Crises in the History of Christianity

There are actually three crises which concern me:

1. The attacks upon Christianity as being the cause of the decay of the Roman Empire — which Gibbon and some other modern scholars revived. I believe these attacks in their original form peaked sometime before the theological career of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, but they remained largely unanswered when Augustine took on that task.

   The charges against Christianity were closely related to a general pagan assault upon Christian beliefs which portrayed Christianity as a dark religion which taught the world is evil. Some cultured pagans thought of Christianity as being an enemy of human civilization. St. Augustine wrote The City of God to counter this attack. This counterattack had more positive content than the ways of thought defended by Celsius and the other pagans and that Augustinian synthesis of the Bible and the best of pagan thought provided much of the form and content of Christian thought in the centuries since.

2. The loss of respect for the mind in Christian thought which occurred, oddly enough, at the end of the High Middle Ages, approximately 1050-1250. This is odd because that age was one of the intellectual high-points of human history — philosophy and theology were thriving and so were optics and statics and even evolutionary biology to some small extent (St. Albert the Great, the teacher of Aquinas, was overly enthusiastic in seeing the transformation of one species into another — see The History of Science From Augustine to Galileo by the historian A.C. Crombie, available from Dover Publications).

   St. Thomas Aquinas mounted an effort to make sense of Creation in the light of God’s revelations — though he was, to be sure, more concerned with God’s revelations. This effort was partially directed against the advocates of the view that preachers needed only to be ‘spirit-filled’. Those early enthusiasts thought that well-developed minds were at best optional if not actually harmful to evangelical and preaching duties. Some scholars think that Aquinas wrote Summa Contra Gentiles to foster respect for Christianity among non-Christians who apparently thought of Christianity as a collection of superstitions.

3. The fragmentation of knowledge in the modern world where Christian thinkers and spiritual leaders have shown themselves incapable of providing a unified account of God’s Creation in light of His revelations. The best most can do is to wave their hands weakly and say, “There is no contradiction between the book of Genesis and modern physics, no contradiction between the Sermon on the Mount and evolutionary biology.”

   In fact, we modern Christians live in a world of multiple systems of truth. Mere assertions by the shepherds that those worlds are ultimately one or weakly compatible seem meaningless to many of those sheep who are wandering away, including many young men and women who watch documentaries on our apish ancestors without having a way of seeing a story which includes both those knuckle-dragging creatures and Moses in front of the burning bush.

   Take an intelligent young woman, well-formed in her faith, whether Reformed or Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox. Put the Bible in front of her along with a pile of popular science books, pre-selected to screen out those with ideological biases. Let’s assume there’s a book on the so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics, one on the evolution of human morality, one on cosmological physics. Will she be prepared see those science books as being compatible with the Bible?

   This fragmentation is at least partly, I think — almost entirely, the result of that loss of respect for the mind on the part of Christians as Christians, even those who have minds well-developed to the needs of their vocations in the sciences or literature or business or other fields. And then there are the specialists in theology or pastoral care who seem mostly indifferent to the empirical knowledge of God’s Creation except when it’s put into sound-bytes on a televised documentary with lots of colorful images.

I’ve tried to address this need for a story of empirical reality in light of Christian truths, starting with my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, and going on to many postings on my blogs. Recently, I wrote an entry on my other blog about my motivations in this effort, Praising God by Understanding His Creation. Only time will tell if I’ve made a serious contribution to filling this need for a Christian worldview, but I hope I’ve at least asked a few of the right questions. And I hope my fellow Christians are realizing this effort will require a major effort on the part of many. That effort will probably be stretched out over more than one generation.

I’ll wrap up by talking very briefly about what happened with the earlier two crises:

1. St. Augustine of Hippo successfully provided a story of human history (including the physical and biological sciences of of his day). This led into the formation of Christendom during the Middle Ages. Whatever one might think of a triumphalistic Christian politics, there’s no denying the accomplishments of the Medieval Church, starting with the strengthening of faith but also including practical results such as the preservation of Roman technology and various bodies of ancient knowledge and then the formation of uniquely Christian cultures that were as rich and accomplished as any in history.
2. The efforts of Aquinas to salvage the Christian mind failed. So far as his thought goes, two of the greatest of the modern Thomists, Etienne Gilson and Alasdair MacIntyre have both claimed that Thomistic thought was misunderstood or deliberately deformed for the years between John of St. Thomas (only a couple generations after Aquinas) and the late 1800s. Apparently, even Pope Leo XIII was going on the basis of inspiration or human instinct when the declared Aquinas to be the man who knew how to do philosophy correctly. He didn’t seem to realize that Aquinas had seen the tight ties between physics and metaphysics or that he was willing to take man as a true creature subject to empirical analysis and not subject to a priori claims of grandeur or even exceptionalism.