The Secularization of Christianity Part XVI - Historicity, History, and Reconstructionism of Doctrine

In continuing this discussion, I want to pick up on the last section in regard to the subjectivist linguistic empiricism of van Buren's position, as it also relates to religion and society as a whole.  That being said, we look now at Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882 - 1973) momentarily, in particular his book The Rights of Man and Natural Law, which was written in 1944.  In this book, Maritain makes a premise for three essential aspects of what he defines as the "common good," and those are as follow:

1.  A redistribution that aids in the development of human persons (this is not synonymous with communism or socialism, as it is not in that context)

2.  Authority is the foundation of the common good in society; for Maritain, it means that certain individuals are endowed authority to provide guidance toward the good of the whole as such.

3.  Intrinsic morality is fundamental to the common good - it is not an arbitrary morality, but rather fosters justice and moral righteousness. 

Maritain also notes that only Christianity has brought these aspects to light in their most complete manifestation, and that totalitarianism more than often relegates them to darkness (Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law.  Glasgow:  The University Press, 1944. pp. 8-10).  Likewise, Etienne Gilson (1884-1978), in his short work The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand (Toronto: University of St. Michael's College, 1984) observes the following in this excerpt:  "If we start by annihilating everything, what limits can stop us?....Man knows henceforward that he can do anything without the echo in his ear of the redoubtable summons of the sovereign judge, 'Adam, where art thou?' There is no longer any judge, save Adam himself, who, since he alone makes the law, can apply it without knowing yet that man is for himself the hardest of masters and that, by a comparison with the yoke that he lays on his own shoulders, that of the Lord was light to bear" (Gilson, pp. 12-13).   Gilson's and Maritain's observations, although from the perspective of philosophy, nonetheless are relevant to the discussion in regard to the reconstruction of theology, in order to make it more secular, by van Buren and others.  Christianity, as Mascall notes, is a historical faith - it has something to do with a particular Person (Jesus) who lived in Palestine at a particular time.  However, van Buren is attempting, as Mascall notes, to redefine what is "history" and "historical" by following the rationale of R.G Collingwood (1889-1943), the English philosopher, who defined history as an answering of questions about human action in the past.  In doing so, as Mascall notes, it leaves history open to revisionism and arbitrary interpretations, and this would naturally rule out any "alleged" action of a supernatural God - this makes Gilson's words in the quote above prophetic, and in the context Gilson uttered those words, he was noting that like Genesis 11, man's limits are seemingly without limit, but they also can be negative in that they burden others.  Consider other attempts to rewrite history - the Nazis, the Young Turks, and recent manifestations of "political correctness," for starters - by either eliminating or ignoring some important facts that are evident of history, society does so to its peril.  Secularization is also as dangerous, as it seeks to revise history, reworking it in such a way that it writes out the importance of religious conviction and supernatural divine revelation in the affairs of human history.  However, this is exactly what Bultmann and van Buren try to do - Bultmann, it is noted by Mascall on page 70, dismisses the "universal history" as a source of "meaning in history," but rather "personal history" is more important - historical events, then, become subjective for Bultmann.  Van Buren also notes that "history" and the "history of salvation" are to be divorced from each other (based on his reading of Erich Frank) and that Jesus is constricted to the latter and has no importance to the former.  At best, Bultmann and others diminish Christ in "secular history," while the "history of salvation" for them is essentially mythological and only is a "coping mechanism" or moral compass but not a real historical truth.  This goes against what both Gilson and Maritain propose in their quotes, in that Maritain would argue from the perspective of the three aspects of the common good that religious faith and the person of Jesus were very influential in the development of  Western civilization, an idea that the orthodox Catholic would readily accept.  That presents an odd dichotomy for people such as van Buren, as well as Collingwood, and that warrants discussion now.

Beginning on page 71 of Mascall's text, we see the root of the problem for van Buren - although Collingwood's assertion that the appropriate activity of the historian is to enter into the historical narrative sympathetically with the subject, the difficulties of affirming a historical Jesus for van Buren is a problem.  The "radical coloring by faith in the resurrection of Jesus," which van Buren obviously denies and confines to the world of "myth," is a "weakness" he sees in the Gospel writers.  Supernatural events, for van Buren, are not historical, and thus it puts the historical facts of the events of Jesus's life essentially into question.  I am going to spend some time on this now, as it is important.  As mentioned before, cults and heresies tend to justify themselves by altering Christology - if they can either divorce the historicity of Jesus from His teachings, or if they can diminish or eliminate His divinity, they feel they can have a special insight into how faith works.  What is true of cults and heresies is also true of secularist liberal theologians such as van Buren, in that in reality van Buren is himself heretical in his denial of fundamental aspects of Christian faith, in particular those which center upon the person of Jesus.  God is therefore reduced by van Buren to a parenthetical abstraction (as he often writes of "God" rather than God, and there is a difference).  However, if Christ is diminished, it means that many other aspects of Christian faith, morality, and anagogy are now subjective only, and are arbitrarily at the will of their interpreters.  It is a slippery slope, in other words, and one that many madmen such as Hitler and Jim Jones have coasted downward on many times over the centuries.  Therefore, in denying the supernatural and thus the historicity of Jesus, van Buren is in effect also nullifying the common good that Maritain notes comes in its fullness through the Christian faith.  And, that is where the problem underlying this whole issue lies.

As Mascall continues to note on page 72, the secularist empiricism of van Buren follow with two consequences.  First, it strips the Easter event of its supernatural dimension, and this supernatural dimension is reduced to what Mascall calls a "blick" in the minds of the disciples only.  In other words, the disciples for van Buren were delusional, as they were supposedly under emotional duress from the event of the Crucifixion and thus developed the Resurrection narrative as a mere "coping mechanism."  Secondly, although it still fundamentally relates to the person Jesus whom the disciples knew intimately, van Buren's empiricism reduces Jesus to being no different from any other dead man - he does this by implication rather than direct statement, as Mascall notes on page 73.  Although van Buren is compelled to cede that the earliest Christian disciples looked upon their own experience in a less subjective and unsophisticated way, he still doggedly maintains his denial of the supernatural event of the Resurrection by actually divorcing it from Christian faith - what Jesus taught was good, in other words for van Buren, but His Godhood is in doubt because He died a man.  Like he has eliminated God and the supernatural from other aspects of his theology, van Buren now attacks the very essence of Christology, stripping from the person of Jesus all of his supernatural attributes.  Jesus, for van Buren, was a historical man that existed, but that is as far as it goes for him.  In essence, this is diminishing Christ in the name of "history," and based on mere linguistic empirical speculation on the part of van Buren and others like him.

History is history, and the Gospels record enough evidence that Jesus was who He said He was, although the limited natural mind of liberal/atheistic theologians such as van Buren cannot seem to accept that.  There are many witnesses (more than 500, give or take) that verify Jesus as who He was, and one of those is even post-Resurrection (the Apostle St. Paul).  The problem with contemporary society is that we want to do away with those aspects of history that make us uncomfortable - the Charlottesville incident over Confederate monuments recently is an excellent example.  And, for the secularist, the supernatural is an uncomfortable topic in that it defies much of their own rational thought - so, since it does, then it is rejected as truth and then excised from their interpretation of history and theology.  Problem is, the whole of the Christian life is tied up around and centered upon the person of Christ, and it is a Person who is the focus of our faith.  To take Christ out of Christian faith is in essence then like removing a beating heart from a human body - it will not function properly and will die without it, in other words.  Christ is the heart of our faith, and not merely a toenail or an appendix, and therefore the whole narrative of Christ - historical and supernatural - must be accepted as fact and truthful if the Christian faith is to be proclaimed, possessed, and believed accordingly.  In the next section, we'll deal more with the personage of Jesus, and how secularism seeks to revise and reconstruct the person of Jesus in order to dismiss their own dislikes.