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.

The Search for Life

It was because of my third novel, now completed and needing a publisher. What was? My new interest in mysticism.

In that third novel, "Freya's Child," my protagonist, Albert Freitag, has some experiences of the presence of the ancient Nordic gods, particularly the goddess Freya ,that scare him greatly and cause him to question his own Christian faith. 

In a sequel to that novel, the proposed fourth in the Albert and Tillie series set in the days leading up to WW II, I plan to follow this young couple into even more frightening experiences of the mystical. I'll keep you informed. Write me if you're interested. 

Ever once in awhile in Lutheran circles someone calls this person or that a mystic. It is quite common for us to speak about the mystical body of Christ. But all in all, we Lutherans don't trust the mystics, unless you speak, of course, of St. Paul and St. John as mystics. Even then we prefer not to discuss in any depth such experiences as being caught up to the third heaven or encountering angels that take you into the future or the gates of heaven. 

Pardon me, I forget. You're wondering what I mean by mystic or mysticism. Good question. Not easy to answer, because there seems to be no common understanding. One dictionary puts it this way: A mystic is "a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect." 

As to what we Lutherans mean by the mystical body of Christ, I'm afraid that's a phrase begging for clarity. I'll pursue it with you another day. 

Speaking about mysticism in the Christian tradition James Harpur (Love Burning in the Soul) writes that "it is extremely difficult to pin down mysticism in a way that does justice to all the experiences of those traditionally considered to be Christian mystics. . . the experience of mystics has usually revolved around a direct apprehension or awareness of God--and experience that goes beyond the rational faculty of the mind and self-willed activity. It can also be said that it is an experience that has often required devoted and disciplined preparation (for example, through prayer and ascetic practices) and that it admits of degrees of profundity, from relatively mild spiritual illumination to union with God, a conjoining in which the will of the mystic is obliterated, and which is often described as a spiritual marriage" (introduction, pp.2-3). 

Now you know why Lutherans are very leery of the mystics. Here are a few of our problems: 

1. What are "experiences" ? When are experiences not "experiences" of God? 

2. When can you trust that "experiences" are from or of God? 

3. We believe and teach that God makes Himself known through His Word; how is a "direct apprehension or awareness of God" different from God speaking in His Word? 

4. When you speak about "required devoted and disciplined preparation" that sounds very dangerously like what the ancient gnostics talked about. The old Greeks and Romans had their forms of mysticism and spoke about the "initiated," the ones in the know, those in direct contact with the gods. In fact, if you saw that recent movie "The 300," about the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, you have a taste of what I mean, because Leonidas climbed the mountain to hear what the gods had to say about the future. In that case, what happens to the classical Reformation teaching about Grace Alone? 

5. What does it mean to go "beyond the rational faculty of the mind"? Must one stop thinking in order to be a mystic?

6. How is Christian mysticism different from Buddhism, etc. or is it? It sounds like one has to lose his/her identity in order to become absorbed into the Reality that is God.

7. How is spiritual illumination different from being in God's Word and walking humbly before Christ? 

This does not mean that I intend to abandon my study. It just means that I will be approaching it with the above questions in mind, as well as things implied by them. Like many believers, I suppose, I have had experiences of God's presence and guiding in my life, but I remain cautious about anything that suggests that I can find God through my own disciplined life or that He is the One I must search out. He has found us. We are the rebels by nature. He came to this fallen world. The world did not rise to Him. That's what the Christian faith is all about. 

Yet. . . 

Jesus did say "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matthew 16:24-26). 

Is this what the Christian mystics are all about? Stay tuned.