Fortunes of the Christian world view

Trinity Journal, Fall 1998 by Henry, Carl F H

FORTUNES OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD VIEW

Fortunes of the Christian world view have fluctuated wildly in the century now closing. From its high role as a theistic system exhibiting the rational coherence of the biblical revelation, the Christian world-and-life view has fallen into disfavor among scholars who dismiss any logically formulated belief system as a speculative byproduct of the Enlightenment and a betrayal of authentic Christianity.

Just before the onset of the present century the Scottish theologian and apologist James Orr delivered his influential lectures on The Christian View of God and the World at Lake Forest College in Illinois. One of evangelicalism's ablest minds, Orr authored almost a score of significant theological books and was general editor of the first edition of the multi-volume International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.

As late as the mid-twentieth century one of evangelicalism's bellwether academic institutions, Wheaton College, used Orr's The Christian View as a required senior class text. It was reprinted by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, which later also produced Contours of a Christian World View written by Wheaton professor Arthur Holmes under auspices of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. Holmes shared and updated many of Orr's emphases and contrasted more recent theories, including process philosophy and secular humanism, with evangelical theism.

Generations before the rise of recent narrative theology many evangelical collegians could effortlessly summarize Christian theism in a coherent scheme of postulates that included existence of the sovereign triune self-revealing God; ex nihilo originator of the universe and maker of humankind in his rational and moral likeness for spiritual worship, fellowship, and service, including responsible stewardship of the cosmos; humanity's voluntary dereliction, provoking divine wrath and forfeiture of a felicitous afterlife; God's merciful intervention promising through the prophets salvation that humanity could not devise for itself and subsequent divine fulfillment of that redemptive promise in Jesus of Nazareth the incarnate Logos and embracing the Nazarene's virgin birth, sinless life, substitutionary death, and bodily resurrection; the ascended Lord's high priestly ministry as universal head of the church, the regenerate people of God eclipsing barriers of culture and race in devotion to global evangelism and social justice; the consummate return of Christ, resurrection of the dead, irreversible judgment of the wicked, decisive triumph over evil, vindication of righteousness, and complete restoration of believers to Christ's moral and rational image and to the enduring felicity of God's redeemed people. The Christian world-life view embraced heaven and earth from creation to end time and enlisted a fellowship of redeemed and regenerate humans in a salvific mission of interpersonal and public duty and functioning as a channel of God's love and of social justice.

Such elaboration of a Christian world view has more recently elicited strenuous criticism. One line of attack deplores pursuit of a Christian world view as an alien speculative activity akin to secular projection of cosmologies and myths ventured by non-Christian religious philosophers. Another assault derides interest in a Christian world view more specifically as sheer rationalism-indeed, as nothing less than an imposition on divine revelation of extraneous cognitive interests birthed by the Enlightenment. Such criticism now proceeds at times from scholars who profess to champion alternatively the Christian religion in its genuine form, and at other times from those who consider misguided any Christian interest in a logical world view.

Long before the modern era rival human cultures cherished distinctive values and motivating impulses. Each related itself to reality by a preferred method-whether speculative reason, subjective decision, empirical observation, transcendent revelation, religious tradition, and so on.

In the forepart of our century it was customary for naturalistic anthropologists and primitive religionists to dismiss all world views as mythological conceptualities. In mid-century the complaint more frequently heard was not that Christianity offers a primitive world view, but rather that its identification in terms of rational world view falsifies its essential nature. Scholars influenced by existential and dialectical perspectives insisted that essential Christianity disallows rational world view considerations. The notion that Scripture has no interest in world view contemplation was encouraged by a rejection of propositional divine revelation.

Karl Barth asks pointedly whether it is really a Christian's task to accept or reject world views, and whether Christians have not "for very good reason" always been eclectic in their world views.2

Now at the end of the century, the focus of attack has shifted again. The dawning of widespread and diversely formulated postmodern epistemology calls in question the coherence of the claim that objective, ahistorical truth claims are possible. If some earlier Christian thinkers, influenced by the Enlightenment, were too quick to label their syntheses "scientific" and too slow to recognize the culture-laden nature of all human thought, a new generation has risen that is prepared to analyze all speech acts in terms of culturally defined interpretive communities. Every utterance, including this one, is intrinsically coercive and manipulative. One can no more transcend culture in a human utterance than one can escape the constraints of language itself. From such a perspective, the notion of a Christian truth-claim sounds not only old-fashioned but bigoted.