Whether we realize it or not, we’re children of the Enlightenment. This is both a good thing and a not so good thing.
It’s good in that the Enlightenment freed the individual from a feudal system that forced people into predetermined slots. It enshrined human rights and liberated people to pursue lives independent of the often-arbitrary constraints of traditional European society.
The downside is that such individualism failed to account for the central importance of community for human flourishing, along with its corresponding responsibilities. While the Enlightenment stressed individual liberty, it implicitly denied communal duties.
Worse still, the Enlightenment effectively jettisoned the accumulated wisdom of the ages in an effort to begin history anew. The foundations and authority upon which traditional society had rested – the church, the family, the crown (political order), history, tradition, laws, customs, norms, and communal life in general – were now suspect.
Traditional society had set limits on unbridled individualism and counseled the obligations necessary to live successfully with others, wisdom gleaned from the trials and errors of countless generations of actual lived experience.
Henceforth such traditional sentiments and norms were to be replaced by reason and science as the sole ordering principles guiding all human activity. The liberated self, pursuing these “enlightened” principles, would advance human civilization to new heights. Liberated from the tyranny of the past, human beings were now free to remake the world.
Rejecting the injustices of the feudal order, of course, was noble and necessary. But, as with many social movements, it took things too far, effectively throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
By rejecting the wisdom of previous generations, the Enlightenment created a new form of tyranny, arguably worse than what it replaced. It exchanged lived, shared human experience for untested, abstract theories, what we today might call “ideologies.”
In 1906, Albert Schweitzer wrote a landmark book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. In it, he tried to establish the real Jesus as someone intrinsically distinct from the Jesus depicted in the New Testament.
His argument was that the early church, specifically the Apostle Paul, had hijacked the real man, Jesus, for its/his own purposes. Thus, the task of modern biblical criticism was to separate the “Jesus of history” from the “Christ of faith.”
Back in the 1990s, this same quixotic undertaking resurfaced with the creation of the acclaimed “Jesus Seminar,” a group of intellectuals who would meet to vote on whether the historical Jesus said, or didn’t say, what is attributed to him in the gospels. They voted using colored beads. (I kid you not.)
This is a good example of the Enlightenment’s misguided reliance on abstract reason and science, in this case the “science” of biblical interpretation. Lost was the centrality of the very community out of which Scripture was birthed.
Like the Jesus Seminar, we moderns tend to look at the Bible in abstract terms, as if it’s merely a set of rational propositions. We forget that the Bible is, in a sense, a descriptive account of countless generations of lived experience, of real human beings grappling with a transcendent God, discovered and experienced amid life’s everyday circumstances and challenges.
Libertarians today, for example, consider the Constitution a brilliantly conceived document that has formed a specific people, the people of the United States. The opposite, however, is true. It is the people who first wrote the document to reflect their preexistent history, religion, culture, experiences, and intellectual understandings. The words on the page didn’t form a people; a people formed the words on the page.
A caveat: here it’s essential to note that the “Word” in classic Christianity is not to be confused with the written words of the Bible. Instead, the Word refers to the fullness of the revealed Christ. He does not come to us as a set of reasoned propositions or dogmatic assertions, but as a person, with all that that entails. What is revealed in Christ is not just his words but his whole being.
To know the Word (the revealed Christ) is to know the sacred, the transcendent, the holy, that which is ineffable and not easily contained in words. God acts, and we respond, in both word and deed, each an outward expression of that which is inexpressible.
Thus, it was the accumulated, lived experiences of the early community of believers who, having first encountered the Word, put to paper words seeking to describe that experience. While its contents do indeed betray identifiable themes, ideas, and even what we might call dogmatic assertions, the Christian faith is not solely defined by them. Such concepts are but the residue of a larger, shared, and embodied faith.
In the Old Testament, we encounter the early Hebrew belief that to utter God’s name would result in death. The reason is that, for the Israelites, names were thought to embody the full essence of the person so named.
To utter the name of God, then, was to bring down the full force of God’s holy power, a power no finite creature could withstand. The idea was that the personhood of God is far greater than the limited and limiting categories and descriptions we human beings regularly seek to impose upon him.
Curiously, the Enlightenment’s rationalism can be seen in both modern-day Evangelicalism and the Jesus Seminar (a group wildly embraced by many mainline Protestant churches). This despite the fact that, outwardly, their theologies appear as polar opposites.
While the Jesus Seminar tried to fashion Jesus into a late 20th century Western progressive, Evangelicals go in the opposite direction, harkening back to biblical times. And yet, as I say, their methodologies are surprisingly similar.
Which is to say they both fall into the same Enlightenment trap. Evangelicalism, for its part, taking the Bible as the sole arbiter of God’s truth, selectively abstracts its principles and dogmas from the living community that produced them. The Jesus Seminar (and much of mainline Protestantism) similarly ignores that same community in deference to a series of contemporary, post-biblical concepts.
As I say, the weakness of Evangelicalism is its tendency to reject or diminish the importance of the historic church through time, the very Body of Christ, who, for generations, and in unending line, has encountered the Living Word and served as witness to God’s activity in and through human existence. It’s as if nothing of significance has happened since 100-200 A.D. And if it did, it probably wasn’t very good.
Thus, you often see in Evangelical circles a skeptical stance toward tradition, sometimes referred to dismissively as “Churchianity.” Such Churchianity may include traditional ceremony, form, liturgy, aesthetics, the experience of the faithful both past and present, cultural and social insights and influences, nature or creation, as well as all the other manifold ways God speaks to his children in time and space. For Evangelicalism as a whole, the Bible alone seems sufficient. Sometimes it seems frozen in amber.
Then again, it’s hard to defend the mainline churches who presumably acknowledge most of what Evangelicalism denies, but tend to sniff at the traditional biblical witness. No matter how you slice it, though, the Bible remains the foundational document of Christian faith.
It’s our link to our past. Without it, we commit to ignorance of what produced Christianity in the first place. To repeat, all too often mainline churches are swayed by everything but Scripture, which is to say contemporary theories and dogma, most often secular in origin.
The supreme irony of the Enlightenment, in the final analysis, is that individual human rights, the pursuit of knowledge, and the other various humane discoveries it championed did not arise out of thin air. It was the preceding Late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods that organically bequeathed the insights of the Enlightenment.
The mistake was in assuming that something completely different had happened, rather than reflecting the steady march of traditional Christian European culture through time.
The Enlightenment was thus not some historical aberration but the product of centuries of cultural progress formed in large measure by the ongoing influence of a lived and inculcated Christianity, which over time had effectively advanced the human cause.
By ignoring or rejecting the very foundations that had brought these things about, the Enlightenment cut itself off from its roots, from the very dynamic traditions that had born such glorious fruit.