The Religion of Morality

The more analytical philosophers of religion would hone in on the first criteria of religious truth that the Enlightenment thinkers held to, I find the second criteria more interesting and more disturbing. Thus, for now I will bypass the first criteria and focus on the second.

The British thinker Matthew Tindal held that Reason was not enough of a standard to hold Religion up to. A purely Reasonable Religion, for Tindal, was missing the point of religion. According to Tindal, "all beliefs and practices must be judged not only by natural reason but by their ability to promote human happiness." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 23) If we were to only judge things on their logical consistency, we would only be left with a mind full of prepositions and ideas, and our lives would not be better. Therefore, we have to not only test the reasonableness of religion, we need to test of how it effects our everyday life and mood.

Tindal's thought continues in this vein: "God's purpose in creation was not for His own glory or advantage, but the happiness of His creatures. God thus demands of us only what will contribute to our perfection and happiness." (pg. 23, italics added) We attain this happiness and perfection through discerning the universal, unchanging truth and putting it into action. Put another way, we become happy by reasoning out morality and putting it into action. "The end of religion, then, is morality, for true religion consists 'in a constant disposition of mind to do all the good we can, and thereby render ourselves acceptable to God in answering the of our creation.'" (pg. 24)


If God's purpose in creation was to make us happy, then our purpose in life is not to make God happy. Our purpose in life is then transformed into a mission to make ourselves happy through the practice of correct action. On top of this, the end of religion is not God, but ourselves. Religion exists solely for our sake. Our morality comes from God, but is not for God.

The French thinker Voltaire took this idea further. Voltaire held that religion should be the practice of morality. His ideal church service would consist of of "primarily...praise and adoration and lessons in morality." (pg. 28) This is what the Church should become according to Voltaire. It should become a place to gather and to be told how to act and behave according to a certain set of moral rules. In doing so, we strip the doctrines and creeds of content that do not hold up to our conception of morality. Tindal held that "Anything in religion that is not required of our moral life should be removed, for the more one 'is not of a moral nature, the less he will be able to attend those that are.'" (pg. 24) According to Livingston, Tindal went so far that he was "willing to call everything in religion superstitious and dangerous which is not directly conductive to morality." (pg. 24)

Not only is this what the Church should become according to Tindal and Voltaire, but it has become this. We, as a Church, have become ignorant of doctrines and their meaning. We have gotten rid of the sacraments and replaced them with moral lessons. When we hear a sermon, we do not want to hear about the divine homoousia and the internationality of the Trinity. We want to hear how to be better people and how to be happier. We get bored by theology and cling to morality. The religion of Christianity in parts has become a religion of morality. This leads to not only a prevalent anti-intellectualism but a perversion of the Gospel. We want God to be for us, but we do not want to be for God. We have reversed how the relationship between humanity and God operates.

The Criteria for True Religion

The goal of the Enlightenment is to rid the world of suffering, misery, deceit and ignorance. By doing such, the world will be transformed into an utopia. If this is the case, that such transformation is the goal, we then need to ask, "How will it come about?" In this post, I will attempt to give an outline of some key Enlightenment thinkers program of transformation while highlighting what this does to theology and the Church.

The British philosopher John Locke held that one of the keys to this transformation was to foster tolerance. According to James C. Livingston, "the great enemy" of the Enlightenment writers "was not religion but dogmatism and intolerance." (Modern Christian Thought, James C. Livingston, pg. 10) According to Locke's argument, there is a multiplicity of religions, but there can only be one true religion. And our knowledge of the true religion will come from allowing people to investigate and examine all the religions. For "It is only false religion that has anything to fear from the tests of reason and experience." (pg. 10) If we follow this line of thought, we learn that tolerance of other religions does not foster truth. Instead, it fosters a search for the most Reasonable or Experiencable religion. These two criteria for religion than become the standard for religion. When looking at religion after the Enlightenment we still have two questions in our mind:

1.  Is this Religion Reasonable? Can it stand up to the tests of Logic? Is it contradictory in any way? (Another way of saying this is: Does it violate the principle of non-contradiction?) 
2. Does this Religion hold up to my Experience? Does it relate to my way of life? Does it have anything to say to me? Is the truth of this religion evident to my senses and what I have done\can do? 

From this we can gather that Religion has to be either Reasonable or Experiencable, or both. Both of these criterion are still in play today in the way the Church operates. Our apologetics either try to  construct logical arguments that any reasonable person would have to agree with, or we try to show how Christianity works itself out in the everyday and confirms our experiences.

In the next posts, we will examine how these two criteria gained traction in the Church and lead to disaster.

Modernity's Attractiveness

When we look around the world, we see that somethings are apparently self-evident. There is suffering in the world. There is misery in the world. One might even say that it is self-evident that there is evil in the world. Another thing that is seemingly self-evident is that there need not be suffering, misery, or even evil in the world. That there needs to be a way out of this miry pit; a way of salvation.

Beginning in the 18th century, there was a change in the history of Salvation. A new way out of suffering, misery and evil was made evident by the philosophers and theologians. This way out is the way of Reason. "Because misfortune and suffering arise very largely from ignorance, it was believed reason could cast its light in the darkness of superstition and deceit and bring humanity its long-anticipated enlightenment and happiness." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 7) But before we get into how reason brings happiness, we need to address the superstition and deceit that is spoke of by Livingston.

The philosophers and somewhat shockingly, the theologians held that religion has failed us. Religion promised us light and happiness yet it did not deliver. Religion, according to some of the thinkers in the 18th century,  pushed humanity further into the pit of misery of suffering by suppressing thought and praising ignorance. Religion was supposed to make humanity behave better and live better lives. According to thinkers like Voltaire, religion failed to make us better because it was too other-worldly and focused not on the natural but the supernatural.

Who would not want to exchange a better life later on for a better life here-and-now? This is the attractiveness of the Enlightenment. Marquis de Condorcet, a 18th century philosopher, held that the persistence of superstition and error was due to the propagation of Christianity. In his The Progress of the Human Mind, he argued that there needs to be a new eschatological hope. "For writers like Condorcet, hope for posterity became a kin d of eschatological substitute for the tradition Christian hope in the Kingdom of God." (Livingston, pg. 10) Who would not want to be known forever? Would not going down in the annals of history be better than living forever? Or would they be the same?

 By either getting rid of Religion or injecting Reason into Religion, the Enlightenment wanted to change the telos (goal, purpose) of human. The goal of life would no longer be to blindly worship a Diety, but to "examine, weigh, sift, and compare the facts again and again until it could discern the true from the false, the contingent and particular from the necessary and universal.(Livingston, pg. 7)  In short, the new purpose in life was to no longer seek the True God, but only to seek the Truth.

By seeking the Truth, we can then distill out a behavior that would get rid of the suffering and misery in the world. "A this-worldly hope in the future in place of an other-worldly expectation 0in an earthly city in which there will be no more 'mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away.'" (Livingston, pg. 10) For this utopia to happen, Religion needs to take a backseat to Reason, according to the Enlightenment philosophers. When this falling away happens, the end (purpose)_of human life" will fall "exclusively within the present world nad its ideal transformation." (Livingston, pg. 10)

Who would not want to live in this world? Who would not want to live in a world free of deceit, superstition, suffering and mystery? Who would not want to live in a world where everything can be known? Who would not want to become the master of their own life? This is the attractiveness of Modernity.

In the next post, we will examine how this transformation is to come about.

The Modern World

We live in the shadow of the Enlightenment. Some philosophers and theologians would argue that we are post-modern or post-Enlightenment or secular or post-secular, Christian or post-Christian. However, I wish to argue that we are none of these. I believe that we are still firmly grounded in the Enlightenment and that this is problematic for the Church today.

Before I start, I want to give a quick and dirty definition of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a philosophical movement that holds to a few key points:

1. We are autonomous. We are self-governing, self-ruling individuals that do not need an outside authority to tell us what to do. On top of this, we should resist outside authorities, as they have no right to dictate our behavior or thoughts.
2. Our thought is grounded on Reason. We have an ability to understand what is immutable, unchangeable and universal. We can run all of our thoughts, behaviors and beliefs through the filter of Reason and find what is really True.
3. Reason is grounded in Nature. Everything that is True is True not due to human convention or language but because it corresponds to the Natural World free of the influence of the individual.

 What this means is that Truth is out there, in the Natural world for us to find and understand. If we get rid of our personal presuppositions and biases, we will then be able to seek and find Truth. When we get rid of bias and presupposition, we will find Truth.






Now, this attitude towards Truth posed a problem for the Christian Church. The Enlightenment attitude, according to Livingson, gave the Church two options:

1. The Church and theology could find itself "adjusting itself to the advances in modern science and philosophy and, in so doing," risk "accomodation to secularization." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 6)
2. The Church and theology could resist "all influences from culture and" become "largely reactionary and ineffectual in meeting the challenges of life in the modern world." (Livingston, pg. 6)

 Both options have been tried in the Church by different denominations. We have seen the Church fail by the strategies of accommodation and withdrawal. However, I wish to focus, in this series of posts to focus on how the Church failed by trying to accommodate the Enlightenment view.

Instead of jumping into the failure of the Church, we must see why the Enlightenment was attractive to the Church. What would make the Church and theology latch onto this thought process?

Continuing the Journey

Bonhoeffer asked us, How do we be the church in the modern times? This question has been bothering me for a while. Perhaps it has been haunting me, a spectre in the back of my mind that I have been trying to get a grasp of. I think that this question that Bonhoeffer confronts us with is one of, if not, the most important question that has been posed to us.

I am not going to pretend that I have an answer to such a question. However, I think I have an insight that is worth sharing. Yet, before I get to that, I feel that I need to do some background work.

You see, I have recently decided to try to get into a Doctoral position at a local seminary. As I was talking to one of the professors, it was recommended that I read James C. Livingston's Modern Christian Thought (2 vols.). This work is a primer on how Christian thought has developed since the Enlightenment, which will help me understand how the philosophical insights have shaped the Church. In short, it will answer the practical part of Bonhoeffer's question. That is, it will tell us how the Christian church has come to be in the modern era. However, we cannot say that how the church is is how the church should be.

So, I invite you on another little quest. As I read Livingston's book, I will be posting what I glean from the text in light of Bonhoeffer's question.

Trying Something Different

After the Lenten season, I abandoned this process, I abandoned the daily writing to try to figure the rest of this crazy thing called life. Even though I have not found the answer to the meaning of life, besides the obvious 42, I thought I might give this another shot to add some structure and discipline to my life.

I recently got a paper proposal accepted for a somewhat prestigious philosophical conference that is held at the University of Notre Dame (of Two Lakes) and thought about using this blog to show my thought process in writing the paper and was wondering if anyone was interested. The conference is on the challenge of Secularization, and here is my abstract:

We now live in a Post-Christian secularized world. That has been well-documented in the literature, including the great history of how this happened by Charles Taylor. Yet, I propose that this is not the major problem of our age. Even though Taylor has done a wonderful job showing the development of secularization through out the ages, I feel that he has missed something that figures larger than he is willing to admit. I would like to propose that the problem of our age is that we live in a world without vulnerability yet full of inquietude. Even though love is not the solution to man's historical problems¹, I will argue that the only way out of this inquietude is through love of self, God, and the Other.

As Taylor argues in his work, it is not just the unbeliever in the Christian narrative that is under the spell of secularization but also the believer. We have been conditioned through our philosophy and theology to distrust an outside authority in our lives. But I will show that the root of this problem is that we no longer have trust in ourselves. Josef Pieper in his work on love, states that “there is hardly another concept that has become so demonstrably “at home” in the consciousness of the average Christian as that of acedia.”² In Pieper's exposition of acedia, following St. Thomas Aquinas, we see that we are in a “despair of weakness, despairingly not wanting to be oneself.”³ Yet, Taylor dismisses acedia as a factor in our consciousness⁴. I find this to be a grievous error. For acedia is a “basic characteristic of the spiritual countenance (and ontological nature) of precisely this age which we live in”⁵ according to Pieper. Thus, contra Taylor, I am arguing that the root of secularization is not an Enlightenment philosophy or a gnostic outlook on life, but in a deep inquietude of the human heart⁶.

This inquietude comes from an “anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him.”⁷ Pieper continues by saying that “one who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.”⁸ This leads to what Aquinas calls a “detestatio boni divini”⁹ which then leads man to wish that “God had not ennobled him, but had “left him in peace”.” ¹⁰ Or to quote Kierkegaard on a similar point, the individual “is unwilling, in his despair, to be himself.”¹¹

Thus it is not that we live in a secular age, but in an age of acedia, or to put it different, in an age where the only serious philosophical question is suicide, to paraphrase Camus.¹² In this age, it is impossible to say “It is good that you exist”¹³ for we do not wish to exist. We are tired of the obligation of existence, the duty of living, and thus are becoming disinterested and disembodied (This disinterestedness Taylor puts into the category of the buffered self, which is “essentially the self which is aware of the possiblity of disengagement”¹⁴). This is not an age of secularization but an age of philosophical suicide or as Aquinas and Pieper would term it, an age of acedia.

1Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love Ignatius Press, pg .201

2Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love Ignatius Press, pg. 117

3Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture, St. Ignatius Press, pg. 28.

4Taylor states that acedia is a predecessor to the malaise of our present age, but says that it does not speak to the ontic condition, only the spiritual condition. (Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age, pg. 303) I would argue that a proper Thomistic view of acedia is spiritual, psychological and ontological, following Pieper.

5Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 119

6Jurgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope defines hope as an inquietness of the heart which is both a blessing and a curse. I am borrowing this phrase from him, which he in turn borrows from Uber Hoffung by Pieper.

7Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 119

8Ibid

9Aquinas, Thomas. Mal. 8,I

10Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 120. Pieper is quoting Aquinas from Mal. II, II, 35,3.

11Kierkegaard, Soren. Sickness Unto Death. Quoted in Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, pg. 120. We also see this in Heidegger's understanding of “everyday existence” which is characterized by being's flight from itself, loquaciousness, curiosity, importunity, distraction and instability.

12Camus, Albert. The Myth Of Sisyphus, pg. 1, Taylor speaks of our fascination with death in our age and how it shows that we are disconnected to reality, thus showing that “there is a sense of void...and of deep embarrassment” (Taylor, 723) in the fact that we cannot understand it, but all long for it, as we are, to borrow Heidegger's terminology, being-toward-death. (Taylor, 722)

13Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love, pg. 164ff.

14Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age, Belknap Press of Harvard University, pg. 42

The Problem of Brunner II

    By now you have noticed, I would at least like to think that you have noticed, I have taken a little bit of a hiatus from posting on this blog about my reading of Brunner. There are two reasons for this, and I think the second reason is the most important. My life has been changing for the better rapidly since I started dating a wonderful woman and this has thrown off my desire to delve deeper into Brunner's thought a little. But this is not the main reason. The main reason is Brunner's work.

   There is a problem of getting burned-out trying to read approximatively fifteen hundred pages by the same author in the span of a little over a month. I have grown tired of Brunner and his thought. Brunner's thought, as I hinted at in an early post, does not stand the test of time. His project is important, and we can learn from it. Yet, like all work, it is historically situated and some of the problems that he is addressing has been addressed by others in better ways. Plus, we have lost the desire to be Existentialists, and have stopped listening to them. Their concerns are no longer our concerns.

   Also, I find Brunner's theology problematic. He is trying to return to a state of "pure Christianity" through the writings of Paul and the first revelations about Jesus Christ. However, this purity has never existed. There never has been a pure, unified vision of Christianity. When we read the Scriptures we see this. Different authors focus on different topics, and offer different doctrine than the others. (For the best example, see the differences between Paul's writings and James' writings.) Brunner wants a return to the Ekklesia as expressed in Saint Paul's writings, but this Ekklesia has never existed, it is a revisionist abstraction. This revisionist abstraction leads Brunner to participate in Speculative Theology, which he is against while still being unaware of his assent.

   Equally untenable, Brunner is trying to get rid of the traditional understandings of how the church operates. Brunner reduces the Holy Spirit to faith, the Eucharist to a personal encounter with Christ, and Baptism to a personal commitment. Strikingly, Brunner does not have an understanding of entering into a Covenantal relationship with God and the rest of humanity. For Brunner, Christianity is reduced down to a purely individual practice, something that is solely internal in us. It is for this reason, I must abandon Brunner and his thought. There are interesting points, but to hold to his thought, we must reject Faith and only participate in our inner subjectivity.

    I am going to continue to blog about what I am reading even after Lent ends. This project has been enriching, and I thank you for thinking with me. The next book I am going to read and start talking through with you is Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday by Alan E. Lewis. I wish that you continue learning and talking with me.