Below is a quote from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, Stanford University Press, 2002. If you are not familiar with the work, it is in some ways the beginning of Critical Theory in 1930’s Germany. It’s a fun, dense read if you enjoy the angry young men genre. And we should note they weren’t just angry; they were frightened and frustrated. They were frightened because Adolf Hitler was a progressive modern. They were frustrated because Enlightenment thought didn’t have an answer to Hitler. Hence, during the Nuremberg trials American eugenic laws were cited, and Americans had produced the computers that helped organize the death camps. Hitler was a modern, supported by progressive moderns throughout the world. Remember Charles Lindbergh and H. L. Mencken.

Given that Horkheimer and Adorno are frightened, we can forgive them for their writing style while recognizing their influence on contemporary thought. Allow me to summarize their critique and then you can read for yourself. Faith requires some knowledge but is not knowledge nor a part of the process of gaining knowledge. The more that one knows the less she believes, so that fuller knowledge is destructive to faith. Believers are aware of this and so they are disingenuous.

 Yet don’t take my word for it: below their quote with all their grinding, twitching neo-Marxist energy and solemnity:

The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the principle of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist, directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form. Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inherent flaw, the immanent contradiction that lies in making a profession of reconciliation, is the reason why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair (14).

There are two hidden assumptions in the passage: first, faith is at loggerheads with knowledge. There is a negative dialectic between faith, requiring ignorance, and knowledge, requiring knowing. Thus, faith is destroyed by knowledge and “why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair.” Knowledge in this conception cancels faith.

Christians admit that a portion of faith is the knowledge gap. Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith allows us to leap over the ditch of history and of ignorance. But faith is not simply overcoming ignorance through a blind leap. Faith includes trusting an authority who is not ignorant. Belief includes trusting another’s knowledge and character. Faith does not exclude knowledge, but rather places trust in God’s knowledge. Thus, Hebrews 11:7 “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.”

A moment of thought reminds us that the process of faith whereby we trust in the knowledge and character of another knower is basic to all human experiences. How do you know who your parents are? And if you say by a genetic test, how did you know who to test as potential subjects among 7.5 billion people?  How do you know that the test is accurate? Almost all knowing comes down to trusting an authority outside of self. In fact if by knowing you mean there is a shared reality outside of your own mind that can be affirmed, you are trusting the authority of truth. You know that all truth is personal, unless you suspect rocks contemplate truth.

There are always at least two knowers, one might say fundamentally Three. But there are two knowers in faith—God and man. God does not have faith because he knows “the events as yet unseen.” Noah must have faith because he does not know the future, unless God reveals it to him. Faith and knowledge are self-destructive only when the believer has the same capacity of knowing as the revealer.

The second assumption of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique is then clear:  there is no God, nor is there any knower greater than man. And so, they are frightened and frustrated by Enlightenment’s product in Hitler, but they have no answer. They want mystery and enchantment, but not the Enchanter or the mystery of God which is Christ. Like the ouroboros of, they are self consumed.