I thought I’d share some of the “in your face”-ness of John Locke. Never a man to pull his punches, his observations are always painful for some, especially when they are true.
It is in vain for any man to unsurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit.
It would, indeed, be very hard for one that appears careless about his own salvation to persuade me that he were extremely concerned for mine. For it is impossible that those should sincerely and heartily apply themselves to make other people Christians, who have not really embraced the Christian religion in their own hearts.
For if it be out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men’s souls that they deprive them of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives- I say, if all this be done merely to make men Christians and procure their salvation, why then do they suffer whoredom, fraud, malice, and such-like enormities, which (according to the apostle) manifestly relish of heathenish corruption, to predominate so much and abound amongst their flocks and people?
Does this look or sound familiar?
- John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
General
I’ve noticed an interesting trend among people around my age. It seems we’ve inherited something from the previous generation that we are now realizing has been a source of disconnectedness. For the most part my age group has been somewhat hostile to tradition in any form. Whether it is religious (especially this), cultural or anything else in between we’ve tried to make our own way and play by our own rules. We hate it when someone tells us that something has to be a specific way. We know there is more than one way to do something.
But this view isn’t entirely ours. We’ve inherited it. The sixties and seventies were a tumultuous time when many were fighting against the traditions handed down to them. These apparently constraining, narrow-minded and oppressive traditions wielded by self-appointed authorities were the source of ridicule and scorn. Indeed many of them were not just outmoded, but the manifestation of the misguided attempts of the modern era who thought objective reason could not be wrong. These attitudes were transferred indirectly to us by virtue of our proximity to these upheavals.
The problem now as I see it is that this jettisoning of the idea of tradition and the actual practices themselves has left many of us without a connection. Sure, we all have pop-culture to look back romantically at, but that is it. It ends there. Our connection is only an illusion. There lies the problem. Many that I’ve talked to are now feeling the effects of this rejection. Some look for real connections, some find traditions. This time, however, tradition isn’t an authoritarian rule of conduct, but a way of establishing a connection with a large segment of humanity. It is a vehicle for relating and sharing with others. It is something that we haven’t done or don’t do very often mostly out of habit now.
Now that we are realizing that the rejection we’ve inherited isn’t our own we can try something different and yet the same. Maybe we can now approach this notion of tradition with fresh minds that aren’t encumbered by the experiences of our forebears. This intended purpose of tradition to provide connection and continuity to groups is what many have missed out on. Somehow and at sometime it was changed into some sort of authoritarian sledgehammer that people eventually rejected. It seems many are trying tradition like a new pair of clothes and realizing that they’ve been missing out on an important part of the human experience. Where to discover, invent and practice these traditions will be the topic of a future post.
Thoughts
No, I’m not actually going to write about the problem of evil, but I do have a question or thought about something related. When we as a group, society or country witness acts against fellow humans that most, if not all, would consider evil what would be an appropriate response? Better yet, what ought we do? And are these two answers the same? The latter question is a bit more complicated (as if the first isn’t). Where does this ought-ness come from?
After living through wars, reading about even greater wars in the past and watching or hearing about a governments attempt to solve the problems by limiting the powers of others while, at the same time, attempting to consolidate their own it is no wonder that we draw the conclusion that violence of any kind isn’t a viable answer the the question.
To some, war seems to have been a realistic answer. But I think it is safe to say that, in the final analysis, it creates more problems than it solves. But is this enough for us to discard any sort of violent response when confronted with the scenario above? Does a violent response simply create yet another act of evil? Is it better to watch another human being be on the receiving end of some act of evil than to intervene at the expense of the aggressor?
At first glance this sounds like a moral dilemma of sorts, but upon closer examination perhaps this is just a sign of how morally confused we really are when we can no longer deal with a straight forward situation. For starters, many would scoff at the idea of some sort of norm or ought-ness. Of course, once you go down that road, can you really be upset at those that choose a different answer to the question? In a morally confused state we have a difficult time even understanding the rules that we use to answer the question. Whose rules do we use or are there rules at all?
I know this sounds insensitive to the millions that have lost their lives when “war” was the answer, but we can’t simply take the easy way out and say that all violent responses to evil acts are not permitted. Well, we can say it, but for it to have any force, we have to have good reasons for following the advice. A very important criteria should be whether following this rule will protect the innocent from death. The easy “make love, not war” sounds great, but I think falls flat when measured by this criteria. So what is the answer?
Thoughts
As you can tell from my content I’ve recently been distracted from my epistemological studies that I outlined here. At first I wasn’t too sure if the distraction was worth it. But now, at my snails pace, I’m nearly complete with my initial reading of Reason and Revelation by Emil Brunner. This book was important for me because I wanted to see how a careful, honest thinker dealt with the challenges of faith and reason. It is understood by most that faith and reason are distinct methods of arriving at knowledge about the world. There are, of course, many problems that one is confronted with depending on how you define these terms. Defining the terms is a challenge unto itself (do you use faith and/or reason to define the terms?), but I won’t talk about that here. Maybe after I get through a second read of the book I’ll be able to talk intelligently about it. What is clear though is that Brunner does not limit the acquisition of knowledge using reason alone. Yet, he attempts to avoid totally divorcing faith from reason and the associated “leap into the void” kind of knowledge. While these quotes don’t contain the full context of what Brunner is arguing they are a decent window into how he views the inability of reason alone to “know everything” and the false ideas of the conflict between faith and reason.
Faith is aware of the higher rationality and the higher actuality of the truth of revelation, and is ready to maintain this; but it is also aware of the impossibility of asserting its validity within the sphere which the autonomous human reason has delimited for itself…The autonomous reason believes that this impossibility shows the untruth of the claim of revelation; faith, however, sees in every such demand for proof the consequences of an original perversion in the actual process of knowing, of the claim of our human reason to a false autonomy.
Reason has nothing to fear from genuine faith, nor has faith anything to fear from from the right use of reason. All conflicts between “faith and reason” are sham conflicts, which are caused by the fact that they have exceeded the limits of their respective spheres; either they spring from claims to revelation which are only in part due to real revelation, an in part to the confusion of revelation with human conceptions of revelation, or they are due to rational assertions which do not arise from reason, but from the misuse of the autonomous reason.
- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 213.
My goal is to complete the text by week’s end and resume my epistemological pain. We’ll see how that goes.
Theology
I’ve received many comments (not on the actual blog of course) that my posts are bit too dense and complex. While I take that as sort of a back-handed compliment I can also appreciate where these folks are coming from. I consider much of what I write about critical and foundational to the creation of a rational, pragmatic and mutable (yes, this is a good thing within reason) world view. Because of this, I think it is important to communicate these issues in such a way that readers of all backgrounds are able to engage in this process. This is going to be new territory for me, but I’m going to give it my best shot. Any feedback when I need to do extra unpacking of concepts or when a post is hopelessly confusing would be helpful.
General
Spiritual sterility, indeed, may reach such a pitch that human beings may no longer have any interest in anything beyond the immediate and purely natural fulfillment of human needs; this loss of interest produces a state of almost total insensibility to the claims of any higher sphere.
- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 268.
Theology