Authority of the Bible

It is one of the central topics of historical protestantism. It was in the name of their faithfulness to Scripture as opposed to "papal apostasy" that almost all reformers carried the course of reformation forward in its early stages. But also, perhaps disturbingly, almost every new protestant denomination since then has begun its own life with a new "turn to the Bible", or at least professing it.

The "Sola Scriptura" formula will never loose its appeal in protestantism, as surely as "ad fontes" or "back to the source" calls always have their force in any religion. I think that it is quite clear that Christianity would cease to be Christianity if one would simply disregard the Bible as a source of faith and doctrine.

The role of Scripture in responsible Christian theology today is still a hot topic and rightly so. It is quite appropriate for a Christian theology to repeatedly return to the question of Biblical interpretation and of the understanding of its spiritual authority, as our circumstances in which we come to the Biblical text change, as well as our knowledge of many areas of life and the world including the socio-historical and linguistic worlds of the Bible, and sociological and psychological perspectives of human religious behaviour.

Nevertheless, one needs to be careful not to lift the Bible to the pedestal on which it can not stand after a longer, honest look. By doing so, textually conservative theologies of today (like evangelical, adventist, but even some interpretations of neo-orthodoxy and post-liberalism) can do the Bible and Christianity a great disservice. For example, inspiration of the Bible does not guarantee its historical reliability (although it might at places "make it" more reliable than other sources from that time). Rather, it means - among other things - that God can and does speak to individuals and to communities today and in all times through the biblical text in a very special and deeply felt ways. This is crucial and it is this what makes the Bible a spiritually unique book in Christianity. Gospels, for ex. are the closest to the earliest, most potent narratives about Christ and his meaning for humanity. The Bible enables us to get in touch, however remotely yet genuinely, with the faith of people who have been devoted and open to the same Ultimate Reality which is at work in people's lives today, two and more thousands years ago.

But because of its very nature, the Bible can not be the only source of Christian faith and doctrine, nor is it absolutely above and superior to the other sources suggested in history (tradition, reason, religious experience). I will give reasons for this claim in the next post.

Sociology of Knowledge and Christian Faith

It is more than forty years ago now since Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a very influential work in the field of sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality. This book is frequently described today as a groundwork for the school of social constructionism. Just a couple of years later, another Berger's field defining work followed, The Sacred Canopy, which applied the general claims of sociology of knowledge to religious claims, doctrines and systems of legitimation of religious claims and practices.

Very briefly, Berger's idea in Sacred Canopy is that every epistemic community has its “plausibility structure” for any conception or belief. This holds also for religious communities which legislate what to believe and what not to believe, give reasons for this (which may be "pragmatic" as well as "cognitive"), and try to correct those who do not obey these rules. In more technical terms: the plausibility structure consists in social definitions of reality, the social relations which take these definitions as true, and the supporting “therapies” & legitimations with which the definitions are supported and members of the community “brought into line” if needed. Berger claims that this holds especially for religious definitions of reality and the corresponding religious knowledge claims because these are not supported by sense experience directly and are therefore even more dependent on social support than scientific claims (although see for ex. the works of Martin Kusch who argues that this also applies to science and its epistemic communities).

Not entering into discussion of the details here, I think it must be admitted - and anyone who has been a part of a religious community in a way knows this, I think - that such "plausibility structures" indeed exist in rel. communities, that they are enforced by the communal talk and taken-for-granted commitments, and that there are various ways of "therapies" for those who do not conform (not to say that these therapies and sanctions are in any way intentionally "evil" or that they are created or enforced consciously or methodically, but they exist and can be experienced).

Belief in the full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is taken for granted in the most Christian Churches and, if one does not share this belief (even though one might share many other Christian beliefs, including the messiahship and God's Sonship of Jesus, construed a bit differently), is somehow out of the game, or at least "under pressure" to conform in order to become a full member of the community.

Berger was also a Lutheran and a lay theologian (he penned at least three books where he discusses his theological positions combining them with his sociological views). It was not a coincidence that his theological journey was from a Barth-inspired neo-orthodoxy in the early sixties, to a more Schleiermacher-inspired liberal theology from the late sixties until today. His conviction was that only a liberal theology, aware of a socio-cultural conditioning of doctrine, theology, Church practices and interpretations of Scripture, is capable of surviving the very insightful criticism from the perspective of Sociology of Knowledge. If the religious experience as lived through a certain kind of existential feelings is completely abandoned as a basis of faith or "proper theology", Berger thought, then theology or even Christian religious commitment has lost an important - or the most important - foundation of faith which alone can (at least in some respects and only through "signals" in the world) transcend the temporal and socio-historical determinateness of religion.

While there are several simplistic assumptions which Berger made in late 1960s (for ex. the assumption of inevitability of secularization understood as a process towards a loss of religious commitment in contemporary world), his application of sociology of knowledge to religion does pose an important challenge to theology and philosophy of religion which is ignored only at their own peril. At the same time, some forms of social constructionism present very fruitful opportunities for religious affirmation and theology today because constructionist critique of atheist a-theologies and empiricist criteria for justified belief are equally weighty as its critique of religion and theology.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (instead of an intro)

Let's open this blog with a specific topic, skipping the intro altogether. The topic is hopefully fitting, however, for the opening of a blog on liberal protestantism. I want to consider some features of the thought of the great theological father of the liberal tradition, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In today's world of post-liberal, post-modern, radical orthodox theologies - and even more so in evangelical, Conservative Roman Catholic and several other conservative Christian systems of thought - Schleiermacher has become a favourite example of a theological apostate. A good recipe to start a theological essay these days is to sketch a "schleiermacherian" position, and then to sharply distance oneself from it by showing its "obvious" shortcomings, its naive view of doctrine and religion, and after that proceed to whatever version of conservative or post-something theology one wants to defend.

Not only are many of these treatments of Scheiermacher heavily biased, insufficiently informed, or simply erroneous; more importantly, they do not show any understanding of the valuable insights and relevancy of Scheiermacher's views for today's situation and dilemmas of Christian theology.

For a start, let me propose a short list of some - by no means all - still relevant claims of Schleiermacher that are habitually ignored or misunderstood, but which I find illuminating insights that can and should inform responsible Christian theology today. I will have more to say on Schleiermacher in the future posts, but we got to begin - this blog, as well as an engagement with Schleiermacher - somewhere (so this list may seem quite arbitrary).
1.) For Schleiermacher, religious experience or "feeling" is essential for Christian faith, doctrines are derivative.

This much is well known. But is it understood? Well, it has to be viewed together with other claims of Schleiermacher, like:

2.) The primary, original expressions of faith-experience are the poetic and the rhetorical (preaching, exhortation). Doctrinal systems are developed as a result of rational reflection upon the first two expressions of religious feelings.

3.) God can never be "an object" of experience, as one object among others. God as an ultimate reality is "the Whence" of all our knowledge (theoretical reason) and action (practical reason).

4.) So, importantly, the feeling of "absolute dependence", which is Schleiermacher's term to denote the most basic and genuine religious feeling, transcends subject-object structure. Rather, this God-consciousness, as he also calls it, is immediate, pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual, and puts us in touch with the Ultimate reality which is God (however, see the bullet-point 6.).

5.) This feeling not only "accompanies our whole existence" (The Christian Faith 4.3), but also colours it and in this way structures it. This is very similar to the claims about existential feelings made by fenomenologists such as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and also to Wittgenstein's notion that how we experience the world determines what we experience.

6.) However, Schleiermacher was well aware that, "if there is religion at all, it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion." (On Religion, p. 73). So, religion can only be "positive", particular, or situated in socio-historical reality: this means it is necessarily embedded in language, within the life co-shaped by traditions, doctrines, communities and practices. There is no other way a religion, or Christianity, could exist! It can not exist in isolation or just in abstraction. (This proves that George Lindbeck's accusation of Schleiermacher that the latter ignores cultural-linguistic realities and defends a possibility of a non-particular "general religiousness", not situated in time and place, is wrong).

My point is that there is more to Schleiermacher than Barth's or Lindbeck's caricatures of the former's theology. Much of contemporary Christian theology suffers from a far too hasty repudiation of the liberal protestant tradition.