2. What This Evening is About
•What I want is a way of
being Christian which
adequately responds to the
challenges which
contemporary society
throws up, but is true to the
“depth grammar” of
Christianity itself.
3. The Enlightenment
•A movement to find out what is
really, universally true, without
relying on authority and / or
revelation.
•Key Word: Objectivity
•Started in perhaps the 17th
Century, still sorta-kinda
continuing today.
•(aka Modernism)
•It’s a fascinating thing, and has
done many extraordinary things –
some good, some bad.
4. Sapere aude
‘Dare to know! (Sapere
aude.) "Have the courage
to use your own
understanding," is
therefore the motto of the
enlightenment.’
(Kant What is
Enlightenment)
5. How, Exactly?
•By the use of Reason,
figure out things for yourself.
•All “reasonable” people will
ultimately agree on what is
True (and Beautiful and
Good)
•Don’t believe just because
of authority
•The best sort of knowledge
is thus scientific (because
the most “objective”)
6. Terry Pratchett: Enlightenment Author
•With his insistence on
the ability of reasonable
people to sort things out
without unnecessary
fuss, or indeed
bloodshed, and his de-
mythologising take on
the world, Terry
Pratchett is very much
an Enlightenment
thinker out of his time.
7. Political Outcomes
•The French revolution
attempted to sweep away the
detritus of history, to create a
brave new world of “Liberté,
égalité, fraternité”
•The Glorious Revolution in
Britain did a similar thing
(Only less glamorously)
•Also the American
Revolution
•What is a nation for?
8. Science
•Primacy of mathematical and observable proof.
•Newtonian physics led to a tidy world
•Archetypical type of knowledge of the
Enlightenment
9. Determinism
We may regard the present state of the
universe as the effect of its past and the
cause of its future. An intellect which at a
certain moment would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of all items
of which nature is composed, if this intellect
were also vast enough to submit these data to
analysis, it would embrace in a single formula
the movements of the greatest bodies of the
universe and those of the tiniest atom; for
such an intellect nothing would be uncertain
and the future just like the past would be
present before its eyes.
—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical
Essay on Probabilities
10. Philosophy
•Attempt to figure things out
from pure reason.
•No role for revelation
•The retreat of the “God of the
Gaps”
•Deism
•“I have no use for that
hypothesis” - Pierre-Simon
Laplace
•Theory, not story
•Static, not dynamic
11. Ethics
Act only according to
that maxim whereby you
can at the same time
will that it should
become a universal law
without contradiction
(Kant’s Categorical
Imperative Groundwork
of the Metaphysic of
Morals)
12. How Does One Apply This to The Bible?
•To try to find out what
really happened
–Liberal scholarship, quest
for the Historical Jesus
•Good examples of
behaviour to emulate
–This seems to be the root
of the New Atheist critique
13. Not Just “Liberalism”
• Biblicists tend to read the
Bible in a similar way
•Which is why to question
the factual accuracy of,
say, Genesis, is so
problematic
•Brian Mclaren calls this a
“constitutional reading” -
trying to find clear rules
14. Allowable Questions
•Enlightenment thinking
lends itself to questions
with objective-seeming
answers
•It likes technical fixes
for problems, which can
be justified on the
grounds of their
usefulness
•It’s aim is to leave no
room for mystery
15. Quick Excursus
•Blake’s picture, “The
Ancient of Days” is part
of his protest against
the overly rationalistic,
machine-like, Deist God
of the Enlightenment
•William Blake: 1757-
1827
16. Fit (or lack thereof)
•This explains the feeling of
“lack of fit” we get sometimes.
•If the best sort of knowledge
is as scientific as possible,
then where does that leave
Faith?
17. The Limits of the Enlightenment
•Ultimately the Enlightenment seems to have
foundered on the problem that “all reasonable
people” appear to believe very different things
about important things:
–What is the role of the state?
–When does a foetus become a person?
–Should there be limits to economic growth?
•Postmodernism, Feminism, Post-Colonialism,
Marxism, etc, critique the “privileged” position of
western, modernist, materialistic, etc ways of
knowing
–The Greens are part of this
•Can you really have knowledge which doesn’t
rely on a point of view? Is there really any such
thing as “totally objective knowledge”?
19. Another way of reading it
•The Bible is not a book of
ethical maxims
•Christianity is not a
philosophy which could be
worked out by philosophers
sitting in armchairs.
•Whatever it is, you have to
understand it as story first
21. Questions
•Do you see the
difference between
reading the Bible as a
source of moral maxims
and Eternal Truths vs.
reading it as Story, and
indeed History?
22. The Basic Point
•Christianity is Story, not
System. If you don’t get it as a
story, you don’t get it at all.
•Of course, we can’t leave things
here – it actually has to be true.
•But if you don’t get the primal
idea, you won’t be transformed
by it.
23. Obligatory C S Lewis Quote
Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends
myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth,
comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the
earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular
place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass
from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or
where, to a historical person crucified… under Pontius Pilate.
By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the
miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more
spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from
the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both
assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact
though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace
which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more
necessary than the other.
(C S Lewis “Myth Became Fact” )
24. Christianity vs. Philosophy
•To start from philosophy and try
to force Christianity into it, is
always to leave something
important out.
•The problem with Modernism is
that it trusts theories more than
stories.
•Christian thinking starts with the
Event, and reflection on it.
•Rather than a single focus on
learning facts about the universe,
Christianity engages the mystery
of how to live.
25. And the Word became flesh and
lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a
father’s only son, full of grace and
truth. …From his fullness we have
all received, grace upon grace.
The law indeed was given through
Moses; grace and truth came
through Jesus Christ. No one has
ever seen God. It is God the only
Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known.
John 1:14-18
26. The Problem…
•This is a bit of a problem for
us, because we would much
rather an uncontroversial
system everyone could agree
on.
•The temptation is to “de-
mythologise” faith, to make it
feel less problematic, more
universal.
