Augustine’s view of the relation between faith and reason can be summed up in the following: 1) reason discovers true authority; 2) true authority demands faith; 3) faith rewards with understanding; and 4) reason helps explain faith.
Rene Descartes is widely considered to be the father of modern philosophy. His seventeenth-century “Cartesian experiment” represented Western civilization’s philosophical and epistemological break from Medieval Scholasticism. To understand how this came to pass, one must begin by examining the intellectual forces competing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Religious pluralism is a plain fact of life. Its presence can also be a valuable indicator that a society in which it is found truly values freedom. It is even the contention of some philosophers that religious pluralism is not merely an empirical fact, but an epistemological necessity. But pluralism can also present grave difficulties in the public square.
In the post-Kantian, anti-metaphysical world of post-bellum America, common sense realism was no longer viewed as a rationally defensible epistemology. The subsequent relegation of religion to the private, subjective realm helped to mute the voice of traditional Christianity in the public square, which gave way to a secular orthodoxy that would come to dominate the first half of the twentieth century.
Because modern man, due to his scientific worldview, must admit that he has no rational basis for believing the New Testament, demythologization frees him to exercise his faith in a radical abandonment to God and thereby come to understand his “authentic self.” So argued the highly influential German scholar Rudolf Bultmann.
Soren Kierkegaard uses the occasion of Magister Adler’s claim to have had a revelation, along with Adler’s subsequent loss of conviction concerning his claim, to illustrate the rationalization that characterizes the present age and its relation to the essentially Christian. In so doing, Kierkegaard contrasts the genius with the apostle, demonstrating the authoritative superiority of the latter. Moreover, even while casting doubt on the evidential value of the miraculous, Kierkegaard nevertheless affirms that the apostle does have evidence to back his claims to authority, namely, that by having divine authority, the apostle is recognizable precisely by his unswerving demand to be heard as a divine emissary and not waiting for public approval to assume his God-given position.
The Old School Calvinists and the upstart Dispensationalists share a common intellectual heritage by which they joined forces against the growing liberalism and modernism of the late nineteenth century. Certain distinctives of dispensationalism, however, were inimical to any long-term alliance with the old school Calvinists. This paper examines one fundamental reason for the breakup of the conservative alliance, namely, irreconcilable hermeneutical methodologies. This will bring into focus the writings of two formidable conservative leaders, Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, and Oswald T. Allis, the “great opponent of dispensationalism.”
In 1879, Pope Leo called for “carefully selected teachers [who would] endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.” Among the greatest of those who answered that call was the Christian humanist Jacques Maritain, whose theological vision was a realization of the Church set free to energize society with the light of the gospel, that he hoped would inspire a new age of Christian humanism, promote a stable, pluralistic democracy based upon love and civic friendship, and put a permanent end to the types of gruesome wars with which the world had become all too familiar.
One can better understand the culture of any ethnic group, professional class, political party, or religious denomination through the humor that is created by that particular group. In this regard, Jewish humor shares with any other group many of the universal elements of humor such as incongruity, surprise, and a local type of logic. At the same time, Jewish humor has peculiarities that sets it apart from other types of humor.
It seems reasonable to suggest that God’s interest in locating truth in our hearts and not just in our heads must be especially applicable to the minister of the gospel. Like Kierkegaard observes, the minister’s preaching, ideally, should come with the same ease with which water flows from indoor plumbing: a genuine, immediate, and uncontrived eloquence. But such a lofty standard can only be realized in the one who has previously immersed himself in Christian thought and life, whose days are consumed in living contemporaneously in the presence of the Savior.
In a state of rebellion against God, mankind digressed from an original monotheism to a ritualistic, priest-controlled polytheism by the sixth century B.C. At that time, the world found itself in religious and political upheaval as the Jews were sent into exile and the nations sought liberation from the oppression of the traditional ritualism. Five types of reform movements, possibly instigated directly or indirectly by the preaching of the Hebrew prophets, issued from this upheaval and the new religions that resulted continue to help shape the world some 2500 years later.
Beginning in 1917 when the Bolsheviks first seized power, Russian Christians for three generations were forced to wage war with a militant atheism imposed upon them in part by a leftist version of Hegelianism. In 1991 the USSR collapsed, leaving post-Soviet Russia in search of healing for a national soul ravaged by seventy years of iron-fisted communist rule. Because for a thousand years the Orthodox Church has been so intimately tied to Russia’s history, it is only natural for the Church to play a significant role in the nation’s present hopes for renewal. In producing ministers who combine apologetic depth with cultural relevance, the Church could do no better than to emulate the example bequeathed to them by the late Father Alexander Men, “the man sent from God to be missionary to the wild tribe of the Soviet intelligentsia.”
Iran’s Islamic revolution was specifically Shi’ite in nature and almost completely dominated by the mystical and legalistic theology of Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, therefore, was first and foremost the result one man’s quest for a perfect Islamic state – legislated by Islamic law and administered by Islamic jurisprudents – a state instituted with the explicit mission of preparing the way for the messianic return of the so-called Hidden Imam, the eschatological hope of the Twelver Shi’ite sect.
Pluralist John Hick provides the most formidable attack on the Biblical message of Christ-centered exclusivity. His three-pronged attack of equalizing the salvific value of religions, positing a Kantian-type Unknowable God, and rejecting the uniqueness of Christ simply does not withstand theological or philosophical scrutiny. The knowledge that only by exercising explicit faith in Christ can one be saved should inspire us to recover the lost missionary zeal that characterized the nineteen century Church.