Beware of Philosophy

Butterflies are cool

in the big, huge, green forest.

They fly up so high!

This is a Haiku poem. It is poetry reduced to the bare minimum. Writers of such poetry are called minimalists. There is a minimalist movement among novelists, musicians, visual artists and architects. We who use computers appreciate minimalist computer program developers who reduce our learning curve. Immediate use video games are but one example.

Minimalism is also a way of doing theology. As in the arts, minimalist theologians insist that we need to reduce the 'Gospel' to its bare minimum. In matters that are not an explicit part of their Gospel we are free to express and discover new meanings for the age in which we live. For such folks there is no need for a resurrection or a teaching that Jesus is God. Such views, they suggest, served their purpose in earlier times. Today, however, we recognize that all religions have teachings about God's love and life after death. All of us seek the same things. This 'Gospel' is a Gospel reduced to its bare minimum: God created us, loves us and wants us all to live together in harmony and love. Details beyond that need to be eliminated. They really do not matter.

Such an approach grew out of textual criticism of Biblical texts, that branch of literary criticism that seeks to get as close as possible to the original ancient documents. This is called lower criticism in contrast to higher criticism that tries to establish who, when and where these texts were first written. This has also been called the historical-critical method, an approach that began as early as the sixteenth century by Dutch humanist and Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus (+ 1536).  It continued among philosophers and theologians in the centuries following and finally led to a widespread distrust of the Bible's authority in anything (see N.L. Geisler, Beware of Philosophy, 1999). Notable among such scholars and philosophers are:

• Dutch-Jewish Pantheist Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) who rejected the resurrection  and miracles because nature's course is fixed and unchangeable. 

• Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711-76) who insisted that miracles are a violation of nature's laws and insisted that prophecy of future events is nonsense. 

• German theologian Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976) who believed it is both senseless and impossible not to recognize the Gospels as myths written in a pre-scientific age. Biblical miracles are impossible for modern man. 

• German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who argued that God is unknowable. We cannot know reality in itself. We can only know what appears to us (the phenomena). Science studies the observable world. That is possible, but anything beyond that is not. All that is left is moral religion, the desire to do what is right. 

• George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) who insisted that history moves forward through a dalectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Using this approach the Tubingen School of F.C. Baur concluded that the Gospel of John had to be a second century synthesis of a thesis-anthesis conflict between Peter and Paul, a conclusion that disregarded evidence of an earlier first century date. 

• Danish Christian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) who said that higher criticism is not harmful to real Christianity. Faith is rather a blind leap. 

• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), openly pro-Nazi theologian, who contended that the true meaning of Biblical terms is found in etymology, the study of the history of words. The origin of a term is the key to its meaning. This meaning is mystical, a way by which one comes in contact with the divine. This approach led to the widely used Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) who insisted that all truth is relative. There are no absolute truths in the Bible. In so saying, he and others like him, asserted that his statement is itself absolute.  

• Charles Darwin and the philosophy of evolution that insists that everything in nature is the result of fixed laws, i.e. the survival of the fittest. 

• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who wrote in detail of the process of reality by insisting that even God is processing into the future, waiting to see how things will turn out.  

So the procession has continued across the centuries as scholars sought to make a name for themselves, to make some kind of original contribution to knowledge, to push the envelope. Human reason and human philosophy have again and again been exalted above the Gospel of the Scriptures. I need to say much more about that the next time.