Danny ChaiI’ve been very slowly working my way through philosophical history with the little spare time I have. (Actually, it’s pretty much come to a halt since Joshua was born, but I hope to pick it up again.) It’s honestly been changing my life. Especially the medieval philosophers. And especially Augustine. Augustine writes (at least in the Confessions) exactly like I do – confessionally, very aware of his own sin, with a lot of digressions, reflecting a deep interest in philosophy that he can’t help injecting into his thinking, but coming from a standpoint of faith. It’s everything I would want my blog to be, except better in every aspect – deeper, more confessional, more pious.
But the reason that reading these medieval philosophers is changing my life is because they deeply affirm my faith.
Intellectuals nowadays are all anti-Christian, and I’d say the general feeling is that Christianity is a stupid, ancient religion. With modern thinking and knowledge, it’s ridiculous to believe in the Christian faith. One cannot simultaneously be rationally intelligent and a Christian.
To be honest, I think many Christians today perpetuate this this idea themselves. I find much of evangelical Christianity hostile to intellectual thought. It’s as if they’ve taken Matthew 11:25 (“Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.'”) too much to heart, thinking that learning will tend to draw us away from Christ. If intellectuals value learning and believe it’s incompatible with Christianity, evangelicals value faith and seem to believe that learning is a dangerous threat to it. I’ve come across many Christians who have been afraid to read modern philosophy, believing that just reading and thinking about it will challenge their faith.
Here’s the thing. When you read the medieval philosophers, you realize that for most of history since Jesus came, learning and faith were not at odds. Quite the contrary – for most of the last two millenia, many of the greatest thinkers were Christian. That philosophy class I took at Stanford spent most of the second quarter looking at Christian philosophers. Some in the class protested, as most of them (including the professors, I think) were solidly and vocally anti-faith. But the instructors noted that if you removed Christian thought from Western philosophy, there would be very little left. Especially during the medieval period, the most intelligent, groundbreaking philosophers were all Christian.
What encourages me most is seeing how many of the issues and problems they thought about in regards to faith are identical to what we deal with today. Modern critics of Christianity tend to think their objections are new, but they’ve been around forever, and great thinkers have thought and written about them since the birth of Christianity. The tension between science and faith? The ancient Christian writers wrote about it. Apparent Scriptural contradictions? They thought about it. How we can be responsible for sin when we were made with that capacity by God? Ditto. I remember being blown away when I found that a criticism commonly made of Christianity – that it only spread because it happened in antiquity; if it started today, modern sensibilities would find it too absurd – was leveled against it right from the beginning. Some guy said how the Jewish faith had the advantage of being centuries old, but Christianity had no such advantage and was too absurd to accept. Pretty much every “modern” criticism of Christianity you can think of was already thought about and addressed a couple thousand years ago by some of the smartest people who ever lived.
And here’s the crucial thing: they all maintained their faith. I find that incredibly encouraging. Christianity is not inherently hostile to thought. Really smart people have thought about all these really troubling questions and emerged with strong faith. I don’t find all their answers necessarily persuasive. But it encourages me that they believe that we can think about these questions in the context of faith, even if we never get definitive answers to them.
I read Billy Graham’s biography years ago, and he had this close friend in the ministry who had all these intellectual issues with Christianity that he could not reconcile. In the end, it drove him from the traditional faith. Graham’s response was along the lines of, he’s just going to choose faith and turn off his brain in regards to matters like these. Call me naive, but I really don’t feel like those are the only options. I think it’s possible to really examine the intellectual issues and problems with Christianity, and still maintain the faith. And when I read philosophers throughout history, that’s what I see them doing.
So yeah, I’ve been finding much encouragement from the ancients. Because I respect their intellectual capacity so much, I’ve been increasingly relying on their arguments for classic problems. For example, the differences in Jesus’ lineage in Matthew and Luke. There have been many explanations for it. Me, I go with Saint Augustine. He was a super smart guy. He was aware of the inconsistency. And he says he learned from Julius Africanus (who lived in the first century after Jesus’ death) a complex explanation involving Levirite marriage. Given his intelligence and proximity to the facts in history, that’s good enough for me. I doubt that the true answer is more likely to come up hundreds of years later by people further removed.
Actually, for similar reasons, I’ve been having trouble with the penal substitutionary idea of atonement. Piper says you can’t have the gospel without it. But I have the same question Jones did: if that’s true, what of all the Christians before Anselm (including Augustine), who first formulated the penal substitutionary view? But that’s a whole other issue.
So yeah, if you feel like you can’t think and be a Christian at the same time, I highly recommend reading some ancient philosophy. It’s great stuff.