The Problem of Literalism Part 6: Conclusion

For these several months we have discussed the problem of literalism, which is essentially that there are two almost opposite uses of the idea of literalism. For Augustine literalism meant attempting to understand the intent of the author and the historical reality expressed in the text. For Spinoza literalism meant attacking the very possibility of revelation. We also discussed that the “rationalizing” of religion around a philosophical or scientific consensus was an ancient project reinvigorated by Spinoza’s work. Having considered all of these pieces, let’s draw them all together to consider how the church should respond to the current state of affairs.

I have an obscure book called Spinoza Dictionary, published by a small press called the Philosophical Library. It’s not a terribly interesting book, but it has a short foreword by Albert Einstein. Here we learn that Einstein “read the Spinoza Dictionary with great care” and that he had obviously read Spinoza’s canon with greater care. He makes a gentle jibe reminding the astute reader to read Spinoza’s works, establishes himself as an interpreter of Spinoza, and mocks sin and the soul and closes. Perhaps, one of the greatest scientific minds in history flashes his philosophical membership card, hides it a way with a smile, and goes back to his physics.

The other day as I sat on the train returning from Washington, DC, the man behind me was loudly counseling his reluctant friend over a cell phone about the need to despoil his new girlfriend. The basic argument was that human beings are essentially animals, and as animals we have sexual needs; if these sexual needs are not fulfilled, we can break down in rage. If the girlfriend refused to submit to his needs, then she was unnatural or likely cheating on him. And thus, we find materialistic philosophy or Epicureanism disseminated throughout our culture at all levels.

Street or train ethics is a conglomeration of Darwin and Nietzsche with a bit of social accommodation on the side.  The poets thump out rhymes confirming this, the writers and actors support it, the academics and philosophers chatter about it, and our media spreads it. Darwin’s contribution to materialism is so common that a man on the train can publicly proclaim without any sense of shame that we are all animals and we need regular sex so that we don’t become rapists.

For better or worse, we live in an age enframed by Epicurean thought with its intrinsic hermeneutic 1. Shedd summarizes our current state well: “Epicureanism is the most natural and spontaneous philosophical scheme for earthly minds, and hence prevails in those periods when the fallen humanity runs it career with greatest swiftness, and with least resistance, from religion, or from the better philosophical systems” [A History of Christian Doctrine (reprint 2006, Solid Ground Christian Books; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 61].

Epicureanism crept into public awareness with the advent of the printing press and the dissemination of materialistic philosophers and theologians like Socinus, Servetus, and Machiavelli. Any careful reading of Luther’s Bondage of the Will or Calvin’s Institutes will prove that they were enormously concerned about the rising materialism. Calvin goes as far as to call the ancient Epicurean Lucretius “a filthy dog” (cf. Institutes, 1.5.5). The puritan John Howe’s (1630-1705) The Living Temple was a careful defense of orthodoxy and an attack on the materialism of Spinoza. Yet even given the efforts of such men, the materialists swept the board and became the framework of modernity.

Spinoza’s modern contribution was laying out the philosophical and practical strategy necessary to maintain materialism in response to divine revelation (cf. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion). One component of this strategy was his corrosive literalism. The Theological-Political Treatise exhibits one of the basic problems of philosophical materialism for Christians. If there is no God or only a philosophically necessary god, then the Bible is open to all the vagaries and fortunes of history in its development and content. The human authors can hold to contradictory beliefs, opinions, and error. The interpreter who approaches the text with Spinoza’s literalism must develop materialistic explanations of the Bible, creating new interpretations and significances from the text in contradiction to the universal faith.

The second issue which is directly related to the interpretation of the Bible is that the Bible teaches a universal history that contradicts the universal history developed by the Epicureans from their presupposition of materialism. The general framework of their history was recorded (circa 50 BC) by Lucretius in On the Nature of Things. In our time the necessary physical uniformity and material causes are accepted as fact and then read back as billions and billions of years and an evolutionary biological process. Occasionally, an Einstein or Sagan (cf. Broca’s Brian) will briefly mention or admit to the philosophical commitments of Epicureanism, but then quickly move to the rhetoric of fact and science.

With the historical rise of Epicureanism as the horizons of Western culture, Christianity has been forced to respond to the incompatibility. One group, led by the likes of Schleiermacher, attempted to carve out a place for Christianity within the system (cf. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers). Others attempted to lead the church into raw and inconsistent forms of fideism and provincial theology. Some attempted to maintain the older and more Augustinian understanding, but were willing to compromise on the integrity of the Scriptures and the historical literalism of the church—A. H. Strong (1836-1921) will serve as an example. And an even smaller group led by the likes of Shedd attempted to maintain the historical interpretation of the church in theological and academic circles.

Schleiermacher’s attempt led to the rise of Christian liberalism, but the mediating position of men like A. H. Strong created another problem, which can be illuminated from a quote by his systematic theology: [W]e would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records,” [Systematic Theology (New Jersey: Felming H. Revell Company, 1907), 395.]

Strong’s position is that the interpretation of the Bible, especially the sections on creation, should now be driven by current scientific consensus on the universal history.  In so doing, he and those who follow his lead break decisively with Augustine’s historical literalism. What is being ignored is the philosophical assumptions of physical uniformity and ultimate material causes serve as the philosophical framework supporting and driving the science of geology. In other words, Spinoza’s literalism is contained within the scientific project as conceptualized by modernity. To accept the universal history of western science as normative is to accept physical uniformity and an ultimate physical cause rather than a divine cause. The current scientific regime will not allow for universally catastrophic events like the Fall or the Flood or breaks in the physical chains of causation caused by miracles. Individual theologians may maintain a historical orthodoxy, but if they consistently hold to physical uniformity, passage after passage must be reinterpreted along Spinoza’s literalism. The journey from  Darwin’s old earth and modern cosmology, to a local flood, the manna of Exodus as bug spittle (R. Alan Cole, Exodus, at 16:31), Jesus walking on a sand bar, Jesus swooning on the cross, and the Bible as myth or fable, is one of simple hermeneutical consistency.

So if syncretism and compromise with the universal history and materialistic literalism lead to capitulation and the end of “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), what do we do? We pray, we remain loyal to Christ and his word and the faith, and we fight.

How do we fight? A bit like this: “You must also know, that whatever Being is not of it self, hath no Excellency in it, but what was in that Being that was of it self before. And therefore, it had in it, all the Excellency that is in such things as proceeded from it (unabated because in it necessarily) together with the proper Excellency of its own Being, whereas the other sort of Beings, have but their own deriv’d Excellency only. Wherefore this, also, is most evident, that, this World had a Maker distinct from, and more excellent than it self, that changes not, and whereto that Name most properly agrees, I AM THAT I AM” [John Howe, The Living Temple: Part II; Containing Animadversions on Spinosa (reprint: Gale Ecco, 2011; London, Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), 87].

And this: “But such agile motions of the soul, such excellent faculties, such rare gifts, especially bear upon the fact of them a divinity that does not allow itself readily to be hidden—unless the Epicureans, like the Cyclopes, should from this height all the more shamelessly wage war against God. Do all the treasures of heavenly wisdom concur in ruling a five-foot worm while the whole universe lacks this privilege?” [John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Know Press, 1960), 1.5.5, 56.]

In these quotes by Howe and Calvin, Christian philosophy stands upon the bedrock of revelation and offers resistance. They say in effect, “Come let us reason together; explain to me this.” They offer to fight, and to the best of their ability they do so.

And yet our friend Augustine reminds us that it is not always so easy:

When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, whether we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, that we will not be lead astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion. [The Literal Meaning of Genesis in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41 (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 1.21.45].

We must then be prepared to fall back, not to mysticism or provincial fideism which is the foundation of so much fearful ignorance and heterodoxy among Christians, but the puzzled and robust faith taught to us by Paul and preserved by men like Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and the rest. The blessed Paul describes it this way: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair. . .” What does it mean to be perplexed? It means that Paul sometimes didn’t know the right answer or the explanation. He was at a loss or puzzled by events, but he did not despair. He understood his task was to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5), but that doesn’t mean that he always won the arguments or that he always had an answer that satisfied his audience.

In Acts 17, Paul faced Stoics and Epicureans (v.18). And while Stoics are in short supply in our day, Epicureans are plentiful. And what does he say to them:  he quotes their poets and philosophers, but first he spoke of “Jesus and the resurrection” (v. 18), he also says, “this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.”

He proclaims God as the greatest possible being, the creator of Adam, the instigator and maintainer of history and the cosmos, the sovereign God. Implicitly he is confirming the historicity of Genesis in the face of the Stoics and evolutionist like the Epicureans. But he does so in a winsome way by quoting the poets Epimendides and Aratus, just as he quotes Euripides in 1 Corinthians 15:33, and creates wholesome lists which at least share the Stoic ethical vocabulary in Philippians 4:8.

And Paul tells us something of extreme importance in Philippians 4:9: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” Paul’s behavior of perplexity in faith, winsome and informed evangelism, and a refusal to retreat from the Areopagus, the Sanhedrin, or the Imperial Court, his stand upon his political rights (Acts 16:37; 21:39; 22:25-29) for the purpose of the gospel are all to be practiced by the Christian, “and the God of peace with be with” us. Our callings may not allow us the access, gifting, or training given to Paul, but we must fight and we must rest in Christ.

Thus should we live; we may not be able to explain the origins and content of the Bible and human origins in a way that will satisfy our contemporaries. But if we follow Paul’s example “some men” will join us and believe (Acts 17:34), others will mock and others will say, “We will hear you again about this” (Acts 17:32). And that is enough until Jesus returns, and then “every knee [shall] bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Next month (D.V.), we will begin a series on love.