I pointed last week toward a piece in Harpers by Alan Jacobs, The Watchmen: What became of the Christian intellectuals?, which has been the subject of a lot of online discussion. Basically, Jacobs mourns the passage of a significant Christian influence in public thought, the lack of theologians who are household names and regularly consulted on public matters of consequence.
Nobody should be surprised to learn that Albert Mohler has something to say about that.
My larger concern with Professor Jacobs’s thoughtful article, however, has to do with the Protestant examples he cites. We might call this our “Where Are Our Reinhold Niebuhr and C. S. Lewis Problem.”
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In the modern age, those who are intellectually aware “do not believe in the virgin birth, and we have difficulty with the physical resurrection of Christ.” Further: “We do not believe, in other words, that revelatory events validate themselves by a divine break-through in the natural order.” A “divine break-though in the natural order,” we must note, is the heart of the Christian truth claim.
His worldview was clear: “The accumulated evidence of the natural sciences convinces us that the realm of natural causation is more closed, and less subject to divine intervention, than the biblical world view assumes.”
That is not to depart from biblical Christianity “at one important point.” That is to abandon the heart of biblical Christianity.
Niebuhr’s strategy, historian George Marsden explains, was to “reserve a place in modern culture for what he regarded as the essence of the Christian faith, a place that would be safe from the onslaughts of scientific naturalism. This “essence of the Christian faith” was Christianity stripped of its essential supernatural elements.
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Where is our Reinhold Niebuhr? We had better be careful what we ask for.
I am reminded of Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that mystery is indispensable to a movement’s success:
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.
The True Believer, §57
Niebuhr’s project, like Bishop John Spong’s and other Christians of goodwill, is doomed. Science has undone supernaturalism and, truth be told, the New Testament texts are the writings of a vengeful cult; the ethical teachings aren’t that good.
Slowly, fitfully, uncertainly, humanity is headed out of the decadence of the Abrahamic faiths; they are untrue, and have nothing on offer — least of all relief from the moral duty to think.