Faith, History, and Eschatology

Just finished reading The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade, thought I would share some sections of the book here.  This is not meant to be a summary of the book’s main argument, I’m intentionally focusing in on a few things that I found particularly interesting.

The book is dealing with ancient/ “primitive”/ “archaic” understandings of humanity’s relationship with metaphysical concepts like “reality” or “being” or “time.”  To give you a little background:

The metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a metaphysics.  - 3

In other words, religious myths and religious actions were a major locus of how such concepts were understood in the ancient world.  

[On the] “primitive” ontological conception: an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype.  Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is “meaningless,” i.e., it lacks reality...  Hence it could be said that this “primitive” ontology has a Platonic structure. - 34

Insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of “history”; and he who reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place. - 35

Essentially, Eliade argues that for the ancient world a kind of dualism pervaded their philosophy in which that which was truly real was that which could escape the changing flow of time.  This was enacted through the retelling of religious myths, which were timeless, and the participation in religious rituals, through which Eliade writes “[ancient man] repeats the gestures of another and, through this repetition, lives always in an atemporal present.” - 86

For contrast, take a modern view of time and history as exemplified by Hegel:

For Hegel, history is “free” and always “new,” it does not repeat itself; nevertheless, it conforms to the plans of providence; hence it has a model (ideal, but none the less a model) in the dialectic of spirit itself.  To this history which does not repeat itself, Hegel opposes nature, in which things are reproduced ad infinitum. - 90

And now for the really interesting bit, contrast both these models with Eliade’s interpretation of the relationship with time and reality in ancient Hebrew thought:

For the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.  This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on)... It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.  We may even ask ourselves if monotheism, based upon the direct and personal revelation of the divinity, does not necessarily entail the “salvation” of time, its value within the frame of history. - 104

What makes this even more interesting is the way in which this conception of history takes on an eschatological dimension:

Under the “pressure of history” and supported by the prophetic and Messianic experience, a new interpretation of historical events dawns among the children of Israel.  Without finally renouncing the traditional concept of archetypes and repetitions, Israel attempts to “save” historical events by regarding them as active presences of Yahweh.  Whereas, for example, among Mesopotamian peoples individual or collective sufferings were tolerated insofar as they were caused by the conflict between divine and demonic forces, that is, formed a part of the cosmic drama, in the Israel of the Messianic prophets, historical events could be tolerated because, on the one hand, they were willed by Yahweh, and, on the other hand, because they were necessary to the final salvation of the chosen people.  - 106-07

Out of this eschatological dimension develops a new perception of God which makes possible faith (interesting to note that Eliade’s understanding of faith here is being influenced by Kierkegaard):

Abraham’s religious act [the sacrifice of Isaac] inaugurates a new religious dimension: God reveals himself as personal, as a “totally distinct” existence that ordains, bestows, demands, without any rational (i.e., general and foreseeable) justification, and for which all is possible.  This new religious dimension renders “faith” possible in the Judaeo-Christian sense.  - 110

In another gesture to Kierkegaard, Eliade then describes how this kind of faith, made possible in Judaism and Christianity, has struggled to catch on:

Neither in Christianity nor in Judaism does the discovery of this new dimension in religious experience, faith, produce a basic modification of traditional conceptions.  Faith is merely made possible for each individual Christian.  The great majority of so-called Christian populations continue, down to our day, to preserve themselves from history by ignoring it and by tolerating it rather than by giving it the meaning of a negative or positive theophany.  - 111

In other words, Eliade seems to be suggesting, for the majority of the Christian tradition the locus of religion is still found in ritual (which recalls the idea of participating in an eternal present) and not in “faith.”  I find this whole comparison very interesting for a few reasons.  First, it definitely seems to be a jab at Catholicism in the name of promoting a kind of Kierkegaardian, perhaps even evangelical, conception of “faith.”  It is also interesting because of the way in which “faith” in this sense is intertwined very closely with eschatology.  Any thoughts?

Evangelicals and the Academy: A Continuing Story

Some thoughts prompted by preparations for the summer reading project at Restless, Young, and Reforming and by a conversation with my roommate which has caused me to focus in on this issue a bit more.

Evangelicalism and the academy have often had a very tenuous relationship.  In my own experience of contemporary evangelicalism, there has seemed to be an inherent distrust of all things academic (at least related to theology, philosophy, or the Bible).  My experience is not unique, this kind of systemic suspicion of the academy was I think echoed in the warnings of one of my favorite professors at my (evangelical) undergraduate institution: “the more you study the Bible or theology academically, the more uncomfortable you will be listening to most sermons and sitting through most church services.”  The feeling of distrust between academy and church in evangelical circles is mutual, in other words (and take especial note, this is a statement coming from the evangelical academy, not the mainline academy).  Where does this deep-seated suspicion come from?

In a chapter I just read in (my old pastor) Andy Byers’ new book Faith Without Illusions, an answer having to do with sociology is given, a connection being made  between the frontier movement on which evangelicalism in this country was based and a distrust of all things “established,” including established, institutional higher learning.  Two other blogs that I have read recently are worth mentioning, as they offer somewhat different perspectives than I will offer here.  The first is from David Fitch, author of The End of Evangelicalism? among other things.  He discusses in this post the difference between the context of the Reformation and the context of contemporary American evangelicalism.  The second is from Baptist theologian Roger Olson, who discusses in this post what he sees as a shift back toward fundamentalism that has happened in evangelicalism in the last few decades.  The approach I am taking here is closer to what Fitch does, but I am going to focus a bit on the history of the term “evangelical” in discussing the relationship of evangelicalism to the academy.  Interestingly, as I was finishing up this post I was also beginning to read The Younger Evangelicals by Robert E. Webber for our summer reading project at Restless, Young, and Reforming and noticed that he does something very similar in his introduction.

As far as I understand it, “evangelical” was originally a much more generic term for Protestantism as understood by the Reformers.  Following the path of their renaissance humanist teachers, the Reformers solution to the problems they saw in the Catholic Church was to go “back to the text,” and in particular the text of the “evangelists”- the New Testament.  Thus, the term “Evangelical,” which if it had kept its original meaning might be (in my opinion) a better title than Protestant for the branch of Christianity it represents.  Interestingly, this renewed emphasis on the text led to the need for in depth study of the text, which led for the need for a strong system of hermeneutics. This got its running start with Friedrich Schleiermacher, who is also considered in many ways the origin point of the historical-critical method from which came the “liberal” study of the Bible.  In other words, to a very large degree modern “liberal”/critical study of the Bible was actually a product of the Evangelical movement.

Like everything else, this story is complicated.  So what we are doing here is “squinting,” which I’m quite willing to admit.  Whole books have been written about this and will continue to be written.  We are not going to cover all the details in one short blog post.

In very general terms, though, we can say that there was a discomfort among some in the Evangelical community about the direction of this critical study of scripture.  In my opinion, that discomfort may have had more to do with disagreements in the realm of philosophical presuppositions which impacted the academic study of the Bible than anything else.  Regardless, these disagreements became more and more pronounced, at first along largely national lines (Anglo-Americans vs. Germans) but eventually transcending those boundaries and creating a theological division within American Evangelicalism especially.  This resulted in the rise during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of a movement we refer to as fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism makes a very interesting move, logically, which is to embrace circularity and declare that certain presuppositions must be held from the start for a theological system to have validity- namely, the doctrines they identified as “fundamental.”  Then, in the course of doing theology, these “fundamentals” would appear again as the conclusions of our research.  In other words the “doctrines” of the faith were unquestionable.  This philosophical system is sometimes referred to as Presuppositionalism and was defended by longtime professor of philosophy at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia Cornelius van Til (whom I have had a slight fascination with in the past).

Two problems plagued fundamentalism, however.  One was that there was little to no internal agreement about what the “fundamentals” were, so there was constant internal bickering and division.  The second was that when you embrace circularity and use it to declare your system infallible from the beginning, its extremely hard to get anyone to take you seriously, and so the community became more and more isolated.  This is extremely problematic for a group that maintains as one of their key purposes the continued spread of the gospel.  When no one takes you seriously, its hard to spread your message.  Eventually, the need to engage the outside world became more and more apparent to fundamentalists.

The next step in the story involves two movements towards the center of this debate, one from each side of the aisle, which both went by the name of “Evangelicalism.”  The first was the movement of Karl Barth, often known as Neo-Orthodoxy, but its interesting to me that his summary of his own theology goes by the title “Evangelical.”  While Barth in many ways accepts the historical-critical study of scripture, he does so from the stance of someone who is also securely committed to Christian Orthodoxy.  In this sense, in my assessment, he challenges many of the philosophical presuppositions which had likely led to the discomfort of many more “conservative” Christians with the direction of academia prior to his time and this in turn led to a movement toward a “middle-ground” between Fundamentalism and the “Classical Liberalism” it had reacted to.

From the other side, there was a movement in “conservative” circles in the United States to become much more engaged with the broader culture once again.  This movement has become known as contemporary “evangelicalism.”  It is not monolithic and its efforts to engage its culture have sometimes been less than successful- the parallel Christian music industry is in my mind one such example.  However, the general aim of the movement seems to be in the direction of being an active part of the culture and not a self-isolating voice.  The suspicion of the academy that still runs deep in evangelical circles, then, is something that I view as part of the growing pains of this processes, and I think at least from the standpoint of evangelicals engaged in academics that I am not alone in this view.

To put the two recent trends in evangelicalism that we are focusing in on at Restless, Young, and Reforming this summer in perspective:  

As a cultural shift towards “postmodernism” takes place in the West, many American evangelicals have embraced what is known as the “Emerging” movement.  From the perspective of our discussion of engagement with the academy, this movement, often taking its cues from “mainline” critical scholarship, is characterized by a willingness to ask questions about what were once considered key doctrines in the evangelical community- Brian McLaren and Rob Bell have both earned quite a reputation in evangelical circles for their questioning of doctrines about hell and the particularity of salvation, for instance.  In the minds of many more conservative evangelicals this is going too far, and the “Neo-Reformed” movement is sometimes seen as a reaction to the “Emerging” movement (though this is definitely a caricature, it is much more complex than a reactionary movement).  The fear of many less conservative evangelicals is that the “Neo-Reformed” movement is dragging evangelicalism back into a kind of self-isolating fundamentalism.  What we are doing this summer at Restless, Young, and Reforming is considering both of these movements in depth, considering their relationship to the wider culture, the academy, and evangelical orthodoxy.

Reflections on the Effects of Technology

I was at a camp not long ago with my youth and I had reinforced to me what I have noticed in passing a few times before- That kids nowadays are entirely dependent on technology, particularly networking technology. They play games in a virtual world with people all over the world. Their social lives revolve in large part around social networking web-sites. Their source of information is form internet sites that are collectively composed by people from across the globe (and people with no particular qualifications for writing said articles, we might add). They simply cannot survive without these bits of technology, it might seem.

Now, before I get into a critique of the effect this is having on our society, let me say I am not totally exempt from this. I am typing this right now on a laptop that is connected to my blog (itself technological) via wireless internet. I have my own social networking accounts that I check fairly frequently (in fact, my Twitter is open in another tab at this very moment). My predominant mode of communication is e-mail or texting. I am very much a part of this technological world as well. But my point in saying all this still applies, I think.

Here are three detrimental effects that I believe being dependent on technology has on our society:
1) Disconnects us from reality.
2) Disconnects us from history and the broader world.
3) Disconnects us from our values and from the process of building true character.

First, we are disconnected from reality by technology. This is pretty obvious. Playing a video game that simulates a battle is not a battle. The real thing, with real bullets flying and real blood splattering across you, is not something you do for fun. But it seems like it would be to plenty of people I know who have played video games and maybe even tried to really simulate a battle by playing paint-ball or air-soft. Chatting on a social networking site is not the same thing as sitting down and having a face-to-face conversation. Yet we substitute them far too often. The virtual world is not the real world. Unfortunately, its becoming harder and harder to tell the difference.

Second, technology disconnects us from history and the broader world. We sometimes think it actually brings us closer to those things- we talk and interact with people across the globe online. But we are not entering their world and they are not entering ours. We are both entering a different world, one that isn't real but in which we both pretend to interact and live for a little while. In this world, who we are in "real life" is irrelevant. I am an expert when I write something online. And so is everyone else. I can't tell you how many times I have run across ideas and philosophies online in discussions that were discredited or disproven 80 years ago but that the author takes seriously because they are his/her "own" ideas. Or how many rumors or stories have run wild across the internet because in that world everything is plausible and nothing has to be verified or scrutinized. It simply is not in check with reality.

Third, technology disconnects us from who we really are and how we become that way. I can be whoever I want to be online. Those of you who know me probably recognize that I am tremendously more bold in writing online than I am in speaking in person (though I am probably close to being every bit as sarcastic in person as I am here). I am also much more polished and elegant. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that if you met me after reading these blogs, you might be very disappointed. And likewise, this is probably true of most people you might "meet" online. Because here, you don't actually meet the person in question, you meet the persona they have adopted for the sake of being in this virtual world. What's more, this persona can be created in about a second and a half. It doesn't have to go through all the process of developing its own character that I myself have to go through over the course of my life. It is simply a fabrication that appears instantaneously in its fully developed state.

In a lot of ways, this virtual world is much more desirable if our values are simply easy pleasure, having a good time, making ourselves happy. However, if we really want to be meaningful human beings who really care about this world and about other people, I feel like the effects of technology should be really, really alarming. In fact, I think that this technology, which represents the pinnacle of the progress of our society, is going to be in the long run the thing that destroys our society from the inside by undermining the lives and thoughts of people in the real world.

A Very, Very Brief History of Christian Thought

Prompted by a conversation with a friend (and roommate) of mine that got me thinking on this and then I couldn't get it out of my head, so I started writing… Also prompted because I think its important that we understand our heritage as Christians in terms of the history of where the things we believe came from.

Christianity starts out as "Judaism fulfilled"- a group mostly consisting of Jews and gentiles who were already sympathetic to Judaism who proclaimed Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophetic promises of a messiah. They consider themselves part of Judaism and not a separate movement.

As persecution breaks out, and particularly after the Jewish revolt against Rome, Christianity and Judaism part ways until Christians find themselves as a separate entity in the eyes of the world. In response to charges of being a group of crazies from many Roman onlookers, Christianity begins to adopt more Greco-Roman philosophy (moving away from its Hebraic roots) to explain its doctrines. This eventually results in the emergence of classical theology. It also, however, results in the rise of many heresies that are based on Greco-Roman ideas applied to Christianity and taken too far. In response to these heresies, the Church develops a body of tradition (there isn't really a clear view on a canon of scripture yet) that becomes the Ecumenical Creeds (Apostle's Creed, Nicene Creed, etc). These creeds become the "cornerstone" of Christian orthodoxy in a sense- they are written to denounce heretical views and provide a basic core of doctrines that all Christians are expected to adhere to (things like the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the incarnation, resurrection, ascension and return, etc.). There is also a strong sense of community in the creeds- one of the primary defenses against heresy is the declaration that all churches hold these doctrines, so heretics are proven wrong by their going against what the whole Church teaches. This focus on the universal (catholic) church kinda gets lost after the Reformation (and particularly after the rise of Baptist churches), but that's another story.

The church doesn't stay unified for very long. The Eastern church follows a much more "mystical" road and eventually comes to see tradition as king in theology (because there is only so much we can know propositionally when we are mystics). The Western church becomes more "logically" based- they want to write theology and not just mystically contemplate it (I'm really oversimplifying, I'm sure)- and so they see rational thinking and scripture as equal sources of theology with tradition in theory. In practice, the decrees of the Pope become more and more powerful and begin to shift in a more and more questionable direction, prompting the Reformation.

The Reformers are reacting against a Roman Church that sees itself as the source of true doctrine. So they put forth the idea of "sola scriptura"- that only in Scripture can we find true doctrine. This is the basic idea of Evangelicalism (which is Europe is more or less the catch phrase for all Protestants). However, scripture has to be interpreted for us to understand it, and this to some extend depends on philosophy, tradition, and other similar factors. This results in a lot of division among Protestants over doctrinal issues- Calvin vs. Arminius vs. Wesley, for instance. Or debates over infant baptism or church government structure. Eventually, after the Enlightenment and the rise of Modern Philosophy, many Protestants will claim that the scriptures are just a human writing and that we need to build our beliefs purely from a human, philosophical understanding. This gives rise to Liberalism. In response to this came Fundamentalism, a very radically conservative movement that tended to create large lists of things that were "fundamental" beliefs in order to try and brand all their enemies as "heretics" or "non-believers" who could be dismissed and ignored. Fundamentalists got very quickly laughed out of the academic world, started fighting with each-other over what qualified as "fundamental" and really disgraced themselves in a lot of ways. Modern Evangelicalism/Conservative Theology is an attempt to correct Fundamentalism by claiming the essential Protestant beliefs that it is primarily from scripture that we derive doctrine, but also acknowledging the role of philosophy, tradition, history, etc in interpreting scripture and being more open to a variety of viewpoints so long as those viewpoints can in some sense be derived from the Bible.

There are many other things that play into each of the viewpoints we have very briefly described here. This mainly just discusses their view on the authority or source of doctrine, though I have left the content of that doctrine alone for the most part. So in addition to these distinctions we could talk about individual denominational distinctions that are mostly based on their views of particular doctrinal issues. But I'll leave that alone for now...

Economics and Ethics

Had a discussion with a friend who is a staunch libertarian that caused a few things to click for me that have been rattling around for a while.

I studied economic and political philosophy for a bit before I began studying theology. Something that interested me about both economic and political philosophy is that they have at least at some level an underlying question that is about ethics. Both are, in some foundational sense, concerned with the question "how can society best provide for all its members?" We can see this historically in political philosophy in the development of feudalism in the middle ages: a society that was falling apart and facing great danger developed a system designed around the idea of protection for its members.

In economic terms, this question is explicitly in the mind of many of the founders of modern economic thought. Adam Smith, for instance, when he wrote The Wealth of Nations was certainly trying to answer this question. And he believed that answer lay in human self-interest. He believed that self-interested humans will always make economic decisions that are "in their best interest" and that allowing this process to freely play out would result in the most efficient economy, which to him meant the one that best provided for the needs of society's members. In other words, he felt that a free market was the most ethical system not because of concerns about property rights or about the authority of the government but because he felt that the end result of a free market was the best provision of peoples' needs.

So in my discussion with my libertarian friend, he argued that the free market was the best system. So far, we are in agreement. He then argued that government action like "The New Deal" were bad and were messing up the marketplace. This is where I begin to disagree. I think that a free market is ideal not as an ends but as a means to an outcome that is best for society. But because the free market is a means and not an ends in itself, I do not believe that when the market fails we are required to sit and wait on the market to fix itself (in the name of preserving a free market). Lets take the historical example of the Great Depression. Initially, preserving a free market was the policy of choice. However, three years later when unemployment was at a record 35% with no sign of getting any better, it seems fairly apparent that the preservation of a free market is no longer in societies best interest. Letting people starve for the sake of preserving the free market is of dubious morality, I think. So I think that the government was obligated at that point (and maybe should have reached this conclusion earlier) to step in and act in a way that relieved the strain on the country to provide for its own peoples' needs. In that case, the New Deal was economically and ethically an advisable strategy.

In a nutshell, this is what I'm arguing. Economic philosophy is not about making efficient markets or making the most profit. Sure, those things are products of good economic philosophy. However, the real motivation behind economic philosophy is an ethical one- the greatest good for society as a whole, the greatest provision of the needs and wants of societies' members. As such, I would argue with the general consensus of economists in the western tradition that free markets are usually the best way to accomplish this goal. However, I would strongly differ from libertarians in that I think the market is only a tool, a means to an ends. So when the tool doesn't work, you fix it or scrap it for a new one. Likewise, when the market fails, I believe it is acceptable for the government to intervene and attempt a solution that better provides for society.

The "Offense of the Gospel" and Christian Involvement in Politics

A thought that occurred to me earlier:

The early church was heavily persecuted by both Jews and Romans because of strongly political implications to its message. To the Jews, the concept of the messiah had long been a political concept about freedom from their oppressors and an exaltation of their nation as the "people of God." Christianity strongly countered that message by preaching about a spiritual Kingdom of God that included both Jews and Gentiles. Paul's taking the gospel to the Gentiles made this essentially anti-nationalist message (not anti-Jewish, but opposed to the sentiment in Judaism that held their people in a particularly high esteem as the only people of God) much more vocal. Essentially, the Jewish reaction against Christianity was largely motivated by Jewish nationalist sentiments, a very political motive.

Likewise, the Romans had a very political reason for opposing Christianity. The Roman empire was held together by a common bond of loyalty to Caesar as King/God. Early Christians refused to submit to this loyalty because they held Jesus to be the only King/God. This must have been greatly insulting to the Roman political order- not only were they refusing submission and loyalty to Rome, the Christians were claiming that someone who had been crucified by Rome was greater than the Emperor. So Roman political pride was also offended by Christianity, and they too had largely political reasons for opposing the church.

So what can this teach us? It seems to hold a political implication- loyalty to a state can never rise above loyalty to Christ in Christian thinking. Protestants are quick to jump on this in criticism of Catholics. Indeed, the medieval Papacy probably did usurp the loyalty it should have given to God. However, I have heard a good number of Evangelicals in this country preach on behalf of a past President and rally support for the Iraq War. I wonder if this is any less a case of loyalty being passed on to the wrong party?

In a free society such as we enjoy in the West, it is perhaps more difficult to find direct analogies. Certainly we can be loyal citizens of our country without compromising (for the most part) our loyalties to God. However, when I hear conservative leaders making sweeping statements about America being the greatest nation on earth and conservative Christians nodding their heads in agreement I wonder if our national loyalty has become a bit too deeply entrenched.

Deep Thinking In Practical Terms

This post is a little more academic, but I think these are important things to think about.

There are two questions that I have wrestled a lot with lately(lately meaning the last four years in the case of the first question) that I am trying to examine in slightly different lights.

The first question has to do with the nature of "salvation" or the nature of the "gospel." Are these the same things? What are we saved from? Is salvation merely a "pardon" or giving of forgiveness as it seems in many Baptist circles especially. Or is salvation a constant process of taking sacraments and doing good works to become justified in the sight of God, as Catholics seem to think. Is the point of the gospel to get us into heaven or is it to take part in something that is happening here on earth?

These questions are difficult to think through, but I'm trying to put this in a slightly different light. Instead of thinking about these questions in a strictly theoretical and theological perspective where we might debate the merits of each view and its sources of authority, I'm trying to understand the implications of these questions practically. While certainly there is a theoretical aspect to theology and to Christian belief, it seems like Christianity is also intended to be an belief system that is accompanied by a lot of action. So the question I am posing now is "what are the implications for different views on the nature of the gospel/salvation for what we do as Christians?" This is especially pertinent in terms of how we view evangelism. If the gospel is entirely a spiritual message- your sins will be forgiven and you will go live with God in heaven when you die on earth- then our evangelism will be focused on "conversion" and be much more spiritualized. This seems to fit the contemporary Baptist model especially. However, if we view the gospel as a call to participation in God's kingdom on earth (NT Wright is major advocate of this view, for example), then our evangelism will be more focused on calling people to believe in and participate in the work of the church (which will be much more humanitarian and less "spiritual"). So I've really been examining the practical side of this issue more lately and trying to understand how the practical and theoretical influence one-another.

Another related question is an examination of history and how the gospel fits into different historical contexts. For instance, the early church was in a very Jewish context that had at its center the concept of a Messiah. Christianity latched onto that by proclaiming Jesus to be this Messiah. Later, as Christianity expanded into a more Greco-Roman world, it began to adopt the philosophical context of this community by appealing to Perfect-Being Theology especially to explain the nature of God. Most of what we consider the classical theological views of God are taken from Greek philosophy and supported by scripture, rather than the other way around (contrary to the claims of many evangelicals and fundamentalists). As time progressed and the Roman empire fell a more pessimistic and "legal" framework of thinking developed and from that came the theology of Augustine that proclaimed that Christ had paid a certain penalty for our sins, one demanded to "justify" us in the sight of God. And a new view of salvation developed, one in which Christ's work is seen as taking our place and paying our penalty in order to make us perfect in the sight of a God who cannot tolerate imperfection (and yet talks to Moses as a friend, just to give us a hint of where this view, like most, does not completely represent the Biblical data). In other words, Christianity seems to adapt to address different philosophical contexts. In each of these the "tradition" has changed. The question is how does this historical development affect our views today? Should we also adapt to a new philosophical context or do we cling to tradition (a call which ironically seems most strong from fundamentalists who also reject Catholicism's canonization of tradition).

This issue become especially interesting in examining the progression of Protestant thought in the last few hundred years. Protestantism developed as a rejection of a view that had developed in the medieval church to say that by taking the sacraments we somehow obligate God to extend grace to us. I believe the protestants were probably correct in rejecting this theological development in church practice, but Protestants stayed in the same framework of thinking as the medieval church, most adopting views very close to Augustine. However, right on the heals of the Reformation came the Enlightenment, and suddenly the philosophical context of the world changed to being much more optimistic and based around the progress of man's knowledge toward triumph over the forces of the world. In this context, the stories of Christianity seemed outdated and incapable of measuring up to the rigors of academic study. From this context developed Liberalism, which attempted to accommodate Enlightenment thought and in doing so rejected the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition and formed something radically different from any prior form of Christianity (and for this reason, it seems questionable to consider the more radical forms of Liberalism to be part of Christianity). In response to the extreme measures of Liberalism, Fundamentalism formed which made the opposite error- instead of throwing out tradition they added to it things that had never been essential aspects of the Christian tradition and made them "necessary" to being part of Christianity. Neither view seemed to really address the modernistic social context, and as a result Christianity lost a lot of credibility. Post-modernism seems to pose a similar challenge, but at the same time some very interesting opportunities for Christianity to re-engage the culture meaningfully and address the new context. The question is how this will happen and who will participate? Will more "conservative" Christians shy away for fear of change? Will more liberal Christians throw away theology altogether? Is there some-sort of balance that can be formed to address the culture and still remain essentially Christian?

Inspired By or Compatible With?

I've heard it said that the concept of separation of powers in America's political system ultimately originates from the doctrine of sin. The argument says that the founding fathers recognized man's sinfulness and so they designed a system that took that into account, whereas European systems seemed anti-Christian in that respect because they often lack a separation of powers.

I think I have a different take on this. Given that most of the founding fathers (and certainly all of the most influential ones in drafting our constitution) were not Christians by most accounts, it seems doubtful they would base such an important aspect of our government on a Christian doctrine. Its also doubtful that such a system was even intended: the constitution gives some checks between legislative and executive branches, but in my studies of history, it seems the legislature was always intended to dominate and the judiciary was never intended to play a part in the balance of power. So the current understanding we have has been the result of some political evolution in our government. The best explanation seems to be that the original system was devised as a reaction to the "tyranny" of British politics from under which the colonies had just escaped and an attempt to create a more populist government that actually functioned. Later political forces created the system we now understand. I see little reason or evidence to indicate that this was based on the Christian doctrine of sin and depravity.

That being said, it is certainly compatible with that doctrine. The system of checks and balances certainly fits to some extent with a Christian understanding of the human condition. But it seems an illogical leap to suggest that means this political institution was inspired by Christian doctrine, especially when historical evidence seems to suggest otherwise. I think there needs to be caution expressed before reading democracy or any western institution into the scriptures or out of the scriptures. They may sometimes be compatible with each other, but this does not mean that they are inspired by one another. Nor does it mean that scriptures teach democracy or support democracy. Remember, they were not written under democracy, and for the most part none of their writers had any democratic experience or knowledge. But their truths are timeless, so we should not be surprised when we find ways to make them compatible with or apply them to our culture or any culture. This does not mean this culture is what scripture teaches. Culture can change, and the application of the Bible will adapt.