disintegration of native culture producing their present parlous state.

This analysis is a triumph of secular academics who steadfastly ignore many good results of European Christian mission and labelled such efforts as cultural imperialism. Of course there were many mistakes in the past and missionaries did not always understand that Christianity could influence indigenous culture without abolishing it. However, we now see that giving material help to societies who do not have a cultural base for competent and just government, serves only to line the pockets of the corrupt, leaving the population to starve.

Cultural relativism has produced a moral and aesthetic impasse. This finds its expression in the way “choice” has become the ethical buzzword, how the study of literature has become an exercise in petty politics and political correctness, how anything can be called “art” and foreign policy may be reduced to “the national interest”. All of this is aided by the separation between church and state which has restricted faith knowledge to the private sphere.

Where to from here? It seems that our society will have to learn even harder lessons before it will learn that it has been duped by what has been called “secular rationalism”. This movement will have to produce even more absurdity before we will see it for what it is.

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Article edited by Patrick O'Neill.
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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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