Living on the edge

When Newbigin talks about the need we face now to think in new ways in light of the demise of the Enlightenment agenda, he reminds us that past eras have presented similar situations and that Christians provided the intellectual resources to re-vision reality. His example is the classical Roman period in the 4^th century. Its internal conflicts had imploded such that cynicism and skepticism were the predominant approaches to life. Although the Classical period had generated much that was good in science, art, and philosophy, it no longer provided a coherent way to understand and live in the world. Newbigin credits St. Augustine as the person who opened the way for the Christian faith to become the new “plausibility structure” that would shape the future centuries of Western thought. Augustine, trained as a Classical scholar, did not reject classicism, but planted it in the new soil of his Christian faith. The tools of reason and rhetoric, so developed under classicism, were now put to the service of Augustine’s Trinitarian faith, the new starting point.

In the same way, Newbigin sees that the Enlightenment project has run its course. It too was the environment in which great gains were made especially in science, but it’s inability to speak meaningfully about the purpose of humanity and the abusive use of technological gains against the environment and against humanity itself has shown that The Age of Reason does not provide sufficient resources to produce a society that people actually want to live in. According to Newbigin, Christianity, with its starting point of God’s fresh creation through Christ, can incorporate the great gains of the Enlightenment without being bound by its limitations. The new starting point of the gospel opens the way for these gains to be rooted in new soil, just as had happened with Augustine.

That means that Christian scholars today live “on the edge;” we are living at the end of an era just like Augustine experienced. Given the widespread acknowledgement of the limits and failures of the Enlightenment project (even more recognized now then when Newbigin spoke 20 years ago), the way is open for Christian scholars to be like Augustine as we think afresh about how the story of the gospel opens the door for us to think and live that in a way that, while using the good tools and insights of the Enlightenment, moves beyond the limits of the stifling philosophy that marked it.

Perhaps the fact that we are at the end of an era is one reason the backlash of the “new atheism” has sprung up in the past half-decade. Richard Dawkins and company are concerned that the reaction against The Age of Reason is leading people to incredulous superstitions and an anti-intellectual way of life that will hamper scientific and social advancement. Of course, they see Christian faith as one of the most popular (and therefore most dangerous) of these superstitions and so especially weigh in against Christianity.

But as Newbigin writes, the way forward is not by becoming anti-intellectual or anti-science. Thoughtful Christians are right to share the new atheists concerns about religion and spirituality when used as a rationale for believing whatever one wants to believe about the world. One of the good things about Enlightenment science is that is rooted in the conviction that there is reality “out there” to be discovered; we are not left with simply subjective ideas. The Christian is likewise committed to the conviction that other sorts of truth about reality are also “out there,” truths in the realm of the spiritual dimension, of morality, and philosophy which today are widely considered to be hopelessly subjective and simply a matter of social conditioning. So, how do we live out our conviction about this truth “out there” without being written off as either being mindlessly subjective (“I feel it in my heart…”) or bound by dogma (“my church teaches….”)?