CHRISTIANITY AND THE AGE OF THE WORLDVIEW (PART 2)

This is part two of a short blog post series. Click here to read part one of “Christianity and the Age of the Worldview!”

THE REFORMATION: A CRY FOR THE BIBLICAL SYSTEM – OR FOR THE GOSPEL?

But the fundamental notion of the limits of human reason is something that Schaeffer, shockingly, fails to see in the early Reformation. By his accounting, the Reformation was not a critique of human reason – or, more accurately, fallen natural human judgment – and its tendency to balk at free, unmerited, unconditional forgiveness; rather, it was the replacing of the Medieval Catholic system with the Biblical system. Schaeffer puts it this way:

At the time of the Reformation the reformers were confronted with a total system. They did not say there were no Christians within the Roman Catholic Church, nor did they say that there were no differences in the teaching and emphases of the various Roman Catholic Orders. But they understood that there was one underlying system which bound every part of the Church together, and it was this system as a system that they said was wrong and in opposition to the teaching of the Bible. (Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 51).

This statement is right in important ways. No, the Reformers did not say that there were no real Christians within the Roman Catholic Church. They thought there were. Moreover, they did see common teachings in the Roman Catholic Church, to which they objected – though they did recognize differences in teaching between different orders. However, there is also a misleading idealization at play here: we are led to believe, by Schaeffer’s statement, that Roman Catholicism existed as a “total system” which they replaced with a Biblical system. (Later on Schaeffer will encourage us to see Reformation teaching as systematic). Unfortunately, this claim is not exactly right.

Granted, there is a misleading, existentialism-influenced tendency among modern scholars to try to make the early Reformers wholly unsystematic, or even anti-system. I agree with Schaeffer that this is wrong. But seeing the Reformation as the opposition of one system – based on Roman authority, and its reading of Scripture – with another system – based on the authority of the Bible alone – is ultimately incorrect.

First, it is something of an idealization of the past to refer to Medieval Catholicism as a “total system.” Though the Catholic Church certainly had its great systematic theologians, as well as its normative practices, it would really be too much to call it a total system, either institutionally or theologically. As Dr. Kenneth Appold has noted, discussing the church as institution: “At 1500, Christianity remained only superficially ‘united’, and ‘the church’ was still a work in progress” (The Reformation: A Brief History, 42). I cannot go into the intricacies of the institutional life of the Medieval church here – I have neither the time nor the qualifications to do so. But I can comfortably say this: the Church of the Middle Ages was not yet the fully centralized, watchful institution we know today. In a place as dispersed and rural as feudal Europe, institutional oversight – and with it, local practice – varied to a fair degree.

The Church did have more unity theologically than institutionally, but this should not fool us into seeing Medieval Catholicism as a prepackaged, fully-defined system. Consider the doctrines that were only fully formulated after the Council of Trent, which was called in response to the Reformation. Appold lists them:

Theologically, Trent established several important positions. Countering the Protestant principle of scriptural authority (sola Scriptura), the council insisted on two sources of authority: Scripture and tradition. In addition, it decreed that it is the church, represented by the pope’s teaching office, who interprets Scripture authoritatively. The Latin Vulgate edition was defined as the church’s standard; the number of sacraments fixed at seven; the doctrine of transubstantiation made binding; and communion under one species (that is, laypeople were to receive only bread) defended, though final decision on this matter was now deferred to the pope. The most significant doctrinal discussions took place at the Sixth Session and dealt with justification… the council chose a narrowly scholastic definition of justification as an infusion of grace, and rejected the more Augustinian understanding of justification centered on forgiveness and “imputed” righteousness. (Appold, The Reformation, 179-80).

Of course, many of these doctrines had been taught in the church before Trent. Some of them had even been taught widely, and could justifiably be considered normative for Medieval Catholicism. But the point is that they had not been codified until Trent. In important ways, you could say that what we think of as Roman Catholicism today started with the closing of the Council of Trent in 1563.

Indeed, it has been a continual objection of Protestants – both then and now – that Protestant teaching was not considered unorthodox until Trent declared it so.[1] The great Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz even wrote a 4-volume, 2,000-page work called An Examination of the Council of Trent, delineating the various ways in which Trent had cut off different parts of church tradition, and had contradicted the teachings of numerous church fathers. Rather than be guided by the tradition, Chemnitz claimed, Trent had given the Church and the Pope the authority to decide which parts of the tradition it would keep and which it would discard. It had put Church and Pope above tradition, rather than making them stewards of it.

All of this is to say that a characterization of the Reformation as somehow rejecting a singular Catholic system is rather misleading. It certainly did contradict common doctrines and practices of Medieval Catholicism, but there was not truly a single system as such to contradict. Their objection was in fact quite different.

Their objection was that the Church had neglected the gospel. Jarslov Pelikan makes this wonderfully clear in his classic book Obedient Rebels: Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle in Luther’s Reformation. There he writes:

Martin Luther

Another interpretation of the Reformation that appears frequently is the thesis that the essence of the Reformation consisted in the recovery of the authority of the Bible, and that Luther’s historic achievement was the fact that he replaced the authority of the church with the authority of the Bible. Like many pat statements, this view can be true and it can be false. In a sense, it is true that Luther’s achievement did consist in the recovery of the Bible – but of the Bible as the bearer of the gospel… In Luther’s day there were several theories of biblical inspiration being taught by various theologians, and the doctrine of the supreme authority, if not the sole authority, of the Scriptures was widely acknowledged by medieval scholastic theologians. The church did not need a Luther to tell it that the Bible was true.

But it did need a Luther to tell it what the truth of the Bible is. The distinctive contribution of the Reformation to the Christian understanding of the Bible was its discovery that all theology is related to the gospel, and that the purpose of the Bible is not merely to provide sacred information but to communicate the gospel of the forgiveness of sins. The Bible must be understood in the light of God’s redemption in Christ, or it is not understood at all, regardless of how one thinks of biblical authority or biblical inspiration… it is inaccurate to designate his [Luther’s] work as that of restoring the Bible to the church. It would be more accurate perhaps to interpret it as the task of restoring the gospel to the Bible. For he did not seek to repristinate New Testament Christianity… What was always relevant in New Testament Christianity was its gospel. (Pelikan, Obedient Rebels 21-2).

Luther’s mission was not then to recover the Bible per se, but rather to recover the evangelical heart of the Scriptures – that God, by His mercy, freely forgives us in and through His Son Jesus Christ. Because certain traditions within the church, especially more recent and monastic ones, had begun to obscure this message, Luther found it necessary to pit Scripture against tradition. But this was not a rejection of tradition and its importance in general; it was rather an argument that, if Scripture was the supreme authority, as Medieval theologians themselves acknowledged, then the central claim of Scripture – the gospel – must supersede certain influential teachings and traditions.

Therefore, to reiterate the point once more: the Reformation did not pit the Biblical system over against the Roman Catholic system. Rather, it sought to recover the gospel, and was willing to adjust tradition – in their case, traditions of the Roman Catholic Church – accordingly. But by no means did the Reformers (the Magisterial ones, anyway) try to rebuild the “Christian system” from the ground up, using only the Bible. This was never the agenda.[2]

Therefore, Francis Schaeffer is wrong to treat the Reformation as a recovery of the Biblical system – that is, of the “Christian worldview.” It was, rather, a recovery of the gospel, and all that entails. But Schaeffer is right about one thing: we cannot see Christianity as simply one choice among many antithetical options, to be decided based upon what feels authentic to me. Christianity is not an optional view of life; and what we have noted here with the Reformation will help us see this very soon. First, however, we must look to Martin Heidegger – for he will make clear just where this talk of worldviews goes all wrong.

HEIDEGGER: WORLDVIEWS ARE A SYMPTOM OF MODERNITY – AND THE ABSENCE OF GOD

Heidegger makes it very blunt and very clear that he considers the whole notion of a “Christian worldview” – or any worldview in general – to be distinctly modern. In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” he speaks of the worldview-understanding of Christianity as a symptom of the demise of religion in modernity. He writes:

A fifth phenomenon of modernity is the loss of the gods [Entgötterung]. This expression does not mean the mere elimination of the gods, crude atheism. The loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one hand, the world picture Christianizes itself inasmuch as the ground of the world is posited as infinite and unconditioned, as the absolute. On the other hand, Christendom reinterprets its Christianity as a world view (the Christian world view) and thus makes itself modern and up to date. The loss of the gods is the condition of indecision about God and the gods. Christianity is chiefly responsible for bringing it about. But the loss of the gods is far from excluding religiosity. Rather, it is on its account that the relation to the gods is transformed into religious experience [Erleben]. When this happens, the gods have fled. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological investigation of myth. (Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” from Off the Beaten Track, 58).

Towards the end of the essay he adds: “As every humanism had to remain something unsuited to Greece, so a ‘medieval world view’ was an impossibility; and a ‘Catholic world view’ is an absurdity” (Heidegger, “World Picture”, 71).

There is an enormous amount to unpack here, and I will not touch it all. What I mostly want to note is Heidegger’s claim that seeing Christianity as a world view makes the coming of the divine (“the gods” as he puts it) impossible. By “impossible,” however, he does not mean that we cannot experience the divine; this is obviously true, and Heidegger recognizes it. But he claims, unexpectedly, that religious experience is precisely a sign of the gods’ flight. How can this be?

There are two key aspects to Heidegger’s thinking here that are essential to understanding this claim. The first is that when he speaks of “the gods” and their loss, he is not talking about the impossibility of belief, experience, etc. He is talking about being at a place where faith becomes a matter of decision at all (“The loss of the gods is the condition of indecision about God and the gods”) (Heidegger 58, my emphasis). His point is this: As soon as I decide for Jesus Christ, then in some sense I am no longer in the condition where Jesus Christ is an immediate reality for me. If God is truly present for me, I cannot decide for Jesus Christ at all.

This might sound confusing, but it isn’t as soon as you think about the implications of such an idea. For the gods to have “taken flight” for Heidegger means that they are no longer immediately felt, known, expected, etc. in the world around us. They are not part of the life I lead every bit as much as the breath I breathe, the food I eat, the people I see. They are not present to me, not ready at hand. An “experience” of them can be invoked, but such an “experience” is an exception; it is a moment of contact with God (“the gods”) which is distinct from the rest of my worldly life. It is an experience, and as such is siphoned off from the rest of drab, modern reality in my mind.

Moreover, it was my religious experience, much as the decision for Jesus Christ was my decision. A decision for Jesus Christ treats the belief in Christ’s divinity as an option, and that is the point – even if it is seen as the true option. The whole encounter with God is here related to me and my subjectivity. I may affirm that it was an encounter with something external to me, sure… but at the end of the day, this encounter is relegated to the realm of the personal and subjective. It has nothing to do with, and is not seen as part of, the reality of the world that immediately confronts me – a reality I still understand in modern, scientific terms. If I might decide to see reality according to Christ, I might decide to see it another way too. Reality does not appear as something necessarily infused with His presence.

But this sort of relativization to me, to my subjectivity – this is precisely the sort of modern, self-oriented, shallow Christianity that a worldview philosophy like Schaeffer’s is designed to correct, is it not? Yes, it is. Schaeffer and others insist that adopting a Biblical worldview as a believer is a matter of finally allowing God to be sovereign over His Creation. It is obedience to His vision, and not your own. It is the acceptance of a reality and truth that is really true, regardless of what I might believe.

But Heidegger thinks this characterization has it all wrong, and that an even more modern, even deeper-rooted subjectivism shows up here. From a Heideggerian perspective, Schaeffer and his ilk know not what they do.

Martin Heidegger

This brings us to the second aspect of Heidegger’s thinking that’s relevant for this essay. This is Heidegger’s understanding of the modern subject. He writes:

The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture. From now on the word “picture” means: the collective image of representing production [das Gebild des vorstellenden Herstellens]. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as world view, the decisive unfolding of the modern relationship to beings becomes a confrontation of world views; not, indeed, any old set of world views, but only those which have already taken hold of man’s most fundamental stance with the utmost decisiveness. For the sake of this battle of world views, and according to its meaning, humanity sets in motion, with respect to everything, the unlimited process of calculation, planning, and breeding. (Heidegger, “World Picture”, 71).

Here Heidegger seems to be thinking of the war of “world views” he elsewhere criticizes – those of fascism, communism and liberal democracy. But in many ways his comments apply well to world view philosophy as Christians understand it. There is, for Schaeffer and many others, a battle of fundamental worldviews going on – and Christianity must ultimately win the day.

But, as Heidegger notes, this view already relativizes the worldview to the subject. As he says, it is a means of producing representations – a way of measuring the beings one sees according to the guidelines one gives for them. No, the worldview is not mine alone – but I am nonetheless placing it upon the world. The world, as it were, consists of neutral sensory data. But I, with the right system, and the right thought-rules in place, can apply the proper understanding to the phenomena I encounter. Such a view is, as I said earlier, like the bare framework of a house, on which the decorative senses are then placed.

Except, in this case, the framework of the house is entirely in my head, and the walls, paint, furniture etc. are all external to me (or my thinking). My worldview may be the true one – for God gave it to me in the Bible, and I believe that through the Holy Spirit’s activity – but the world itself remains external to this interpretation. In a very odd way, the correct interpretation of the world seems almost indifferent to the world itself; the only ones it really affects are you and your God.

What Heidegger reveals here is stunning. It is not simply that there are different worldviews, between which we must decide (or are compelled by God to decide, which is Schaeffer’s actual view). It is also that these worldviews are projections of the subject. Treating Christianity as a worldview, in other words, relegates the Christian faith to my subjectivity, to my consciousness and the way it constructs things. It takes faith out of the world in which “the gods” may be encountered, and places it back into me, and my way of structuring the world.

As it turns out, the only real difference between Schaeffer and the existentialists is a matter of criteria. As he said at the beginning of the book, the most important thing to a Christian worldview is the law of noncontradiction – a law which allows me to begin to reason towards faith (at the impetus of the Holy Spirit). The problem is not faith being relegated to my subjective comprehension; the problem is the criterion of personal feelings of authenticity.

But Heidegger wishes to blow up both these conceptions. He is trying to show here that those who engage in battle for worldviews are much like those who say that all beliefs are equal. Both understandings relativize truth to the subject and its beliefs; they remove faith from the world in which it is placed.

Subjective comprehension or feeling is not the world of faith – not for Heidegger, the Reformation, or Christianity in general. Now we shall see why our meditations on the Reformation mattered. In the following section, I’ll take a closer look at what the world of faith actually is for Christianity.

Come back next week for the conclusion to “Christianity and the Age of the Worldview!” There I’ll try to outline a different, more helpful answer to the question “What is Christianity?”

[1] Of course, one could argue that this point means very little: the very function of a church council is to refute heresies, and heresies are not formally recognized as such until a council declares them so! But the Reformers would have argued, in turn, that Trent did not follow the model of the ancient councils, and hence was illegitimate. It was so, first, because it was not a “free” council – that is, it was presided by a pope, rather than impartial, temporal rulers; second, because it did not involve the whole church East and West, including all five patriarchates; and third, because it claimed the power to decide and even create church doctrine, and not simply the power to affirm what Scripture and the church had always taught – which had been the express self-understanding of the ancient, great councils. Having read through the decrees (and many of the canons) of the ancient ecumenical councils, I can confirm that these three things were indeed true of those ancient councils (the “Ecumenical Councils”) accepted by both East and West. Western councils, however, have operated somewhat differently.

[2] I think Schaeffer and some other evangelicals can get confused on this point for two reasons. First, some prominent traditions within evangelicalism have their roots in the Radical Reformation, which did try to rebuild Christianity from the ground up using only Scripture. The Baptists, for instance, broke off from the Quakers, who were part of the lineage of the Radical Reformation. This can tempt certain evangelicals, who look to the Magisterial Reformation as their heritage, to misread Magisterial teachings through Radical Reformation eyes. This can happen even to those who, like Schaeffer, are part of historically Magisterial denominations. They are too deeply formed by the evangelical world, in which the legacy of the Radical Reformers still holds significant sway (at least in certain ways).

The second cause of confusion is that the Magisterial Reformers did believe Biblical commandments – especially those of the New Testament – outweighed the counsels of tradition wherever the two contradicted. For those in the Reformed camp of the Magisterial Reformation – of which Schaeffer was part – the advice given in the New Testament concerning church order, etc., were also counted among the commands of the New Testament. (For the Lutherans, they were not, since church order is tangential to the gospel.) So the recovery of Biblical teaching for church practice was quite prominent, even if the Bible was not regarded as a system per se.

One can readily imagine that such a position might get confused with the Radical Reformation position quite easily, especially once we get groups like the Reformed Baptists, who form a sort of Magisterial-Radical Reformation hybrid. Oftentimes even bright minds in this tradition can slip from a preference for New Testament teaching to Biblical system-building without even noticing it.

DAN TATE is a writer and blogger at Christ & Cosmos. A former atheist, he’s been surprised and amazed by the God of all things, and he’s passionate about sharing the gospel in ways that respond to contemporary concerns about theology, philosophy, spiritual practice, science, art, and more. A lifelong writer hailing from Upstate New York, he has a B.A. from Allegheny College, an M.A. from Syracuse University, and an M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.