This is a piece I wrote to help people uninformed about current Christian theology prepare to read Marcus Borg's book The Heart of Christianity.
What is Modernism?
Rev. Dr. Tom
Sorenson, Pastor
March, 2017
In his book The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg uses phrases like “modern” or
“the modern period” as though everyone understood what he means by them. I
rather doubt that everyone understands what he means by them unless they have
taken the trouble to study the matter and learned what they mean. So I want to
give a brief introduction here to the notion of “modernism,” a word that points
to all of the things Borg and others mean by words like “modern.”
To understand what modernism is
we need to understand that an enormous shift in how people understand the world
took place in western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians
call this shift “the Enlightenment.” It is perhaps an unfortunate term. It
suggests that before the Enlightenment people lived in darkness. Indeed, I have
seen a Soviet writer say of a man (on whom I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation) who
worked in the field of public education that he brought not enlightenment to
the people but “endarkenment.” Dark is the opposite of light, yet we must
understand that people who lived before the Enlightenment weren’t necessarily
“in the dark.” They just understood things differently than did the people of
the Enlightenment and everyone whose world view has been shaped by it. That
“everyone,” by the way, includes all of us. We are all children of the
Enlightenment whether we’re aware of it or not.
We start with a brief review of
how people in western Europe understood the world and the nature of truth before
the Enlightenment, that is, in what we call the premodern period. In the
premodern period the most profound truth was understood to come to us through
divine revelation. People knew about God not because they reasoned their way to
an understanding that there must be a God and to an understanding of the nature
of that God but because they believed God had revealed Godself to them. That
revelation came in different ways depending on whether a person was Catholic
or, starting in the early sixteenth century, Protestant. What Catholicism and
Protestantism had in common was a belief in divine revelation as the source of
profound truth. Premodern people could be very rationalistic. The great
theologians of what we call Scholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas were rationalistic in
the extreme, but they applied rationalistic analysis to what they took to be
revealed divine truths. Thus, when Anselm wrote his book Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human) he assumed the divine identity
of Jesus Christ as revealed truth. He didn’t reason his way to it. He reasoned
his way to what he thought it meant (an understanding, by the way, that
essentially took over western Christianity and is even today what most people,
but not most postmodern people, think Christianity is).
In the premodern world most
people probably took the accounts in the Bible to be factually correct. They
took them to be fact because they had no reason not to. The Scientific
Revolution that was such a big part of the Enlightenment hadn’t happened yet.
For example, it looks to us like the sun revolves around the earth. The Bible
says the sun revolves around the earth and that Joshua made it stand still. So
for premodern people the sun revolved around the earth and Joshua made it stand
still. Premodern people probably took the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis to
be factual. Science had not yet discovered all the clues about the evolution of
the human species, so they had no real reason not to take that story as fact.[1]
Premodern people mostly took the
Bible as factual, but they didn’t think that factual truth was primarily what
the Bible was about. They understood that it contains truth far more
significant than mere factual truth. They usually called that truth
“allegorical” truth. They saw the great stories of the Bible as allegories, as
stories that point beyond their mere facts to far deeper truths. They did not
limit the truth of the Bible or the truths of the Christian faith to mere
facts. They knew to look below the surface of the stories for far deeper
truths.
The Enlightenment can be said to
have started in 1637 CE when Rene Descartes, a Frenchman, sat in his study and
wrote in French “Je pense, donc je suis.”
A few years later he said it in Latin, "Cogito ergo sum.” In English it’s “I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes had set out to reason his way to truth because he had given up on
religion as a way to truth. He took, or at least said that he took, nothing as
revealed truth. The only thing he took as a given was his own existence. He
knew he existed because he knew himself to be sitting there thinking. Hence “I
think, therefore I am.”
Descartes rationalism, his
claimed use of his own reason as the way to truth, became the distinguishing
criterion of the Enlightenment. Human reason became the guide to truth in
virtually every field of human endeavor, something it had never been before.
Adam Smith applied reason to economics and came up with capitalism. John Locke
applied human reason to politics and came up with a political theory that
formed the basis of the American Constitution. Scientists like Isaac Newton and
a great many others applied human reason to the study of the natural world.[2] They discovered new fact
after new fact about that world. Indeed, what they discovered was taken
precisely as established fact. The notion developed and became universally
accepted that a scientific fact was an established, indisputable fact.
Scientific fact was truth no one could deny. The belief in the infallibility of
scientific fact actually isn’t very scientific, for science sees its “facts”
only as hypotheses that can be challenged and changed when newly discovered data
disputes them. Einstein proved that Newton’s theories of gravity actually
missed the mark, but in Newton’s time and long thereafter no one knew that they
did or believed that they could have. They and so many other scientific
discoveries were taken as established fact.
Scientific truth as factual
truth was so powerful that truth got reduced to fact in every area of human
endeavor. Everyone wanted the truth of their field of study, whatever it was,
to be as solid as scientific truth appeared to be. That meant it had to be
factual truth. Even the truths of religious faith got reduced to factual
truths. People came to believe that if the Bible wasn’t factually true it contained
no truth at all. Premodern people never have believed that way, for what they
called the allegorical truth of the Bible would remain even if the apparent
facts in it turned out not to be facts at all.
The conviction that there was
truth deeper than fact mostly got lost in the Enlightenment. A central part of
modernism is the belief that only facts are true. That’s why so many Christians
cling to the untenable belief that everything in the Bible must be factually
true. Take the six days of creation story with which the Bible opens for
example. It is impossible that that story is factually true, but people cling
to its factuality by doing things like saying that the days that it names are
actually geologic periods. The Bible doesn’t call them geologic periods. Still,
if they are geologic periods they can be factually true. Turning the days into
geologic periods in no way solves all of the factual problems of that story,
but people cling to it anyway.[3] They cling to it because they
are children of the Enlightenment. For them only facts are true.
The reduction of truth to fact
that was a central feature of the Enlightenment took over western Christianity.
We see that takeover in starkest relief in the beliefs of Christian Fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism is a product of late-nineteenth-early-twentieth century American
Christianity. It’s central tenets appeared only in a series of pamphlets
published between 1910 and 1915. It insists that Christianity consists of five
essential beliefs. They are:
1.
The inerrancy of the Bible.
2.
The literal (that is, the factual) nature of the
biblical accounts.
3.
The virgin birth of Christ.
4.
The bodily resurrection (and ultimate return) of
Christ.
5.
Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement
for human sin.
Fundamentalism is the Christianity of modernism reduced
to its most basic beliefs. It is Christianity stripped of all truth but factual
truth. Not all western Christians by any means became true Fundamentalists, but
the factualism of Fundamentalism was shared by almost all American Christians
during the time most of us grew up and were introduced to the faith.
Western culture has moved beyond
modernism. At least its cutting edge has, and all of western culture will. One
central feature of what we call (for lack of a better term) postmodernism is
the recovery of truths deeper than mere factual truth that was a characteristic
of the premodern world. Borg calls that deeper truth metaphorical. I call it
mythic or symbolic, those being the technically correct terms for this kind of
truth. Whatever we call it, it is a feature of premodernism that is also part
of postmodernism. One significant difference between premodernism and
postmodernism in their understanding of truth is that postmodernism accepts
scientific discoveries as true in the realms of human knowledge to which they
apply. Those discoveries hadn’t been made in the time of premodernism. Thus,
postmodernism knows in a way that premodernism did not that the earth is not
the center of the universe. We have no problem with it being a tiny planet
orbiting an insignificant star far from the center of one galaxy out of an
almost countless number of galaxies in the universe. We have no problem with
the earth being 4 billion years old. We have no problem with the equivalence of
matter and energy, as in E=mc2. We have no problem with human beings
being the result of a very long process of the evolution of species.
Premodernism knew none of those things nor a great many more. Modernist
Christianity in its most elemental form has to deny them, or most of them,
because it insists on reading the Bible as inerrant fact. What Borg calls the
emerging paradigm accepts scientific truths because it knows that, while they
may be more or less factually accurate, they are not the only kind of truth. There
is truth that is far deeper than they are that is not inconsistent with them.
So that’s what modernism is, for
our purposes at least. It is human reason and science raised to the level of
ultimate truth; and it is the reduction of truth primarily to fact. Borg’s
“earlier paradigm” is the Christianity of modernism. His “emerging paradigm” is
at least the beginnings of a Christianity of postmodernism. The Christianity of
modernism cannot survive more than maybe another hundred years or so because
modernism has had its day and is fading into history. Postmodern Christianity
is on the rise. We’d better pay attention.
[1]
Not all premodern people took it as fact. The Church Father Origen, in the
third century CE, said he thought taking it as fact was foolish. His voice was,
however, that of a small minority of people. Most people took the story of Adam
and Eve to be fact.
[2]
There were scientific precursors to the Enlightenment. By the time Descartes
wrote Cogito ergo sum astronomers
from Copernicus to Galileo had already upended the earth-centered universe that
everyone had believed in.
[3]
One quick example. Genesis 1:3 has God creating light on the first day and
“there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” Evening is when the
sun sets. Morning is when it rises but the sun isn’t created until the fourth
day. See Genesis 1:14-16. The sun didn’t exist on the first day, according to
this account. If this is a factual account, where did the light come from on
the first day? Biblical literalism says “nothing is impossible for God.” In a
sense that’s true, but in another sense it is the ultimate cop out of those for
whom the Bible must be factually true. It doesn’t answer the question, it ducks
it.
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