Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant
I know that the appropriate stance when reading a book about famous thinkers is to use some historical imagination and put myself in their shoes. No one ever said this would be easy, and I am by no means equipped to do it properly even yet. Let me be honest: Christianity seems unalterably silly to me, the more so as I read more about it. The only thing that seems likely to rescue it for me, as an intellectual pursuit, is if I read some modern thinkers who were born into the Western scientific inheritance after the Protestant Reformation had a chance to shake itself out, and who completely absorb those teachings into their religious writings. I have a couple pointers to works that might fit this bill (The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza and The Philosophy of Spinoza), but in the meantime I can’t help reading all of this with a smirk.
McGiffert does his very best to treat these great thinkers seriously and concisely. We move briskly from the mediæval background to the Reformation — namely Augustine — through Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Luther’s student Philip Melanchthon. From there we get all manner of new Christians: we get Anabaptists and Socinians, Puritans and Pietists and evangelicals. They loathed each other. They viewed Christ differently. They viewed the relation between civil and spiritual government differently. Some took the Bible more literaly, some more symbolically. Some — most — of them viewed man as bottomlessly depraved, salvageable only by divine intervention. One sect’s optimism forced its opponents to adopt an even more reactionary position. And so the whole mess spun out of control. (Well, that’s one way to frame it. Another way is that the ambiguities in the Bible and in the life of Jesus, combined with new print technologies and wider literacy, led naturally to a flowering of divergent ideas. This is the kind of flowering where people kill one another. Death flowers.)
One outcome of all of this was Rationalism — making peace with the scientific and mathematical changes being wrought all around them and trying to justify Christianity on the basis of objectively obvious axioms. These didn’t work out. One proof (described on p. 227) is based on the rightness of Christian ethics: since the outcome of Christianity is right living, clearly Christianity is right and true. Naturally one has to then argue that no other system of ethics could possibly produce right outcomes. The only way one can really cling to such a belief is by ignoring the non-Christian world altogether. This the British, among others, did.
Maybe Christianity is totally incompatible with argument. This would conflict with a few hundred years during which Christians did feverishly try to make their religion mesh with reason, but why not? Late in the game, then, we get books with titles like Dodwell’s: Christianity Not Founded on Argument: And the True Principle of Gospel-Evidence Assigned, counseling us that “Religion will not admit of the least alliance with reason,” that “The only power to bring us to religious faith is the Holy Spirit,” and that we should “trust … in the Lord with all [our] heart[s], and lean not unto [our] own understanding.” This has a certain kind of honesty, but it sounds suspiciously like the terrified ravings of someone who’s been backed into a corner: not only is he not scared, he’s happy to be in the corner. He cannot explain why standards of argument that apply everywhere else do not apply to his own favored religion, so he pretends that he’s not obliged to argue.
Protestant Thought Before Kant is sort of the dual of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s sweeping epic. Where MacCulloch was expansive and detailed, McGiffert is tightly focused and content to paint arcs. Where MacCulloch methodically covers the history with only enough theology to fill in some gaping holes, McGiffert’s book is a little gem of theology with virtually no history surrounding it. The Thirty Years’ War merits only a peep from McGiffert, whereas the first half or two-thirds of MacCulloch’s book teased us toward the War’s final convulsion.
McGiffert could use more history; its absence means that he has to fall back to metaphysical handwaving. He tells us that liberalism, with its new feelings of optimism about man’s place in the world and his ultimate redemption, emerged from some vague “modern spirit” (p. 176) or “general spirit of the modern age” (p. 187). As someone who respects historical materialism of the Guns, Germs, and Steel vein, this just won’t do. But I can’t blame McGiffert for cutting out almost all history: he wanted to pack all of Reformation theology into a couple hundred pages. I’ll cut the guy some slack.
A friend asked me a very legitimate question a while back, about my attempts to take this stuff seriously: Why do I feel obliged to take “Christianity [seriously] but not Zoroastrianism, or neo-Platonism or the Ghost Dance?” Totally fair cop, and it answers itself: I feel so obliged because I live in a Christian society, which is a terrible reason to want to dignify non-arguments with this kind of energy. One could argue that this will help me understand my fellow-countrymen, and in some sense it might. Probably reading the history of theology won’t do the trick; actually going into a church might.
Well, this is the “religion as experience”. Spending time reasoning about religion is sort of pointless. It’s about connecting with something bigger in a spiritual way, and all that. You feel it more than think it. It’s about crazy dreams, and the mystical connection to the divine, not the limits of metaphysical mumbling. It’s about the vision.
This may seem like a cop-out but it’s a pretty powerful thing for a lot of people.
But I can see the difficulty: Where the interface between the feeling and the more critical mind and, more importantly, the rest of the world?
That works. But which one(s)? Also, I can’t believe you’ve never been to a church for anything, even a wedding.
Comment by mrz — September 9, 2008 @ 10:39 am
Yeah, my big concern is where the two worlds meet, as they surely do. I wonder if there’s a Schrödinger’s Cat for religion. The idea with SC was that people were saying “The quantum world is totally different from the macro world; you can’t reason about it in the same way.” So Schrödinger says, “Fine, let’s connect them then: if something happens on the micro level, it leads to an event at the macro level. Now: is the f—ing cat alive, or dead?” It was a way of smacking people for evading the question.
I wonder if there’s an equally nice example for religion.
As for churches: I have very little church experience in my life. I went to a few Catholic funerals growing up; that was it. I went to a Catholic Mass with my friend Jason Smith a while back. Otherwise: nada.
There are lots of churches near me, though. So to answer your question about which ones: I should go to as many as I can stomach, no?
Comment by Steve Laniel — September 10, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
The irony here is that the SC thought experiment is a challenge to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is a metaphysical position. QM works whether you interpret things with Copenhagen, or Many Worlds, or what-have-you. So, talking about the metaphysics, people who ascribe to the Copenhagen interpretation have explanations for SC that fit into their interpretation.
The question of “but what does it mean?” is the metaphysical stuff. Maybe it really does mean wave functions, or multiple universes, or transactions, or whatever, but the physical model is mute on these points, or at least seems to be so far. So, this is still just metaphysics talking about more metaphysics, right? There’s no “real” connection between the physical and the metaphysical.
I wonder if religion is the same way, or perhaps the “surface” exposed to exploration via reason or experiment is too small, or if it’s just that we aren’t “standing back far enough” to see that most of us experience these kinds of religious feelings or inclinations because our brains are built pretty much the same way and the sucessful trappings that define a religion are just whatever social ideas that evolve in the right settings with the right backing to carry on and to seem true?
Comment by mrz — September 10, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
I’ve always wondered why you’re not just Jewish.
Comment by Adam Rosi-Kessel — September 10, 2008 @ 10:34 pm
So, I saw this about Kant on Wikipedia:
So, it looks like we’re stuck at the point of Protestant thought after Kant! You’ll never get your hands on the “real” religious experience through evidence and reason, so you should adhere to it for practical reasons.
Though, this still leaves open questions like “Which religion? Why?”
Comment by mrz — September 11, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
Couple things about the Kant quote:
I think it’s dubious at best that morality requires religion. That is a point that needs arguing, at the very least. In fact the reverse might be true: there’s a certain morality that the people, or the ruling classes, adopt to maintain social order; a punishing god arises as the ground beneath that morality. (I.e., be good or god will destroy you.) Again, not obvious, and debatable, but not absurd either.
Even if morality requires religion, it’s not at all clear that morality requires Christianity. Presumably Kant wanted to defend Christianity?
Comment by slaniel — September 11, 2008 @ 1:14 pm
I agree. I think Kant’s proposition here sounds like a ratcheted up version of Pascal’s Wager. It assumes an awful lot.
Even if you assume that religion is necessary, if you can’t reason about religion in any meaningful way, then which one do you pick? I suppose you could look for a religion with the “best” morals and follow it, but what are the criteria for “best”?
But yeah, there’s also the big question of whether or not morality can stand alone and I think a lot of Philosophy has tread that ground, right? Utilitarians, for instance. There’s also the question of the necessity of “morals” over and above ethics as per Nietzsche, right?
Comment by mrz — September 11, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
Rawls is probably the most famous recent hunter for a freestanding morality.
As for the choice among religions: that’s my big question, and actually connects with your earlier observation about “living the religion.” If you’re trying to convince a Muslim to convert to Christianity, I wonder what you use to do that. I wonder if reason does any useful work there.
Comment by slaniel — September 11, 2008 @ 1:47 pm